Letters - 24 July 2015
From seeds of peace to Unitarians
Seeds of peace
I am offering a belated response to Janet Quilley’s excellent letter (10 July) about the reduction in the range of Quaker Peace & Social witness’s peacebuilding work in recent years. I agree with her suggestion that more resources might be given to low profile, long-term and open-ended conciliation work.
I would also like to suggest that we should consider recreating the equivalent of the former Friends Peace and International Relations Committee in order to apply what we have learned, not only by facilitating small circles of international dialogue but by helping to elaborate and promote new thinking on constructive policy for security and international relations. The need to demilitarise geopolitics is urgent. Progress in that direction would greatly reduce the destructive power of local conflicts.
Of course, if we want to see our peacebuilding work expand, we need to increase our giving accordingly.
Diana Francis
I welcome Janet Quilley’s encouragment to re-assess the balance of our work and consider giving ‘a higher priority to low profile, long-term and open-ended conciliation work’. However, in my view, this needs to start at home.
On my travels around numerous Area Meetings in the country over the last eighteen months, I have become acquainted with all too many stories of long-term hostilities, apparently irreconcilable resentments and accompanying bitterness within Area Meetings themselves – in more than one situation a key Friend even feeling the need to move to a different Meeting for Worship.
If we are to consider extending our conciliation work throughout the rest of the world, how about extending our commitment to learning to heal our own internal relationship rifts, so we can become a beacon for reconciliation at home, before extending that modelling and mediation work abroad? ‘Let it begin with me.’
Sue Holden
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