Letters - 05 June 2015

From vocal ministry to radical reformation

Vocal ministry

Gordon Smith’s letter (29 May) on vocal ministry raised some deeply interesting questions with respect to expressing gratitude for Friends who have offered vocal ministry.

Personally, I feel in 99.9 per cent of occasions when we offer vocal ministry, it is our ego that pushes us up on our feet in the first place, and then, if we’re lucky, flashes of grace sometimes come through us and surprise Friends and even ourselves at times.

It is because of this mysterious blend of human and divine that I will continue to thank friends for getting to their feet after they have offered vocal ministry. How we can divorce that of God from our human condition is an enigma to my nondualistic understanding.

Chris Goodchild

Slavery or racism

I read your report on slavery with interest (29 May). It seems that what appeared to be a simple problem has, rather than having gone away, steadily become more complex. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 is, indeed, welcome.

Yet, there is a more insidious example than slavery of man’s view of his less developed fellows as inferior beings, which is far from spawning a law against its perpetrators.

When the developed world sends drones and other ‘precision’ weapons to kill its enemies, quite apart from these all being illegal or acts of war, since no fair trial is involved, it rarely attributes the same value to the lives of others who are killed and maimed as it would to its own people. These unintended casualties are called, rather disgustingly in my view, ‘collateral damage’.

Such behaviour in our name seems, to me, as reprehensible as anything slave owners perpetrated in the past or do today. Perhaps our most important testimony is to the ‘spark’ within all human beings.

Don Atkinson

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