Letters - 7 August 2015
From nonviolence to Gift Aid
Gandhi and nonviolence
I would like to take up Leslie Merton’s point (24 July) about Gandhi and nonviolence; in particular, the aim of ‘not even a violent thought’. In principle this might be possible, but the effort to banish even a single violent thought might have unfortunate consequences.
I remember in the 1970s going to a Quaker weekend where Fortunato Castillo (quoted Quaker faith & practice 21.69) was the speaker. Fortunato was a psycho-therapist, and he said that he noticed a worryingly high incidence of depression among Quakers – in fact, he often treated them without charge, because he was so concerned. When a Friend asked what he thought the cause of some of this depression might be, his answer lay on the lines of ‘they are trying to suppress difficult or unworthy feelings, such as anger, and those feelings fester inside’.
We have all had experiences that have made us upset and angry, many of them absorbed before we were mature enough to process them. The key, I think, is not what we feel but what we do about those feelings: whether we become angry with other people or try to understand ourselves and, if necessary, seek help.
Alison Leonard
Seeds of peace
Sue Holden (24 July) is right when she says that there are too many instances of unresolved hurts and destructive behaviours within our Local and Area Meetings. Quakers are not immune to the effects of human weaknesses. Quaker Life, for some years now, has been offering support for Meetings in this kind of difficulty through its Conflict in Meetings project.
On request from a Meeting, a team of two trained Friends will visit and engage in a process with the Meeting and those most directly involved. The starting point is that conflict in itself is not the problem, but how it is dealt with. The visitors try to enable the Meeting to use its (perhaps hidden) strengths to move from a cycle of dissonance to a cycle of healing, using Quaker disciplines of prayerful listening and respectful engagement.
This project is not well enough known, in part because confidentiality makes publicising its work difficult. The link person in Friends House, Oliver Waterhouse (oliverw@quaker.org.uk), is keen to hear from Meetings who might be interested in finding out more.
Robin Waterston
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