'There will be tears, and dark nights. There will be impossible heartbreak… and magnificent joy.’ Photo: Rupert Read
Love and ecological collapse: Joseph Jones hears Rupert Read give this year’s Salter Lecture
‘There is nothing humans need more than meaning.’
The question ahead of this year’s Salter Lecture – ‘The Horrible, Wonderful Truth About Climate’ – was not whether Friends would find its subject matter important, but whether anything new could be said on an issue that already unites most Quakers – often to the point of exhaustion. In finding Rupert Read, the Quaker Socialist Society, which organises the lecture, secured a clear ‘yes’.
A Norwich Friend, Read’s national media appearances as spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (XR) were described as ‘absolutely amazing’ by Naomi Klein. Read has since stepped back from XR, but his ability to communicate effectively, and navigate the range of strategic approaches taken by climate campaigners, made for a compelling and intelligent lecture.
Friends need no convincing that the earth is experiencing a climate crisis. But the feelings of fear and desperation that this provokes are not pathological, Read told listeners at Westminster Meeting House. Instead they are spurs to act. But what kind of action? The lecture took place during XR’s ‘The Big One’ weekend, a gathering of some 60,000 people concerned about climate change. Hundreds of Quakers were using the Meeting house for preparation and rest; XR activists like the Red Rebels also used the building, as did Just Stop Oil (JSO), more famous for protest that causes civil disruption – and the arrest of its activists (including some Friends). Such extreme demonstration tactics can be useful for starting a conversation, Read believes, but they risk alienating the wider public. In a polarised world, it was important to appeal to ordinary people in their local communities, civic associations and faith groups. Transformational change happened in two stages, he said: first, when everyone realises that we can’t go on like this, and second ‘when everyone realises that everyone realises it’.
Read then turned to philosophy, his academic background, to remind listeners of what writers from Frankl to Nietzsche had understood: that there is nothing humans need more than meaning. ‘Right here is a life’s purpose waiting for anyone and everyone who needs one, and I put it to you that there is nothing that our society… needs more than purpose.’
If purpose drives people, it requires fuel. How could Friends find the motivation to keep going as things worsened? Tired listeners, all-too-aware of the challenges ahead, found the renewal they were looking for: ‘The love that we are, whether taking form as effort, as “sacrifice”, as giving, as joyfulness, as griefstrickenness, as worry, as desperation, as presence… the love that we have for our children, for life itself… this love is an indescribable gift and a truly mighty power. Friends, let yourself fall deep into it, which means with, and into, and through, all of us. There will be tears, and dark nights. There will be impossible heartbreak… and magnificent joy.’
Joe is the editor of the Friend. You can watch the lecture online at https://youtu.be/hX9soctwBsQ.
Comments
We must appreciate that the Earth is not in trouble. We are. Why have we been so selfish in separating ourselves from Nature? Possibly because most in the West have been, and perhaps still are, of the view humans just precisely *are* separate from Nature, even if they know not how this view came about.
This was the result of Rome’s misappropriation of the Christian way of life, c.400CE, for the purpose of suppression and domination. The underpinning worldview of that cult still dominates (sic!) ‘cultured’ thought in the West - and perhaps even in the East. It is all about competition amongst ourselves for ‘growth’, abusing the natural world to achieve it.
In contrast, the cold, hard, Natural reality of the biosphere means that, as the American theologian John B. Cobb Jr has said, ‘We live at the ending of an age.’ Can we actually transition to the Ecological Civilization that is necessary for our survival as a part of Nature? Put another way, can we be guided by the Spirit to genuinely witness and fully appreciate that of God in all things, not just ourselves? And act accordingly.
By markrdibben@gmail.com on 18th May 2023 - 8:56
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