Friends, old and new, at the Meeting for Worship at Marble Arch. Photo: The Friend.
‘Public preachers using a public address system were encouraging anyone listening to take action.’
The Exctinction Rebellion movement is young, rebellious and urgent. Sound familiar? Judith Roads wonders whether early Friends operated the same way
Sitting in Meeting for Worship last Easter – on the ground at Marble Arch in London, as it happens – I was struck by similarities between the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement and the early Quaker movement in Britain. We were worshipping beside the XR climate camp, where public preachers using a public address system were encouraging anyone who might be listening to take action. They made clear why this was necessary, and urgent. ‘Repent!’ (as they didn’t say!). These speakers didn’t see themselves as preachers of course, XR is not an ‘end times’ religion.
Except, perhaps it is. Like early Friends they warn of impending doom, an apocalypse. ‘Therefore all people be warned, and to the Light return, this is the waie to salvation, repent while ye have time’, (Friend Margaret Killam, 1656).
Modern-day climate rebels don’t suggest that people should repent their sins, unless rampant consumerism and corporate greed can be seen as modern-day sins. Some have gone ‘naked for a sign’ publicly in parliament and on television, as Isaiah and other prophets in history exhorted. Nakedness today is an unexpected symbol of change, of upset to the social status quo.
The rebel movement feels young, is young, as it appeals strongly to school children and all those with most of their lives facing an uncertain future. It’s prepared to misbehave, to cause nonviolent civil disruption, to be visible as it seeks urgent change. What was the message of George Fox, James Nayler, Francis Howgill and other Quakers in the seventeenth century if not precisely that sense of time running out, that fierce youthful energy?
There is something very attractive and energising about a newly-formed group. There is as yet no tradition, no older people bemoaning how things were better years ago and how the group has forgotten its roots. (A lot of work has gone into theoretical analysis of the life cycle of organisations and movements, but this is not the place to dig deep into that.) Margaret Heathfield’s 1994 Swarthmore Lecture Being Together: Our corporate life in the Religious Society of Friends has insightful things to say about the alternations between closed and open groups. This is a key aspect of the history of the Quaker movement – how it has repeatedly reinvented itself and enabled new growth and insights to develop. Our experiences in life can show us how formerly vibrant groups somehow lose their way, become stultified and eventually forget why they existed in the first place; ‘snuffing out’ the flame as opposed to ‘kindling’ it.
During my XR experience the image came to me of a ‘core sample’ such as earth scientists use to investigate changes and developments over time. The Quaker movement’s 350-year core sample has many layers. XR has barely enough years under its belt for more than one. Will it create structures and tradition or will it retain a healthy balance between competing elements of anarchy, regulation, community, democracy and power? Is this what the beginnings of Quakerism also felt like in 1650?
I felt at that Marble Arch Meeting for Worship, and again on Waterloo Bridge a day or so later, that I was being shown something about the roots of Quakerism from this present-day experience. How durable is the inspiration and energy that a founding group experiences? God wasn’t mentioned in my hearing at those XR events but I guess God didn’t need to be mentioned. When everything animate and inanimate that calls our planet home is crying out for change, is that not something deeply spiritual? That ‘something’ that is instantly recognised by all generations as the eternal spark of divinity, known by many names and none.
