Hope takes root when all reason for it has disappeared . . . Photo: Rainforest Action Network/flickr CC
Sustaining our worlds
Stephen Yeo looks at the way forward
Sustaining the worlds we live in seems to need more charity, hope and faith with each day that passes. Of these three, faith – faith in action – is, for me, the hardest. Hope takes root when all reason for it has disappeared. Charity takes root when we no longer feel love or, for that matter, much ordinary liking. But faith?
A recent Oxford Meeting for Worship helped me, taken together with Karen Armstrong’s writing. Why do we tend to reserve faith in God – and political action and much else besides – for things we don’t know, can’t know and have no reasons for knowing? In this way we turn faith into an eyes-shut leap into ‘belief’.
Why do we do this when actually, especially in our Meetings for Worship, we know at least the following:
• that there are different, better and available worlds deep inside each one of us, and between every animate being and inanimate object in the universe. These worlds are a rich mixture of memory (which is part of hope), biochemistry, tangible happiness, being together as well as alone and, yes, human (divine?) purpose.
• that these better worlds sometimes seem infinite in number, and up to us to arrange, surprisingly freely and against the powers that be, state as well as market.
• that such worlds often collapse into knowledge that evil is; that it has some kind of built-in originality to it; and that, in capitalism, it has become systematic and preferred. We are not free.
• and so we also know we need help, from outside and between our selves. Grace means more and more to me every day – particularly in the small hours – more than faith, hope or charity.
Help! Help so that by inventing more characteristically and specifically Quaker political actions, we can generate more and more faith in action, and stop counting the cost. We cannot know the effect of our actions. We need not confine them to what modern rationality tells us will be ‘effective’. But they do need to re-present what we know, deep inside ourselves and often in Meeting.
Examples please…
