Close-up of the cover of 'Quaker by Convincement'. Photo: Penguin Books.
‘The whole world stands in need of a non-dogmatic spirituality.’
Still convinced: Richard Seebohm has some lessons from Geoffrey Hubbard
Geoffrey Hubbard, who died in 1998, was a polymath: a physicist, scriptwriter, futurologist and educational technologist. In 1974 he wrote Quaker by Convincement. This neat paperback is still offered to enquirers as an honest road to Quaker faith and practice (if I may coin a phrase). What those of us who hand it out may not always notice is its closing chapter. This has a darker tone. It exposes the shortcomings of the Quaker community in his day and seems to me to have unchanged relevance now. The process of restructuring now seen in Friends House makes this all the more timely.
Some of us, says Geoffrey, would rather remain a club with a select and mutually acceptable membership. We seem to be content with a mild non-dogmatic intellectualism. In his eyes, some of us fail to make contact with wider strands of society, in spite of our well-concerned relief work and advocacy. Yet some of us have over-strident personal commitment to particular Quakerly causes, and may try to exert moral blackmail to involve other Friends who cannot say no. He thinks that collectively we do not have enough fun. He admits that he may be saying some unfair things to make a point.
So, what should a few thousand well-intentioned Friends be doing for the fractured world they face? We may let our lives speak, but should we not be more widely heard? We have our own Quaker committees on our various concerns, but should we not focus more on placing visible committed Quakers in more exposed national and public arenas? Those who are there already should not be hesitant about their heritage.
The churches and other faiths offer variants on the leadings that our testimonies give to us, but they are often burdened by inherited rules, architectural relics and required rituals. Some find it hard to look beyond what their congregations expect of them. We ourselves may seem peculiar people because of our practice of sitting in silence. But the basic ethos underlying both us and them offers a universally valid pattern for making life worth living for humanity, in a world threatened by conflict and environmental degradation. One populist or extremist decision can be catastrophic. The whole world stands in need of a non-dogmatic spirituality. For Geoffrey, the Society of Friends is a model of a spiritually-directed society. I would go on from this. We all need to grow up without a need for triumphalism. We should be able to trust all those we encounter. We, all humankind, should grow up without regarding those we don’t know as ‘other’, whom we could with indifference hurt or cheat, and who might hurt or cheat us.
Speaking out, except on a carefully minuted basis, is still a fraught issue for Britain Yearly Meeting. We unite over things where consensus is easy, but we sometimes lack the courage to tell the wider world of our deeper discernments – or even to explore or expose them.
