Thought for the week: Joseph Jones on present dangers
‘For writers in our archive, it’s about challenging oneself.’
In 1892, the Friend gave a wholehearted welcome to Christmas (‘this happy season’), noting that ‘Puritan objections to its observance have passed away’. Christmas was associated with ‘the greatest event in history’ and Friends ‘ought to hail it and enter into its amenities with ardour and rejoicing’. He who has entered into the right apprehension of this time of year (there’s a lot of ‘he’ in the Friend archive, I’m afraid) ‘feels a fitness in making it a season of gift giving and charity’.
It’s a surprising piece, and not just because of Friends’ historical ambivalence towards recognising times and seasons. In the years either side of 1892, I struggled to find any reference to Christmas outside the many advertisements that, in those days, filled the Friend’s first pages. Those articles that did appear were often handed over to ecumenical writers, from congregational or Unitarian churches, perhaps more accustomed to celebrating the season. So readers of this issue, in which we’ve reproduced a range of end-of-year articles from 1854 to 1954, ought not to imagine they are representative. Where Christmas does appear, it tends to be in mainstream Christian terms. There is much talk of King and Cross, and an evangelical exhortation to carry this message into the world (indeed, we’ve had to cut a bit from the 1921 piece, since the language it uses about missionary work in Africa, while giving a valid snapshot of Quaker attitudes of the time, is well outside what we would consider appropriate to print today).
What is representative is a two-fold approach to Christmas that bears consideration today: Friends are first encouraged to renew themselves from the inside out, to then become a people who might engage in a renewing of the world. It’s common now to hear that Christmas should be about other people; for writers in our archive, it’s very much about challenging oneself first. In 1917, Henry Hodgkin suggests that, by this process, ‘the one otherwise aimless and futile life is fitted into a glorious design’. For him, the challenge is about ‘abandoning ourselves’ to Christ. Friends now might see this challenge in a different way, but surely the call to examine our own lives is a valuable one. The years 1917 and 1941 are evocative, yes, of war, but also of times when Quakerly action had a significant, counter-cultural impact on the world. What I read in the archive of the Friend suggests that this work began internally – within us individually, and within our Society – before it spread.
The other thing I noticed is that, whatever year I looked at, Friends have always been aware of a world in difficulty. Poverty, disease and conflict were ever-present. The dangers were immediate and could not be ignored. As we step warily into 2023, with threats local and global, we are in historical company.
Joe is editor of the Friend.
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