Thought for the Week: Live adventurously
Anthony Wilson reflects on the Quaker Service Memorial
During the war years, in a world engulfed in violent conflict, members of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and Friends Relief Service (FRS) witnessed to their pacifist convictions. They made their choice and ‘lived adventurously’. In the spring of 2011 Staffordshire Friends forwarded a concern to Meeting for Sufferings that a memorial to commemorate this service should be constructed at the National Memorial Arboretum, six miles from Lichfield Meeting. It was less obvious that we would also be living adventurously. We were invited to test our concern with other Area Meetings and received responses that were sufficiently supportive and constructively questioning for us to take the next steps into fundraising.
Maybe we thought that this is where the concern would rest. We were soon alerted, however, to the adventure that a pile of stones could generate. Unknown to us, Jenny Carson, of Manchester University’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, had been interviewing FAU and FRS members for a thesis. Her subject was the settlement of displaced people in post-war Europe and she intended to convert her material for use in schools – with an exhibition to match. Ten minutes of skimming through her thesis was enough for us to realise that she was offering the intellectual framework that we needed if we were to tell the story of the service – the story that had prompted our original concern.
At the core of Jenny’s account was the emphasis that the FRS and FAU teams gave to the humanitarian and spiritual needs of those with whom they were working. It had a direct relevance to present-day policies regarding asylum seekers. Today, asylum seekers are subject to a regime of disbelief, even in the face of evidence of torture; they are prevented from working – one way of asserting their self-respect; they are offered accommodation with severely limited cash support on a no-choice basis; and they are at constant risk of being cut off from this support and deported at little notice. Even in the chaos of post-war Europe, Quaker teams were able to assert life-enhancing alternatives counter to all these precepts.
This is part of the message that school parties who visit our memorial will receive. Education staff at the Arboretum are putting our site high on the list of those to be visited, especially for students who may think that the story of the second world war ended in Europe on 5 May 1945. Pupils with an asylum-seeking background could well be present, and be freed to tell their stories to fellow students who are quite unaware of their situations. The guidance notes for teachers draw attention to this.
When we inaugurated the memorial on 20 April, we opened our Meetings for Worship with Quaker faith & practice 21.17:
True Godliness don’t turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavours to mend it: not hide their candle under a bushel, but set it upon a table in a candlestick.
William Penn may not have been thinking of our memorial, but he speaks our mind.
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