Thought for the Week: Our Peace Testimony
Roger Hill reflects on the Peace Testimony
It is helpful, I believe, to consider our Peace Testimony in two ways: ‘outward looking’ and ‘inward looking’. ‘Looking out’ embraces the big scale – wars in Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan or wherever. Often, in the face of this, we tend to despair and say: ‘But what can I do to change the situation?’
In the 1980s, the two bishops of Liverpool (the Roman Catholic archbishop Derek Worlock, and the Anglican bishop David Sheppard) were good friends and collaborated as closely as they could. Their motto was: ‘We do it better together.’ So, we might like to bear in mind how much ‘being together’, working as a team, as a member of the Religious Society of Friends, rather than as an individual, can contribute to what we might achieve in our strivings towards building peace.
Chapter twenty-four of Quaker faith & practice is headed ‘Our Peace Testimony’. It is the only chapter heading in the book to use ‘our’ and, thus, emphasises a sense of the collective, of Friends together agreeing a purpose and working together to achieve it. ‘Outward looking’ also means peacemaking on the domestic, on a smaller scale, where we can more obviously make a difference. In this group we can include our family, our neighbourhood, our friends and companions, and our work colleagues. The Anglican text (adapted) setting out the requirement, the pre-condition, that is placed on worshippers before taking Holy Communion, is this:
Ye… that are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life… draw near…
The themes and sub-themes of chapter twenty-four of Quaker faith & practice are mostly, but by no means exclusively, concerned with being ‘outward looking’: with conflict and war, paying taxes, protesting, disarmament, building institutions, and the arms trade. But unless we are at peace within ourselves our outward-focused efforts will, necessarily, be weaker and less effective than they might otherwise be. So, surely, a key part of supporting the Peace Testimony is to be active in our personal daily prayers or meditations, to train our minds, to calm our emotions, to develop our powers of attention, and thus to be more able to be helpful to others. The contribution from New Zealand Friends (24:10) is explicit:
We must start with our own hearts and minds.
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