Thought for the Week: Taking the long way home
Andrew Greaves reflects on the beginning of the UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice
‘Your holy hearsay is not evidence. Give me the good news in the present tense.’ I first encountered these words of Sydney Carter’s while a student at Woodbrooke in the late 1970s, as the title of a powerful exploration of contemporary theology by Joan Fitch of Ambleside Meeting, which she was writing during her Quaker Fellowship year. Joan’s lasting influence on my subsequent spiritual journey came to mind as I was reflecting upon the origins of the Peace Pilgrimage now making its way to London from Iona.
‘Be patterns, be examples…’, George Fox urged the first generation of Quakers from Launceston Gaol in 1656 (Quaker faith & practice 19.32) in a letter written down for him by Ann Downer, a Friend who had walked all the way from London to Cornwall to offer him support.
I am often aware of the many people who have been my own patterns and examples. My maternal grandfather and my father, having both spent time in prison as conscientious objectors, have undoubtedly contributed to a sense of accountability that, I imagine, will be familiar to other Quakers by convincement.
The interconnected crises threatening our world are so enormous, the havoc they cause so relentless, it is hard not to surrender to feelings of hopelessness or even despair. What difference does anything we can do as individuals make in the face of such overwhelming forces? ‘Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.’
In the current climate of market-driven secular materialism this is an entirely logical response. ‘If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what doth it profit me?’ the apostle Paul asks. He goes on to commend to the Corinthians an alternative mode of being, which imparts to life a very different meaning and purpose and which, time and again, has persuaded ordinary people to put their life on the line, to act unselfishly, courageously, spontaneously: faith.
The numerous accounts left by early Quakers of their personal journeys to convincement speak with extraordinary vitality and power across the centuries. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven did gather us and catch us all, as in a net’, Francis Howgill wrote, ‘…We came to know a place to stand in, and what to wait in…’
For George Fox, and the founding generation of the Religious Society of Friends, actions spoke louder than words. Fox constantly counselled against the danger of ‘running out into notions’ – of allowing one’s faith to become abstract and disengaged from the here and now.
Today, the tension between contemplative inwardness and outward witness in social action remains as acute as ever, not only for us as Quakers, but for committed people everywhere, of all faiths and none. Sometimes, ‘finding a place to stand’ can lead people with no previous experience of political involvement to an irresistible impulse to take action.
On Saturday 15 February 2003 more than a million people converged on London to oppose the government’s intention to go to war with Iraq. The fact that such a powerful expression of public opinion still proved insufficient to change the government’s course of action is not its most significant aspect. What is equally relevant is that many ordinary citizens found themselves a place to stand for the first time that day, convinced that they had to become involved: they could do no other.
The 2013 UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice may turn out to be another such event. Of course, it will not alter the government’s determination to spend £100 billion renewing the UK’s arsenal of WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), while grimly continuing to slash spending on vital public services.
The Pilgrimage from Iona to London has its roots in a very different vision of our future security than the despairing counsels of our political leaders. It represents the unequivocal rejection of a market-obsessed model of society where the rich go on getting ever richer while the needy and vulnerable are dismissed as losers, scroungers and the authors of their own misfortune.
The 2013 UK Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice is from 19 May to 20 July 2013
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