What’s in store? Angela Greenwood attends ‘The Big Sit’

‘This was exactly the sort of action I felt comfortable with.’

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with S, a fellow Quaker, after Meeting. It was about a ‘Stop the War’ demonstration she was going to in London that weekend. I shared my memory of going to a similar one many years ago. While I respected her decision to go this time, I felt that over the years my position had changed.

For many years now, along with some other local Friends, I have been following more of a ‘non-dual’ path, which I could describe as a deep awareness of an underlying ‘eternal’ dimension. This is outside of time, and pervades every moment and every thing, while the world of our everyday humanness, of our interactions and experiences, comes and goes. Although happenings and things can often delight and engage us for a moment, or depress and even shock us, they are but passing manifestations of this underlying timeless reality (like ‘that of God’ in everything perhaps).

I am only a beginner on this path, and can easily get caught up in thinking, worrying and planning. My intention is towards a non-divided way of seeing and engaging with the world. By that I mean accepting and not resisting ‘what is’, at the same time as allowing responses to flow through and around me. This can be painful and difficult, as it includes feeling the horror of personal and world problems without getting caught up in blaming and demonising. On a human level it is like feeling, alongside others, the pain and the hurt, knowing ‘I’ cannot make it better.

After our conversation I reflected how my intention to live from ‘presence’ and to trust in the flow of life and love – my intention to adopt an undivided stance of not taking sides – meant that I was uncomfortable with a demonstration against anything, including war. But I was still conflicted because so many people are suffering.

Then, at our Friday Zoom Experiment with Light group, a regular attender referred to ‘The Big Sit’, which her son was organising. It was an invitation for meditators, faith groups and ordinary people to bear witness by sitting in meditation at the Westfield shopping mall in Stratford, London. We would be recognising climate chaos, overconsumption, political failure (and war) and ecological breakdown. The organisers said ‘We can use this opportunity to interrupt the craving and fear that grips us all, and simply Be, helping to reduce the suffering caused by anxiety-driven consumerism and action’.

My Friend had no intention of recruiting, but we all expressed interest. Later it came to me that this was exactly the sort of action I felt comfortable with. I went and it felt just right – a bit like being TS Elliot’s ‘Still point in the turning world’ of Westfield shopping.

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