‘Shakespeare’s ministry is specific and useful.’ Photo: Tom Shakespeare gives Swarthmore Lecture on YouTube
‘Where there is the greatest evil, there is also the greatest good.’
Swarthmore Lecture: Joseph Jones watches, and reads, Tom Shakespeare’s ‘Openings to the Infinite Ocean’
‘I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.’ Many Friends will recognise these words from George Fox in the title of this year’s Swarthmore Lecture, given live on YouTube by Tom Shakespeare. Fox had been in despair at the state of the world, said Shakespeare, but shared with New Testament Paul a vision of grace in which we are encouraged to live in intimacy with God. This intimacy is the source of real hope, he said, a spiritual experience beyond the cognitive reasonings of optimism.
It’s tricky to consider intimacy through an electronic screen, and I missed the sense of being seated alongside other Friends – even the blurry faces of Zoom Meetings. But this year’s lecture was compelling nonetheless, containing challenge as well comfort for our own hard times.
Shakespeare’s Quaker faith finds its anchor deep in the Christian tradition – in his text he warns that some readers may have difficulties with his language – and his calm academic manner belied some passionate instincts. After recounting a historical line of intense Christian expression from Paul through to early Friends he pauses to observe ‘how much we have lost in the modern liberal Quaker movement’. ‘As a body, Quakers now seem rather atheological’, he says, mourning what he describes as ‘the outrageous certainty that [Friends] could know God directly’. We need to work actively on the life within, he argues, noting that in his personal experiences of Quaker worship ‘Christ was lacking, in the sense of any focus on incarnation or redemption.’ This changed for him when he read the whole of the Bible, remembering Jesus’s parable of the sheep who knew his voice: ‘I realised I was the one who had heard the message but had not believed. And in that moment, my eyes filled with tears and I was born again into that “Christ-shaped future”. I have been weeping ever since’.
Each Quaker will have their own path, he acknowledges, but ‘I ended up feeling that Quakers needed to remember God, not imagine that they could do very well without… We can be more than Guardian readers!’
All this matters to the subject of hope because, he says, it is the spirit of Christ that enables us to endure suffering. Letting our lives speak – or preach, as he prefers – is ‘not about everyone being a bit wonderful. It is about everyone being a vessel for God to act through. Unless the creature allows itself to be a vessel through which the creator can act, the creature is not living what it is meant to be.’
There is a tension here, he notes, between ‘what we might call Quaker spirituality, which says we won’t get there unless we stop doing and surrender to God, and an activist mentality which says that we have to do it ourselves and that waiting to be led is an excuse for not doing anything.’ But this tension need not necessarily be problematic: ‘I believe that both are badly needed.’
The lecture’s exhortations to a new communion with the divine might in other hands sound woolly or vague. But Shakespeare’s ministry is specific and useful. He reminds us that the two great events of the Christian calendar – Christmas and Easter – are both examples of the triumph of hope amid suffering. Early Friends preached Christ crucified, he says, because ‘Where there is the greatest evil, there is also the greatest good.’ If modern Friends are to dispense with the celebration of these festivals, it must be because they are willing to experience the cycle of hope and suffering every day. Hope, in this understanding, is a gift, often something we receive when we surrender absolutely. It is not something we generate ourselves. Whereas optimism can be misplaced, or an intellectual assumption, we must, with Martin Luther King, ‘accept the finite disappointment and yet cling to the infinite hope.’
This introduction of the civil rights experience is more than a nod to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Shakespeare’s theology owes much to Jurgen Moltmann, for whom hope is an acceptance of a future in which Christ is risen. For Moltmann, experiences of suffering and hope reinforce each other, a lesson he learned in a prisoner of war camp. Hope is the protest of the divine promise against suffering. Thus he understood that ‘the theology of hope is not the right way to speak the gospel to Americans: they need to get a feeling of the suffering and violence and injustice in their country.’ This is its own rebuke to those of us who seek hope for the whole world from the comfort of wealth and privilege. ‘The rich don’t have hope, they have only anxiety because they have something to lose’, he has said. This demands some honest consideration – from which aspect are we considering hope? – but we should remember that hope offers as much to the oppressors as the oppressed, namely the hope of reconciliation.
Friends wary of Christological language will find more sustenance in the second half of the lecture. Here Shakespeare used more secular sources (like Antonio Gramsci and his ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’) to shift our perspective. Our brains are better at holding negative information than positive, he says. ‘We believe that the world is going to hell in a handcart, but that’s simply not true.’ Citing a raft of statistics, from literacy to poverty to life expectancy, we might sometimes consider global improvements. ‘Progress is possible, and this should not be a cause of complacency, but a spur to do more.’
Another perspective shift is from the global to the local, and to focus on stories of local engagement.Shakespeare has been personally involved in a number of inspiring projects, each itself a sign of hope.
The lecture goes on to stress the importance of personal action, in three directions. Changing our lifestyles is inner work, ‘doing good on our doorsteps or in our kitchens’. But this also requires the outer work of helping ‘public good break out in the world’; and neither matters unless we also work ‘across’, linking up with others, regardless of who they are. ‘We need to make connections… We are all interdependent.’
Finally, Shakespeare returned to the Bible and its list of people who endured defeat and exile. He quotes Søren Kierkegaard who remarked that the Hebrew Bible can be summed up in the word ‘nevertheless’. Like those characters ‘we do not think we are perfect – but we think we can be perfected.’
Joe is editor of the Friend. You can watch the lecture, or buy the book, at https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/learn/about/swarthmore-lecture.
Comments
This is very interesting indeed thank you. I am particularly drawn to the notion that humans have made great strides in eradicating disease and poverty worldwide - but there is more to be done, much more. We are fed a constant diet of despair and horror by the press in order to ? sell newspapers ? keep tv channels afloat ? make us feel powerless to effect change
? make us think we need those in positions of power to sort it all out? We need to recognise our value and ability to make positive change, to seek those opportunities out. The only thing I would question in this piece is the notion that Americans need to be brought low to understand the need for action. All Americans? I can recommend two books by Rutger Bregman’Utopia for Realists’ and ‘Human Kind’ Thank you Mr Shakespeare for you thought provoking work
By nyinmodelek@btinternet.com on 7th August 2020 - 14:24
Please login to add a comment
