Witness at Burghfield
Sam Donaldson writes about putting his faith into action
‘Success is not one of the names of God’
- Martin Buber
On 13 December I was sitting on a train heading down from Hull to Reading to stand trial, alongside Hannah, Ellis, John and Gillian, for our nonviolent direct action against Trident at AWE Burghfield. We were pretty certain that, barring some kind of miracle, we would lose.
The loss we faced, though, was tiny in comparison to the landslide vote in the House of Commons earlier in the year, where ‘the powers that be’ chose to spend £200 billion-plus of our taxpayers money on renewing Trident. But this significant loss is tiny in comparison to the constant losses suffered by countless human beings, animals and mother Earth herself, under the reign of imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, now with Donald Trump as its figurehead.
Loss after loss after loss…
What does my Quaker faith have to offer in this kind of hopeless situation?
For me, our Quaker way, committed as it is to nonviolence and justice, cannot be founded or driven by success, or even the hope of success. We need a deeper kind of foundation, something far more challenging, far harder-won, a kind of ‘hopeless hope’ that has less to do with optimism than a harsh truthfulness about the state of our world and our complicity in it. We need a deeper grounding in the mysteriously silent unconditional love that beats on and on at the heart of our cosmos, suffering loss after loss after loss along with us.
I’m struck by this quote by Daniel Berrigan: ‘From a religious point of view, nonviolence is not primarily a tactic. It is a way of living and being and expressing the truth of your soul in the world. Tactics come and go. Tactics now work and now do not work. The gift of faith, as I understand it, is to be able to die well when called to. It may yet come for us. I recall Dietrich Bonhoeffer while in prison writing that, in his situation, there was very little he could do. “One can only”, he said, “tell the truth and say one’s prayers.” And then he went to die. That was his politics. He told the truth, he said his prayers, and he died. That was his gift to us. So, I think this concentration upon political effectiveness is very often a trap. There is, in fact, very little one can do in certain circumstances. One can only know effects later, or the survivors know what the gift meant. You can’t immediately proclaim political effectiveness. Hope is a mystery, a gift. It has nothing to do with optimism.’
Dark, dark clouds are gathering overhead. All hope may well already be lost. But as the George Fox song says: ‘There is a Light that is shining in the heart of a man, the Light that was shining when the world began’. As things get darker, and they will, we will need one another to commit wholeheartedly to ‘living and being and expressing the truth of our soul’s in the world’, shining our ‘Inner Lights’ into the growing darkness.
On 14-16 December, knowing there was very little else we could do, Hannah, John, Ellis, Gillian and I went into the courtroom, ready to speak truth to power and then receive our sentence. Little did we know that we were about to witness a minor miracle! Police incompetence meant that our case was thrown out by lunchtime, with ‘no case to answer’. Absolutely overjoyed, we headed straight to the nearest pub and celebrated this sweet victory, knowing that the next day the struggle would go on!
Comments
Well done Sam. You certainly deserved those pints! What a wonderful testimony, so strong in purity and courage even poetry. Cheers!
By Padraic Murray on 29th January 2017 - 16:59
Please login to add a comment
