Letters - 09 August 2024

Economic growth

Thank you for printing my ‘Thought for the week’ (26 July) on economic growth. The same day I read a passage in George Lakey’s autobiography Dancing with History which is so relevant to the last part of my piece that I’d like to share it with your readers. George is an American Quaker, a well-known lifelong advocate for peace, justice and nonviolent social change. 

 On page 354 he shows why radical change ‘will require a power shift’. He then continues: ‘That’s for people’s movements to make happen, through what will amount to a nonviolent revolution. My belief is that a mass mobilisation can’t happen without an alternative that can be communicated in a persuasive way; therefore, we do need to do the homework on issues… and come up with an easy-to-communicate vision to replace what we have now.’ 

John Lampen

How wholeheartedly I agree with John Lampen’s ‘Thought…’ about economic growth, ‘Will we only change when catastrophe forces us?’

It should be obvious to anyone who possesses intelligence, and our new prime minister and chancellor certainly do, that nothing organic can continue growing forever. Animal and vegetable life, reaching maturity thrive, reproduce, and then inevitably in due course perish. Obesity shortens life. Huge size leads to death. Nothing can get larger forever. Overfull rivers burst their banks. Empires expand, conquer all, crumble and fall.

In God’s creation, if ever there was a golden age, there was balance (or so it appears to us today) before the human race began to destroy that balance by greed and inequality.

May we hope that the government will aim for economic sustainability, not growth, and that the new Green and Quaker (sometimes both in one individual) MPs will work towards this.

Rosemary Mathew 

John Lampen questions the idea that a good quality of life requires continuing economic growth. Once upon a time, about the late 1960s, I was an organiser for the Conservation Society, an environmental campaigning body. I organised a public meeting in Exeter with an economics professor from Cardiff as speaker, I think called David Walker, who gave us a lecture with that thesis – that a reasonable, possibly good, quality of life could be had without continuing economic growth. 

Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have convinced his fellow economists, let alone politicians.

With our testimonies for equality and sustainability should Quakers be campaigning for this? 

Penelope Putz

Midweek Meeting

May I add a small suggestion? Clive Ashwin (2 August) says a midweek in-person Meeting for Worship ‘should be… at the usual time (mid-morning)’. 

I am sure I can’t be the only person who has medical problems that make such a time exceedingly difficult or impossible. 

I am consequently glad that our midweek in-person Meeting is at a later time. I suggest that each Meeting consult its Zoom participants about what time would make it possible for them to attend.

Dorothy Woolley

Israel/Palestine

While this is a hugely emotive topic, and people are entitled to their own feelings and opinions, there are some matters of accuracy and context arising from Nicola Grove’s letter (2 August) which I believe it would be helpful to address. 

First, and most obviously, I am clerk of trustees of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), and certainly not clerk of BYM.

Second, I was invited to take part in the preparation session in a personal capacity, having served both as an ecumenical accompanier in Jerusalem, and on the committee that has oversight of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. Moreover, for twelve years, as secretary of Europe and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation, I had a very close connection to the Friends Meeting in Ramallah, the Friends schools and other Quaker work in Palestine-Israel and Lebanon.

As a panellist, I offered entirely personal views, and any inferences that what I said can be taken as the position of the Yearly Meeting is utterly false and misleading.

Quakers in Britain have published International Court of Justice judgements, most recently on 11 and 19 July – see our website.

Meeting for Sufferings has mandated Quaker Peace & Social Witness Central Committee to look at the language we use in relation to the violence in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank. I have no part in that discernment, and will abide by it unreservedly in my role.

The specific point I was trying to make as a panellist was that when I speak about the continuing violence perpetrated against the people in Gaza I use the word ‘massacre’, because it is descriptive of the reality of it, it is harder to argue against, and avoids references to the very events which we Europeans bear responsibility for, as I said elsewhere. Words take on different connotations depending on who uses them – what is perfectly legitimate in the voices of the people directly affected will have a very different impact when coming from the mouths of those who are the inheritors of a grave historical catastrophe, which we have not atoned for.

Marisa Johnson

Facing outwards

To me, being a Quaker is about living out my values in my life, helping others, standing up for what I believe, by my actions, ‘speaking truth to power’, and worshipping and learning in a like-minded community. 

Our energies should face outwards. We have the ability individually and collectively to change things both big and small by how we spend our time, how we spend our money, and by responding to the needs of our world. 

It seems to me that the Religious Society of Friends has become a Society which has become bogged down by our numerous buildings. We spend the majority of our money, an important resource in our troubled world, on our buildings. All the Area Meetings I know are overwhelmed by the maintenance of property, and not just Meeting houses. This is a travesty.

It takes an inordinate amount of time and energy to steward the upkeep of these buildings. Have we got it wrong? Are we making our steeple houses more important than our work in the community and the wider world? Living out our testimonies as best we can? What would George Fox think?

I feel deeply that this is not what is required of me. My energy, which is reducing as I get older, could be much better spent looking outwards. Of course others will disagree, but if we always do what we’ve always done then we’ll always have what we have now, a Society increasingly ageing, spending far too much time and money on premises, which cost us more and more, expending time and energy which could be much better spent on ‘what God requires of us’.

Sarah Lane

The Bamford Community

I recall the legacy with which the Bamford Community was founded (26 July). If my memory of the 1970s serves me right, Winifred, a Westminster Friend, had discovered the young Quaker community living near her in Stoke Newington. She regularly called and seems to have thought highly of community living.

When in the 1980s she left a legacy to form a Quaker community, the matter was not discussed by Some Friends Community (SFC), which by then had grown out of the Stoke Newington one, becoming over a dozen Quakers and sympathisers, living over former shops in Bethnal Green Road. The community member in the know had not thought it relevant to say, possibly because they had not met Winifred the decade before. Anyway it seemed good that her money was used to form a Quaker community in the Peak District. Will the proceeds from selling the land and buildings go to a twenty-first century Quaker community or if not to Quaker-like communitarian action? 

SFC went on until 2008 though I had moved on in 1990.

Jeffery Smith