A deep dear loss

To me and many Friends this week the hardest things has been to bear the loss of our respected and loving Friend Robert.
May comfort and grace be visited upon Frances and his daughters.
In loving Friendship
Peter ( and many others)

Yearly Meeting Gathering 09

I got home about an hour and a half ago from Yearly Meeting Gathering.
The big news for the outside world is the decision of the Meeting to recognise and record marriages for same-sex and opposite-sex couples in the same way, and to ask the government to change the law to allow religious marriages of same-sex couples to be legally recognised.
For me, the Gathering was about witnessing and taking part in amazing change; about finding new connections with new and existing friends; about taking time to recognise the sacredness of everything; about learning how I can be more articulate about myself and about my faith; about answering that of God in those around me; about integrity and truth and communication about what matters.
I feel changed by my experience of this week. I hope it lasts; I intend it to.

The Age of Simplicity?

I've been thinking for a while that there's something very significant in the relationship between Quakers and climate change, which maybe we're not responding fully to.

The missing piece in the jigsaw regarding humanity's response to climate change is the absence of a mass movement of the general public forcing/enabling the centres of power to take the action needed.

Quakers have always emphasised different testimonies in response to the challenges of the times. We prioritised equality when slavery was the issue. We prioritised peace when world war was the issue. Now the urgent issue is one of overconsumption, so maybe it's time for us to prioritise simplicity. In terms of Quaker history, maybe the Age of Equality and the Age of Peace need to make way for an Age of Simplicity.

In order to uphold these testimonies, Quakers had to go through an often trying period of internal discernment and threshing. Once that was done, we became united, active, and vocal enough in the world outside to contribute to the change which occurred. This had benefits for us as a worshipping community and obviously it also did good in the world at large. It's good for us spiritually as a community to have a real challenge to face, and we do most good in the world when we face it.

So maybe we need to become a people campaigning for simplicity in the way we have been a people campaigning for peace or equality. I see the beginnings of this among Quakers at the moment, but maybe we could/should go further?

I might write at more length on this when I get time.

Forgiveness and forgetting

All day I have been returning to one particular thought namely, to what extent is forgiveness related to childhood position within the family and the need to often forget issues to enable continued family peace? I know that some may say that I am forgetting the spiritual aspects of this but I believe that, to a great extent, they are related.
In part this was triggered by memories of a school friend who would never consider sharing, after offering one biscuit, packets of chocolate biscuits as normally they were all his; another friend who would never consider taking anything for themselves until everyone else was satisfied, ( There are issues here but I won't look at them further.) and socialisation within the family and school.
As a member of a family of five - 2 adults and 3 children - my own experience was based on sharing (not always willingly in the first instance) though I am now going back 50+ years. It was encouraged, and not only within the immediate family but with friends, and greed was not encouraged but fair shares were. Sometimes it worked and at other times it didn't but although some immediate displays of annoyance, anger etc were made they were usually quickly dissipated within the family and school and things often forgotten; indeed forgetfulness of such issues was encouraged. However those with no brothers or sisters etc. were often quite different in response to such issues and seemed more concerned to their right to what was on offer than others.
Within families there seems to be a great deal of forgetting as, to do so, it may carry on functioning. In part this may be, when children are aware enough, spiritual but a great deal of the time it may be appear, and need to be, necessary and situational but out of this the spiritual can grow. I bet Jesus had a Nelson eye for some things!
I can only speak to my observations and could be very wrong but I do not think that I am arguing to the general from a particular case but from many cases I have observed. This may seem to lack the Q spiritual but there is a mixed relationship with the Q spiritual and the Q temporal from what I can see.
Foregiveness, to last, requires forgetting; forgetting requires foregiveness. These apply not simply in childhood but throughout life but childhood provides the foundations of rock upon which they can be built and not those of sand upon which they can be swept away.
In Love
Peter

Concerns, making decisions and nominations

I read the following remarkable passage by John Macmurray in "The Creative Society", written in 1935. Though John Macmurray later became a Quaker, at this time he knew little or nothing of us and our ways. Yet in this passage, to me, he succinctly locates the nature of concerns, the "sense of the meeting" and the nominations process in his own understanding of how true communities should function and get things done. The context of the passage is analysing the relationship between Christianity and Communism, and in particular highlighting the limitations of both as practised.

"What practical steps are we to take to provide an expression for our Christianity in the social field? This question often is associated with a demand for 'leadership,' and the leadership that is meant is the leadership of someone who will tell us what to do and show us how to do it. This form of demand is thoroughly misguided. It is conspicuously anti-democratic and, therefore, anti-Christian. “He that would be first among you let him be your servant." It is of the first importance to remember that Christianity looks for the creative source of social integration in the common people. Until there is a Christian society which knows what it wants and what it must do, leadership can only be a case of the blind leading the blind. When there is a society which knows what must be done, leadership is never a difficulty, because the leader is then merely the agent or the servant of the purpose which he shares and which he is responsible for carrying out. Only within a body of people who are united on the basis of real Christianity can the understanding of what must be done arise [The sense of the meeting]. And this understanding must arise in them. It cannot be given to them from outside. They must first discover the action which they have to take in the social and political field [concern]; then they can commit the carrying out of this defined common purpose to agents of their own choosing [nominations]. The whole principle of democracy involves this. There is a curious idea abroad that only specialists and experts are capable of answering the fundamental questions at issue in modern society. This is the reverse of the truth. The expert and the specialist, the highly trained and highly cultivated individual may be useful and essential for solving technical problems about the means by which the general solution can be carried into practical effect, but they are positively disqualified for deciding what the general purposes should be. There is nothing paradoxical in this."

It is all to easy to say what we do not do: We don't have leaders, we don't vote, we don't have elections, etc. But unless we know what we do do, and why we do it, and ground our understanding of what we do in our lives together, we can all to easy throw the baby out with the bath water when difficulties and problems arise and we crave solutions.

2009 Transition Conference

The 3rd national Transition Conference was held at Battersea Arts Centre on 22nd-24th May 2009. This is my report on it for The Friend magazine.

The Transition movement has a good claim to being the fastest-growing social movement in the UK. From its origins just 4 years ago in the small town of Totnes in Devon, it has grown into 170 ‘official’ Transition initiatives, with hundreds of others at the ‘mulling’ stage across the UK and in over other 30 countries.

Still most widely known as 'Transition Towns', the movement is increasingly growing beyond its English market-town origins, to develop models of Transition initiative for every scale of community from villages and islands to major cities such as Bristol and Sheffield.

The Transition movement is a community-based response to the challenges of climate change and 'peak oil' – the imminent steady decline in world oil production that threatens an unprecedented worldwide energy crisis.

The Transition movement's approach to both climate change and peak oil is the building of community-based alternatives to our energy and carbon intensive society. Many other environmental movements have focussed either on promoting individual lifestyle change or campaigning on government policy. By contrast, much of the tremendous energy and enthusiasm that has been unleashed by the Transition movement is largely due to its emphasis on local communities getting together to work out what they can achieve together.

Such community-based initiatives take a huge diversity of practical expressions. They include local currencies such as the Lewes pound, local food growing projects, renewable energy generation from wind, water and biomass, low-impact housing and 're-skilling' in practical skills such as food growing and hand crafts.

In all of these activities the emphasis is on building the local community's ‘resilience’: their ability to meet essential needs for food, heating, transport, health and education without dependence on fragile and energy-intensive global supply chains.

But the Transition movement also seeks to create a vision of a lower-energy society that could be more satisfying, more socially connected and more equitable than our current oil-addicted society. The movement sees itself as 'a midwife for the emerging culture we need so urgently, the one that lives within its means and is more nourished and satisfied for having done so.'

More on the Transition movement at: http://www.transitiontowns.org/

An ‘Open Space’ Conference

This was the 3rd annual conference of the Transition movement, attracting about 400 people from Transition initiatives across the UK, and also from continental Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. On Friday afternoon Ed Miliband, minister for Energy and Climate Change, also joined the conference as a 'keynote listener', taking part in several of the workshops.

The conference used the group process known as 'open space' to generate many of its sessions. Every participant was given the opportunity to host a round-table conversation on a theme of their choosing. Participants offered a dazzling range of over 150 themed conversations throughout the weekend; from preventing burnout to dealing with conflict, home composting, engaging with local Councils, creating local currencies, reaching faith groups, and rainwater harvesting. Attenders could choose to stay with a particular table for the whole open space session, or drop in and out of different conversations at will.

On Saturday evening the conference was opened up to the public of London for a dramatic presentation of the main steps in setting up a Transition Initiative, from awareness raising and re-skilling to the development of an 'energy descent action plan' for a whole community. This aimed to enact the whole process of ‘transitioning’ a community through a mix of creative media and group exercises. These included short films, group discussions, an interview with an 80-year old London resident (to illustrate the principle of ‘honouring the elders’ – learning from their experience of life before consumerism), and a huge ball of string to weave a web of connection between people with skills to teach and those wanting to learn them.

The huge range of workshops on offer meant that it was impossible to attend them all, but the workshop on local currencies by Oliver Dudok van Heel of Transition Town Lewes was one of the highlights.

The Lewes pound was launched in September 2008 with an issue of £10,000, which sold out in 3 days. There are currently 30,000 Lewes pounds in circulation, which can only be spent in local and independent shops in the town, with the aim of encouraging people to support the local economy.

Oliver pointed out how typically 80% of money spent in large chains such as supermarkets immediately leaves the local economy to global suppliers, contractors and shareholders. By contrast money spent in small independent shops creates more jobs and continues to circulate within local supply chains. Although local currencies such as the Totnes and Lewes pounds currently have a very limited economic impact, they are seen as pilot projects to help people to understand how their spending affects the local economy.

Lewes pound notes are printed on genuine currency paper, complete with watermark and an engraving of Thomas Paine, a former Lewes resident, with the quotation from his writings, “We have it in our power to build the world anew.”

Transition Town Lewes are planning a new, larger issue of their local currency soon, which will include a £21 note.

A ‘Cheerful Disclaimer’

In a brief talk on Saturday, Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition movement, gave participants what he called a cheerful disclaimer:
“If anyone has come imagining that Transition is a system that is all worked out and you can just take it off a shelf and it will work for your community – it's not like that. This is something that we are making up as we go along, that is constantly growing and changing, absorbing new ideas and ways of working.”

He called the Transition movement ‘a sign of the immune system of the world kicking in’, and the beginnings of a ‘detox’ from our society’s addiction to oil.

For many of the participants I spoke to the Transition movement offers a way of moving beyond their fear and despair about the current ecological crisis, and coming together to create positive possibilities. “Taking that fear and doing something positive with it”, and “not waiting for anybody else to fix things for us but getting on and fixing them ourselves.”

Or as one woman told me “When my grandchildren ask me if we knew what we were doing and why we let this happen, I want to be able to say that yes I knew, and I did everything I could.”

A to Z

I was amazed at the number and range of groups and organisations that have used the Sheffield Meeting House in the past year. there must have been 250 plus on the paper circulated at the meeting on Sunday, too many to list here, but below is a selection -


Age Concern
British Polio Fellowship
City of Sanctuary
Drug Action Team
Early Years Education Care
Friends of the Earth
Grow Sheffield
Hawley Street Residents
INOVA Consultancy
Job Centre Plus
Knitters
Lymphoedema Support Group
MIND
Northern Refugee Centre
OFFER
Police Authority
Quaker Quest
Ramblers Association
Sheffield Alcohol Advisory Service
Thich Nhat Hanh Meditation Group
UNISON
Victim Support Sheffield
We Want Our Buses Back
OXFAM
Youth Justice Board
Zoobys


I do hope the conversation on how best to use the meeting house continues and discussion is opened up further. I liked the suggestion around the value of having Friends around just to listen to people who may pop in, a Friendly ear indeed.