Values and principles

Margaret Fell famously reports George Fox as saying:

“You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?” (1694)

Increasingly today amongst Quakers we don't know what Christ said, and hardly know who the apostles were. Instead, today, we might be told:

“You tell us about the Peace Testimony, and also about testimonies to truth and integrity, equality and simplicity, and even to sustainability, but what can you tell?”

The Britain Yearly Meeting website (http://www.quaker.org.uk/more-about-testimonies), and the associated printed pamphlet, tell us that putting “faith into practice ... arises from an understanding of certain values and principles which are central to the Quaker faith.” , and this under the sub heading 'Our Beliefs'.

So why do we meet in silence, if all we have to do is understand and believe in the testimonies? Are we just having a time of pleasant contemplation on a Sunday morning? Why don't we just join some campaigning group or other that works out these testimonies in practice? Or when all is told are we in fact really just one of these political campaigning groups that happens to add some weird stuff on Sundays?

Our ancestors believed in gods and monsters, and priests and kings. And George Fox told us not to trust in them, but to search for the truth within, the light, the seed. Today we believe in values and principles, rights and ideals. We think that we are enlightened and have found the truth, and have forgotten that the truth can only be found within.

Our testimonies are not values and principles, and certainly not beliefs, but merely 'what we can say' about our lives. Yes there is one truth, which is why what we testify behind our concerns remains essentially the same down the ages, but that truth has to be discovered and worked out for each one of us,  for each and every particular time and place, and for each and every concern. And it is this discovery that we witness to in our lives, not idealistic principles. This is why we wait in silence, expectantly believing that the truth is there to be found. This is all that we need to believe as Quakers – that the light is within, that the seed will grow.

The rest is commentary - go and wait in the silence.

National Canterbury Commitment gathering 2014

'Transforming ourselves: transforming the system'

Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick, Derbyshire

7-9 March 2014

Organised by the Meeting for Sufferings Canterbury Commitment Group

In 2011 Britain Yearly Meeting in Canterbury committed to become a low-carbon, sustainable community. Friends and Meetings are doing an impressive amount to cut their carbon emissions, but some have been discouraged by lack of change in the wider social and economic system.
We need a radical transformation that requires more than individual action.This national gathering aims to help energise our Quaker community in the urgent response to climate change and energy injustice.
This is an opportunity to connect up change in our own lives and Meetings, with action in the wider community, to create the transition to a low-carbon sustainable society.
We hope that the gathering will be the first step in establishing an on-going network, and will help Meetings to prepare for the Yearly Meeting Gathering later in 2014. The gathering will be grounded in worship and deep reflection together and there will be opportunities to hear about the experiences of other Meetings, celebrate successes and explore the challenges and ask how we can best support each other. There will also be resources and ideas for action. And there will be time to ask where we are led now in our corporate commitment.
The event is particularly aimed at

• Friends who have championed sustainability in their meetings or who would like to do so
• Seasoned Friends experienced in eldership and oversight
• Friends with experience of work under Concern in this or other areas
• Friends who have experience of activism in this or other areas

Arrivals: 4-6pm Friday 7th March; Departures from 2pm Sunday 9th March.
The cost of attending this gathering is £180 (Area Meeting bursaries are available for attending Quaker events - contact your overseer for details).

Online booking form here

Becoming a Low Carbon Sustainable Community

I realised some time ago that growing food to eat was an important part of moving towards a more sustainable, low carbon lifestyle. An allotment means I can spend joyful time outside, with my hands in the soil, looking over to Wincobank, with a wren, robin and frogs as my daily companions. I have read up about organic gardening, both in books and on websites, and plan a 4 plot rotation growing lots of different vegetable: onions, leeks, potatoes, peas, beans, spinach, chard, kale, cauliflower, parsnips, squash, courgettes and pumpkins. I also have fruit on my plot and we have bottled and frozen lots of it to eat over winter. :-)

Transition Towards Sustainability...

Over the last two years, I have been attending quaker meetings. During that time, many changes have occurred in my life, some inward and some more apparent. Attending quaker meetings has given me a new freedom – a central point in time and space (Sunday morning, James St. 10:30am) where I know that whatever is going on in my life, I am welcome to come, sit down and reflect. No-one is there with a big stick telling me how bad I am or what I ought be doing. There are many people struggling just like me to do the right thing, be the right person, or even ask themselves if there is such a thing. Each of us sitting in that meeting are seeking the “inward light” which early quakers called Christ, in hopes that we may see life more clearly in that light. One of the big changes which has happened gradually over the last two years is that I have become vegan. For almost a year or so, I was “mostly vegan” and wrestled with the idea of having to refuse an offer of food from someone who had cooked for me without knowing my preference. I felt as though by refusing their offer, I would in some way be rejecting their kindness or as if I was saying “these are not good enough for me.” I shared these concerns with a number of Friends along the way and was listened to and understood, without being judged or coerced one way or another. It seems that the important thing for quakers is that we are each seeking to bring forth that which is inside us. Since making the decision to be vegan, I have felt better physically and am confident that it is one of the biggest things I can do personally to reduce my ecological footprint but moreover, I've gained confidence in the process of answering a leading with a testimony of action. It's not a smugness, but there is a lightness – an increase of energy and enthusiasm. Like Thomas Ellwood in 1659 (see Quaker Faith & Practice 19:16), I can rejoice that I am no longer weighed down by the wrestle I was having.

I love the way that Friends encourage one another to seek the light within and grow closer towards it and each other.

Paul Newman.

A message from James Nayler

A message for David Cameron's government from 17th Century Quaker James Nayler:

God is against you, you covetous cruel oppressors who grind the faces of the poor and needy, taking your advantage of the necessities of the poor, falsifying the measures and using deceitful weights, speaking that by your commodities which is not true and so deceiving the simple, and hereby getting great estates in the world, laying house to house and land to land till there be no place for the poor; and when they are become poor through your deceits then you despise them and exalt yourselves above them, and forget that you are all made of one mould and one blood and must all appear before one judge, who is no respecter of persons, nor does he despise the poor; and what shall your riches avail you at that day when you must account how you have gotten them and whom you have oppressed?

James Nayler - A Discovery of the First Wisdom from Beneath and the Second Wisdom from Above, 1653

There is an interesting article about James Nayler by Stuart Masters here.

Real Religion

"When religion is real, it throws the centre of our interest and our action right outside ourselves. It is not about myself at all, or only incidentally and for a purpose that is not my own. It is about the world I live in and the part that I must play in it. It is not to serve my need but the need of the world through me. Real religion is not something that you possess but rather a power that lays hold of you and uses you in the service of a will that is greater than your own."

John Macmurray, 'Search for a Faith', 1945

A Testimony to Sustainability?

In 2011, British Quakers made the 'Canterbury Commitment' to become a low carbon sustainable community. This is an important landmark decision in these times as the evidence for possible runaway climate change gathers apace.

However, this commitment is often being framed as a new 'testimony'. Craig argues against this in his blog 'Actions not Principles - an introduction to the Quaker Testimonies'. But Blackheath Quakers have 'Quaker Sustainability Testimony' and in the USA, the SPICE formulation of our testimonies (Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community Equality) has become SPICES with the addition of 'Stewardship' as reported in Friends Journal here.

But is 'Sustainability' a testimony in any spiritual sense? After all organisations such as Friends of The Earth and Greenpeace, and the Transition movement all testify to the same thing. And many Quakers are members of such groups, and many Meetings generously host them at their meeting houses. Craig mentions other testimonies: anti-slavery, temperance, anti-militarism and the practice of equal marriage. These too are testified to by all manner of political and social groups.

What we need is a distinct spiritual or religious testimony of our actions in the world when led by the spirit. If we just follow the spirit of the age, then we will just be like any other political pressure group, no matter how noble our aims. We are first and foremost a 'religious' society and we need to work out what that means and how it makes our witness distinctive, such that it adds to and deepens the political witness of those around us.

We have been here before, and right at the start of our witness: Margaret Fox berated our 'silly poor gospel' of being obsessed with how we dress and losing sight of the spiritual reason for plain dress. That reason was a witness to our testimony of equality, in a day when ostentatious dress was deliberately used to set people up against one another. The mistake, I believe, was to make 'plain dress' into a testimony when in fact it was a concern arising from equality and specific to the circumstances of the day. Such also is our concerns against slavery, for anti-miltarism and for equal marriage – all arise from our testimony of equality, and we look to the time when they will no longer be concerns.

With our very real concern for sustainability in the face of climate change and 'peak oil' we run the very dangerous risk, as Margaret Fox so presciently pointed out of

“minding altogether outward things, neglecting the inward work of Almighty God in our hearts, if we can but frame according to outward prescriptions and orders, and deny eating and drinking with our neighbours, in so much that poor Friends is mangled in their minds, that they know not what to do, for one Friend says one way, and another another”

Just the sort of thing that is happening in meetings across the country right now as Friends struggle with widely varying levels amongst each other of 'outward prescriptions' to being 'low carbon'.

So where then is the spiritual testimony that informs our concern about sustainability and underpins our 'Canterbury Commitment'? Part of the answer was brought out wonderfully in our recent Meeting for Worship for business where we asked of ourselves ‘How is God leading us towards becoming a low carbon, sustainable community?’, and there was deep ministry about paying attention to simplicity as our guiding principle.

But for me, simplicity does not fully capture the spiritual underpinning of what it means to me to be in a low carbon sustainable community. None of our testimonies as commonly formulated does so, such is the radical and novel place we find ourselves in as we cope with these newly revealed concerns. But I think that Quakers do have a unique and special voice for our times as we worry about the destruction we are wrecking on the planet, and that is that we believe that everything is equally sacred.

If everything is equally sacred then we certainly cannot 'have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth' (Genesis 1:28) as so much of  Christianity has it – at least until the recent past, and from which much of the destructiveness that has led to unavoidable climate change can be seen to have come from in the Christian West.

If everything is equally sacred then we can't even have 'stewardship' over the earth, as most thoughtful Christians would interpret the Genesis imperative, and so it would seem, do many Quakers. For to be a steward is to set oneself over and above something else, to treat the other as an object for our use, or even at best, our care. But if something is sacred then it demands our acceptance of it as it is and for itself – 'put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground' (Exodus 3:5). 

If everything is equally sacred, what does it mean to throw something away? To put stuff in landfill, or send it somewhere out of sight, where they have lax environmental legislation? Everything that passes through our hands comes from a sacred place and should go to a sacred place. If everything is sacred then there is no place for a rubbish heap.

If everything is equally sacred what does it mean to treat our technology as toys to be played with to indulge our crude pleasures? And then to discard them in favour of the latest model? If we considered technology to be equally sacred, we would use it with care and proper attention, learning it's fit and proper place, and discarding it if it violated equality and simplicity in our lives.

If everything is equally sacred how can we ever think of anything merely in terms of its money value? Money destroys the sacred by putting a barrier between us and any possibility of entering into a relationship with it. This is why 'the love of money is the root of all evil' (1 Timothy 6:10).

If everything is equally sacred how can we allow so much of our stuff to wear out and not be properly maintained and cared for and even passed on to future generations so they too can see them as sacred? We should mourn the loss of our goods to wear and tear and remember the good and useful life they had with us.

In a secular age when the spirit of the age is to turn everything into a commodity for our selfish use with no thought of the morrow, it is vital that we develop a testimony to the sacredness of everything. We have a rich past of this testimony in action, and we are in good company for much traditional non-western spirituality also testifies to everything being sacred.With equality and simplicity in particular we will then have a rich and deep spiritual witness, which overcomes guilt and despair and enables us to cheerfully and courageously challenge the unsustainable society we are in, both in our own lives and in political action for change.

And we can look forward to the day when we can lay down this concern because we will find ourselves living in a low carbon sustainable community. And discover then whither the will of God will lead our testimony.