The world has repeatedly called forth new forms of Quakerism. After Darwin’s theories of evolution changed understandings of the past it took fifty years, but the 1895 Manchester Conference enabled Quakers to move towards a geological rather than biblical understanding of history. Climate change is now tearing up our sense of the future. Progress is not inevitable, the Earth has limits. It may have taken another fifty years, but there is evidence of a re-visioning of Quakerism that is probably just as radical.
If renewal is upon us, what might it look like? All we have now are straws in the wind, but let’s start with online worship, which is probably the biggest transformation in 350 years of how we worship. We can now worship daily, unlinked from place and local community. Many of us have had a daily spiritual practice but most have never been able to meet daily in Quaker worship. Through Woodbrooke, Living Witness, and Meetings for Peace, many Quaker communities are now worshipping together on a near-daily basis. Just as important, Zoom has enabled communities of interest to worship together, including Living Witness’s Meetings for Worship for the Earth, Quaker Support for Climate Action (QS4CA)’s meetings to support those going through the judicial system, support for Friends House Moscow, and Sharing Across the Earth with Australian Friends.
Online worship is also mediating new forms of both witness and worship. QS4CA coordinates witness in new ways, taking the essence of Quaker nonviolence into courtrooms and sharing it with the wider criminal justice system. Equally, Living Witness is exploring how a committed Quaker worshipping community focused on the Earth can support discernment of how to live with incipient collapse.
In our usual, slow, non-theological way, we are coming to see that our relationship with the Earth holds the key to how we know God and learn what living in the Light may mean in these times. If we come to see that, in destroying a forest, a species, or a mountain, or causing another extinction, we are in some real sense destroying God, then our sense of the sacred – and our relationship to it – changes. A simpler way of living ceases to be a theological choice about doing away with distractions and becomes a sacrament. Peace is not just about other human beings; it is also about the peace of all beings and what we can learn from them. Our historic call to answer that of God in every one increasingly becomes a call to answer that of God in every living thing. As this happens, our traditional testimonies begin to take on an ecological hue.
Increasingly it will be the limits imposed by a warming Earth that end the extractive violence of growth and capitalism. Recognising this can lead us to new spirit-led witness and politics. The signs of renewal lie all around us. Whether they come to anything, and what the Light really demands of us – well, who knows. But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that stasis and decay are the outer bounds of what is possible.
Paul Hodgkin