I attended three sessions of the Friends World Committee for Consultation World Plenary as part of the Manchester and Warrington hub. These are just three miscellaneous but vivid memories of the sessions I attended.
The first was a rendering of the song, There’s a hole in my bucket:
There’s a hole in my bucket
Dear Liza, dear Liza!
There’s a hole in my bucket
Dear Liza, a hole!
Then fix it, dear Henry
Dear Henry, dear Henry!
Then fix it, dear Henry,
Dear Henry, fix it!
With what shall I fix it
Dear Liza, dear Liza?
With what shall I fix it
Dear Liza, with what?
With the straw, dear Henry,
Dear Henry, dear Henry!
With the straw, dear Henry,
Dear Henry, the straw!
And then follows a whole litany of actions needed to mend the bucket, each of which depends on the next step culminating in the need for water, which requires a bucket for collection and – of course – there is still a hole.
I remember it well from childhood, and one of my daughters once sang the part of Liza. If you recall it, you will know that Liza gets increasingly exasperated with Henry. It had not occurred to me how it encapsulates that statement by Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
That sense of going round and around with growing exasperation is very much part of my own response to climate change and indeed many other crises. And humour can be energising and bring insight.
The second memorable moment was during worship, when a woman very slowly and tearfully was talking about interspecies communication. She described her own conversations with the elephants contemplating the end of life on the planet. The elephants simply replied, in response to her question about what they would like from her, that they wanted her presence. There are certainly moments when the sense of grief is overwhelming yet there can be a kind of gentleness in the despair.
The final memory is of the efforts made to be inclusive. I wonder sometimes if inclusion is a form of patronising by those with the power? Or is there genuine reciprocity? I am not sure this attempt succeeded but the intention was certainly there and the messages broadcast on Zoom from time to time asking for Swahili or other translators, and indeed the inclusion of many from such a variety of countries, really brought home that this was a global event.
These three things together expressed so many of the feelings I experience in these times: exasperation at our refusal to face up to the immensity of the problems, so we fail to search for the radical nature of any real solutions, and the deep sadness of the tragedy unfolding right amongst us. But still those efforts to bring people together to enable communication and sharing of thoughts and feelings do contain seeds of hope. Global efforts are certainly vital and I find Antonio Gutierrez, General Secretary of the United Nations, inspiring. Hope grows from actually acting as though our efforts will make a difference. “Another world is possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” (Arundhati Roy)
Sandra Dutson
Eccles Meeting