Equipping for Tomorrow

EarthQuaker Issue 99

It feels as though the things we left out of our industrial, fossil-fuelled culture are coming back to haunt us – our dependence on nature, our inability to control the Earth, the humility and connection with the Earth that we lost when we came to see the whole planet as a “resource”.

This is as true of Quakerism as everything else. The history of Quakerism has been much more driven by our engagement with, and enrichment by, capitalism (think Barclays, Gurneys, Fry, Rowntree, Allen, Sturge, etc. etc.) than by our attachment to the environment. The thing we Quakers left out, and have only rarely borne witness to, is the natural world. Prisons, enslavement, nuclear weapons, peace, racism, homophobia, human betterment, yes. But Coalbrook Dale? The West African cocoa ecology? The million whales that Nantucket Quakers killed? The effect of the industrial revolution that we played such a part in creating? Not so much. 

It is all too easy to feel that we Quakers are on a down-turning curve. Meetings fail, numbers decline. The gaze turns inwards.

In all this it is much harder to see the upturning, renewal curve, but I think there are really transformative things happening within the Society – just think of:

  • The meetings for worship for peace held in solidarity with Friends and peoples across the world caught up in conflict situations. This is a peace testimony that transcends distance.
  • The Friends who are currently in jail or awaiting trial for non-violent direct action for the Earth. This is probably the biggest number of Friends involved in NVDA since the heyday of CND.
  • On the day that Shell was taking Friends and others to court in a private prosecution, Friends held a meeting for worship that occurred simultaneously at the Royal Courts of Justice and with supporters across Britain. This takes worship into the heart of witness.

These examples reflect three separate developments.

  1. Zoom liberates us from place. Worship can happen as and when we want to organise it – even within the heart of the British justice system. 
  2. Zoom allows us to have a daily spiritual practice based on gathered silence.
  3. Finally we are beginning to braid our witnessing and worshipping communities together. Before Covid, a Quaker special interest group might meet up for a weekend together once every 6 or 12 months and the time would inevitably be taken up with planning and re-connecting. Now Quaker Support for Climate Action meets every Tuesday both to worship and to plan witness. Living Witness meets to worship three times a week and has learnt new ways to hold ‘Meetings for Worship for the Earth’.

For me, all these bear the hallmarks of the upturning, renewing arc – not so easily seen as the one that seems to chart our decline but, once noticed, full of light and renewal. None of this means that the older, downturning process is bad or less important than the renewal – far from it since it is from the old that we carry forward the essence of everything we have learnt so far. Rather, the upturning renewal usually occurs in different places to where the old is being curated and cared for and is often harder to see.

An old adage says that “technology is the architect of our intimacies.” Now we are realising that technology is also the architect of our spiritual intimacies. Just as the technology of meeting houses channels our spiritual intimacy into a particular physical space, so Zoom changes, enlarges and yes, in some ways, diminishes, what the gathered silence of worship means.

It is less than 5 years since we discovered this spiritual technology so of course “we are still living on the wave’s edge, where sea, sand and sky are all mixed up together: we are tossed head over heels in the surf, catching only glimpses of the horizon.”

There is no guarantee that everything is for the best – there never is. But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that nothing is happening. Our ability to be together in the Light, to have a daily Quaker spiritual practice, and to braid witness and worship together, all these are being transformed by the soft light from our screens as we sit in the dawn or dusk of a gathered silence that can now encompass the planet.

Paul Hodgkin