Today’s prompt EXPECT hit a raw nerve with me. Minutes before reading my emails, my teenage son cut me off rather aggressively insisting that I could not voice my objection to his rudeness. I certainly expect to be treated better and not constantly criticised. What particularly hurt was that he criticised me for doing something he had criticised me for not doing (and caring for him) a few months back. I thought no wonder I get upset (and am constantly angry) in light of such behaviour. I felt the real need to be held, but also felt bottling my anger would only lead to more righteous criticism from him about being constantly “angry” about the fact that I expect to be treated like a human.
Having received with the daily prompt, I thought that I might respond by writing about what I expect in this situation. Being heard and having voice would be a start. However sitting down to write, the Quaker dictum of ‘What does God expect of us’ shot into my head. Love … which brings me to ask what does he EXPECT? Sad that that conversation is unlikely to happen, but I might pray for it.
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For me, Quakerism is essentially an experiential faith – witness of Friends past and present is at the heart of how we understand our faith and try to live it out. Ministry is particularly powerful when it speaks from our life to the life of others. Such powerful ministry can also be provided by non-Quakers and can come from unexpected sources. This theology from the benches is often raw and very uncomfortable.
How does this relate to racism and Quakerism? This feels urgent – and therefore the following thoughts are still very unformed.
A year ago today (19 February 2021), a German racist walked into three bars in Hanau near Frankfurt and executed (murdered if you prefer) nine Germans Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar, and Kaloyan Velkov) for the sole reason that they looked ethnically different and migration background. For many German ethnic minority citizens, the events of Hanau robbed them of their sense of safety and identity as German citizens. This week listening to the powerful podcast 190220 on Spotify brought home to me the moral injury inflicted on ethnic minorities living in Germany by those white Germans whose lives were not impacted by the events and ignorance about them. The moral injury occurs because we do not acknowledge the pain and the hurt caused to the identities of ethnic minorities and our lack of imagination.
After the shootings in Christchurch, the ministry in my local meeting was somber. Friends reflected on how glad we were that we could worship without fearing of a gunman breaking in and murdering us while worshiping. The shootings affected us because we were worshiping like the victims of Christchurch. Toward the of the meeting, I relate the tweet of a young Muslim woman working for Quakers in Britain, Sahdya Darr, from the previous Friday about her fear for family attending Friday prayers in Britain, because if such an event could happen in New Zealand, it could easily also happen here given the widespread Islamophobia in Britain. In this tweet, she also spoke of her disappointment about inability of her co-workers to comprehend her pain and the level of moral injury she had just suffered. I learned a lot from her tweet and her subsequent ministry about the event during a very powerful meeting for worship as well as by what happened afterwards including that we all can be racists by our failures to acknowledge the pain and the moral injury caused not necessarily by us individually but by us as co-workers, committee members, a Quaker body and Yearly Meeting.
I regard Sahdya Darr as a friend and therefore have strong feelings about racism she encountered. Her account of the constant micro-aggressions sounds credible. And since this criticism will be made, I will admit that I do not know the full story or the other side of story, but I have reason to doubt any of her statements. Therefore, I am pained that no way could be found to resolve the conflicts between her and her co-workers through some process of mediation or restorative justice and she left Quakers in Britain some time ago.
Her recent tweets have to be seen against the background of the report on the toxic work environment for ethnic minority staff in the charity sector. And raises the question whether the work environment at Britain Yearly Meeting staff is toxic? The recent report to Meeting for Sufferings by Edwina Preat suggest it may well be. For Quakers, this is potentially a big loss, because we benefit from the diversity of staff and the insights that they bring. I feel that we may have a lot of learning and listening to do here. We may well lose predominantly ethnic minority staff in the current restructuring of Friends House staff.
I am not saying that (institutional) racism in Quakerism is confined to Friends House. Racism lives in our meetings – we are often unaware our micro-aggressions and the moral injuries that we often inadvertently commit. There remains much for us to learn and become aware.
Apologies for not offering any thoughts on your theological points.
I am reluctant to write this blog post and not quite sure whether to publish it, but let’s take the first step and write it.
I am reluctant to write about my feelings about the second world war, because I was born in Germany. Therefore, I bring with me a complicated relationship with that difficult past bound up with the wartime experiences of my parent’s generation. My own family’s past inevitably shaped my life as well as the confrontation with all the atrocities committed by German soldiers wherever I travel within Europe. This started on school trips when as fourteen year olds, we were taken to see the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near Natzwiller in the Alsace region of France. Or on family holidays to the South of France, we tended to stay near the beaches of La Croix Valmer where the allies landed to liberate Southern France, but also encountered plaques commemorating the acts of German soldiers against French civilians. On one of our trips into the French countryside, my parents to took us to see an exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica at the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vance – this painting has stayed with me as an image that captures the horror of the air war [I wonder how my mother experienced this visit having lived through the air raids on Mannheim as a young child in primary school.] As a foreign exchange student in rural Minnesota, my fellow high school students called me a Nazi forcing me to think about Germany’s past in a different way. Many citizens of New Ulm (Minnesota) descended from German immigrants that had come to the United States in the late nineteenth century fleeing political persecution and economic hardship. Their relationship with “the old country’ was uncomplicatedly positive and seemed to ignore what happened during the Third Reich. At the same time, this relationship was mediated through the gratefulness of my parent’s generations for the Allied victory in the second world war, American aid for West German reconstruction and support preserving the West German state as a western democracy in the cold war. While I was oddly fascinated with the portrayal of Germans as buffoons in Hogan’s Heroes, my eyes were opened to the darker sides of the German past by watching the TV drama Holocaust first in the US (1978) and then a year later in Germany (1979). In this context, I started to realise how the second world war deeply shaped my life without necessarily having the courage to ask my parents about my family’s actions during the second world war, in itself a complicated and difficult story.
As a historian of the immediate post-1945 period, I have explored how this complicated relationship with the past shaped the emerging postwar societies in Western Europe. For the resistance groups against the Nazis, European co-operation became the way to overcome the nationalism which had led war in Europe twice within a generation. Their ideas paved the way to European economic and political integration. Due to their hard work, many Europeans (and not just a small elite) believe that the European integration projects has assured relative peace in Europe since VE-Day. And yes, this narrative is a foundation myth which pushes away a more complex history and distracts from a more complicated past. For Germans on both sides of the iron curtain, the defeat of the Nazi regime allowed them to reconstruct themselves as new states within different spheres of the cold war. After the horrors of the war, Germans rejected the Nazi past and held up their reconstruction efforts as the path to a brighter peaceful future. Having become model citizens of the West and Soviet orbit, many Germans could not comprehend the apprehensions of other Europeans in respect of German re-unification following the fall of the war. Those apprehensions reflected concerns about the stability of postwar German democracy given the Nazi past and the experiences during the second world war. In Britain, the second world war shaped the political consensus that underpinned the postwar welfare state and the National Health Service as well as the continued increased military establishment and militarisation of British society to maintain the “hard-won people’s peace” after VE-Day. Since 1945, the British armed forces and defence budget have been an unquestioned part of the postwar political consensus. Driven by a fear of appeasing another dictator, British politicians have supported military intervention to maintain British political power. The ‘heroism’ of British armed forces in the second world war provides the justification for British exceptionalism and continued attempts to project power overseas despite the increasing global irrelevance of Britain and the relative weakness of its armed forces in a nuclear age.
Against this background, we struggle as peace campaigners to raise our voices against the celebrations of VE-Day particular in a period of government-enforced lockdown and social distancing. Indeed, the government and the established institutions fall back on the language and symbolism of the second world war in order to employ it to mobilise the British public and an ‘army of volunteers’ (as in a flyer distributed by Derbyshire County Council) to defeat the new ‘enemy’ in form of a virus. At a time of a global health emergency we should be working together with others and not othering them. We will not be able go out and engage others that feel moved to toast the fallen British heroes. We will not be able to insist that war (like the virus) does not differentiate between its victims. Those that died in the war did not neatly divide into ‘heroes’ and victims on one side and perpetrators committing evil acts on the other. The evil acts of many does never morally justify the inevitable suffering that defeating these forces necessarily entailed.
In marking VE-Day, we need to remind ourselves of the suffering of everyone caught up in the second world war: children, parents, civilians, those persecuted for their race, ethnicity, sexuality and political views, conscripts and volunteers. Let’s not forget those heroes excluded from the discourse of our heroic armed forces, the colonial troops, the refugees who volunteered to serve in the British armed forces, evacuees, conscientious objectors, pacifist and everyone else. In contrast to our myths, the past is complicated. Let’s embrace it in our attempts to build the kingdom of peace on Earth.
[An edited version of this blog post was posted on the Northern Friends Peace Board website: https://nfpb.org.uk/voices/
I have spent a weirding sort of a day. I spent investigating the case of four payments which went missing and then miraculously appeared last Friday. Neither the sending bank nor the receiving bank claim any knowledge of what has gone wrong and it is no one’s fault. While I did that I negotiated the virtual Ocado queue fill my shopping basket for an hour negotiating with everyone that the right food would be bought, only to get to the checkout to be unable to get a delivery slot. That meant I spent the afternoon breaking self-isolation to go to the dump (and yes a queuing system was in place) joined lots of others including many or seventies to dump our rubbish. Then dropped the car off to have the winter tyres swapped, no other customers in sight and ended up at Tesco’s to shop donning a mask. Negotiating the emptyish shelves (unable to get a whole chicken or chicken wings to feed the hungry teenager, toilet roll or paracetamol – not sure what that says about us as a nation).
We live in curious times and I am sure more curious days to come. Not sure I will be able to pick up the car tomorrow now that we are in lockdown. Not sure when normal life will resume.
I have thought a lot in the last few days – no, ever since referendum day: what is my identity? I have lived in the UK for more than thirty years, but am of course constantly asked where are you from? What is your nationality? While once these questions were innocent, they no longer are in a world where government ministers are thinking aloud about asking for a person’s passport when accessing the National Health Service; or introducing income thresholds for those EU citizens living in this country exercising their treaty rights. I also no longer know the answer to the question, because truth be told I am British, but I am also German, a Quaker, a cat lover, a historian, a retired person, an adoptive dad, hopefully a devoted husband, a supporter of many causes and political parties, a recycler, an aspiring blogger, a human, … . When I am no sure that I have only one identity, why does that one identity that of the stranger/immigrant matter so much. Why is that part of my identity so threatening.
Prompted by reading Helen Steven’s No extraordinary power I am led to experiment with keeping a journal using Quaker writings as prompt for my own reflections.
Among the books, I picked a copy of the 1960 Christian faith and practice in the experience of the Society of Friends out of the large pile of books brought in by a Friend to Meeting yesterday. I noticed that in contrast to the current Quaker Faith and Practice which contains a separate chapter on our Peace testimony (chapter 24), the Peace testimony was subsumed into a chapter on International Responsibilities (chapter 14) in the previous book of discipline.
The chapter starts with a quote from minute 7 of the All Friends Conference in 1920: “In considering the character and basis of our testimony for peace we have felt strongly that its deepest foundation lies in the nature of God, and that its character must be inclusive of the whole of life. There is an urgent need for a fuller recognition that God’s essential nature is love, that the Cross of Jesus represents the highest point in the revelation of the character of God, and that there is the seed of God in every man, that spiritual forces are the mightiest, and that we must be prepared to rely upon them and to give expression to them in daily work and character as well as in what we call the great crises of life. We must set before us the highest ideal, that which ought to be, rather than that which is, believing that God is not alone the God of things as they are but the God of things as they are meant to be.” (Christian faith and practice 1960 [1972 reprint])
The passage calls on Quakers to integrate the peace testimony into their daily lives and strife for making the world into a more peaceful place. The notion of believing ‘that God is the God of things as they are meant to be’ may seem a rather utopian aspiration at first sight, but for the Quakers of the interwar period this belief provided the basis for their corporate endeavours to help those affected by war and campaign for peace. In that sense, God enables us to go out and mend the worId to borrow from Kenneth Boulding.
However and despite this authority, I am finding it personally challenging to make this testimony part of my life and even harder to live it out when there is so much injustice in the world and so many threats to world peace, as well as the little and quite big injustices in my personal life which leave me angry and depressed. But I take comfort in that being an idealist and an utopist is part of my faith allowing me to reject the realist notion that the world is evil and we have to accept it the way it is.
This morning a Friend brought a selection of books he was discarding to Meeting for Worship. I could not resist and picked out a few gems related to my current research project. I spend the afternoon curled up with the cats reading “The growth of the peace testimony of the Society of Friends” by Horace G. Alexander. Besides being remarkable Friend, Alexander was a well-known ornithologist and confidante of Ghandi.
His leaflet has ENLIGHTENed me about the emergence of the Quaker Peace Testimony. I found particularly interesting that Alexander attributed the increased social activism of Friends to the French Revolution and the emergence of human rights.
Another passage peeked my interest and found rather interesting because it speaks to my concerns about our email petition culture and its impact. “We must beware of becoming busybodies. Pouring postcards and resolutions at the heads of Governments may possibly be a sign of taking our citizenship seriously: but … ” (p.36) While Alexander dwells on whether Quakers as a corporate body should send such resolutions, I wonder whether we really can speak with authority when we sign e-petitions as much as they fulfill our needs to address our views and outrage at government policy, social injustice or the latest moral outrage. Are we not in danger to drown out those issues that are really close to our heart and on which we might be able to speak with some authority.
TigerQuake 