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.
TigerQuake 