Encounter: 24 July  2005  - That of God in Everyone

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s1420515.htm]

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Gary Bryson: Over 350 years ago, George Fox devised a theology which put forward the idea that ‘God exists in everyone’. We must seek the light within ourselves, he said, and serve God through our actions. This was radical enough for the time, but Fox made himself especially unpopular with the authorities when he taught that there was no need for priests or liturgy, no sermons, no prayers, no hymns.

The movement he founded came to be known as the Quakers, or more correctly, the Religious Society of Friends. And to this day, Quakers who follow Fox’s teaching worship in silence, broken only when an individual feels called to speak.

Hello, I’m Gary Bryson. Welcome to Encounter, where today, we’re exploring Quaker faith and practice.

Reader: This is the word of the Lord God to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living God; be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.
George Fox, 1656.


Gary Bryson: Scratch the surface of any major humanitarian concern in this country or overseas and you’ll probably find a Quaker. They’ve been influential in setting up concerns like Amnesty International for example, and Oxfam. And in recent years, running anti-violence programs in prisons, or reconciliation processes in places like Rwanda. Or removing landmines in Cambodia, campaigning against the international arms trade, or assisting refugees.

Quaker values of pacifism, equality, simplicity and service have led many of them towards these social justice issues. And in the parlous state of today’s world: global terrorism, the war in Iraq, genocide and starvation in Africa, Quaker values are perhaps needed more than ever. But how do these values stand up to the demands of the modern age? And have Quakers’ beliefs, and their insistence on faith in action, pushed them beyond the theology of established Christianity?

Sabina Erica: One of the advices is along the lines of listening to the promptings of truth and love in your heart. It’s not always easy to hear them.

Gary Bryson: Sabina Erica is an author and peace activist. Like all the guests on our program today, she is also a practising Quaker, a faith that gels with her political ideas, and something she attributes to her family background.

Sabina Erica: My parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. My father was Jewish. And lots and lots of our family perished in the Holocaust, and we were lucky; we came here. And my father had an extremely positive attitude to life generally, and a great belief, even before he became a Quaker. When he found Quakers, he found his spiritual home, he found where he belonged, and he brought us up to believe that there was good in everyone, even in the Nazis, which really always amazed me as a teenager. I used to get really cranky with him and say, ‘How can you? How can you believe that people like that are good, or have good somewhere?’ But he did, and he was quite unrelenting in that belief.

Gary Bryson: Like many born into Quaker families, Sabina Erica drifted away from Friends in her younger years. Quakers will tell you this is how it is with young people, and that they usually find their own way back.

Sabina Erica: In that period that I left, I thought maybe I’d become a Catholic for a while, I attended mass for a bit, and I even remember saying to my mother when I was about 13, that I thought I might become a nun. And I loved the drama of mass, I thought it was fantastic because Quakers don’t have any drama, it’s very quiet, and very inward-looking. But then when I went off to work on a property, I had a lot of time for reflection out there, just the sheep and me, and I was a governess to a couple of little girls, but that didn't take up all my time at all, it really only took up a couple of hours in the morning, and the rest of the time I had to myself. No car, no nothing, just books and paper and vast acres of paddocks. And I thought a lot about who I was and what I wanted to do, and so on, and I thought I’d like to do something good and worthwhile. And that kind of led me back into thinking about being a Quaker.

I actually wrote to a Quaker who lived in a nearby town, and he came out to visit. He was working with cattle on an experimental farm. He came out to visit me, we had a bit of a chat about it, and then I thought Yes, I’d like to really join and I wrote to Sydney Meeting and said I’d like to join, and they then sent this man out as an official to visit and that’s how they go about the process of becoming a Quaker, they send out a couple of Quakers to visit you and talk with you about it. And then they go back to the Meeting and recommend that you be accepted into membership, or not, as the case may be. So that’s how I became a member.

And then when I came back to Sydney, I thought, well, I had all these grandiose ideas out there in the paddocks about doing good things, and I approached a school for disabled children and said that I’d like to work with them. So that was kind of the first little step into doing something that I thought would be worthwhile work.

Gary Bryson: Sabina Erica’s commitment to worthwhile work has led her to jail, where today she works with violent offenders. She runs workshops as part of the Alternatives to Violence Program, the AVP, which encourages offenders to confront their anger and to re-think violent responses. This work, she says, is a direct response to the Quaker ideal that one should demonstrate one’s faith in action.

Sabina Erica: It certainly is, I think, quite central to Quakerism, that out of your faith action is born, and there’s always been a strong recognition that both is necessary in our lives. We don’t have rules and regulations, but we have a Quaker Book of Faith and Practice, and we have a Book of Advices and Queries, and they’re born out of what Quakers have said and thought and written over the centuries. And there’s always been that advice that in order to act faithfully in our activist life, it needs to be born from that inner life of spiritual reflection.

Quakers believe very strongly I think, in having a calling, you know, that you don’t just rush out to any cause that looks good. We wait to know whether something is the right path for us to take on, and I think that’s happened more and more with me as I’ve gotten older, and is how I got involved in AVP. But it seemed like at one stage that the time was right to do something in that area.

Gary Bryson: I know this is probably quite difficult, but I wonder if you can tell me something more about how you make those decisions? What sort of spiritual process takes place?

Sabina Erica: It is difficult to express it in words. Talking about a spiritual experience is a difficult thing, and I think it’s a matter of trying to discern - for me, for me - it’s a matter of trying to discern the truth about something. Am I going to do this for glory, for praise, to make myself feel really good? What is the truth of this adventure, or this potential adventure? And I think there comes a point when you can discern, and it’s like a small inner voice prompting you to the point where you actually can’t say no any more. You can’t not do it.

Gary Bryson: Author and peace activist, Sabina Erica.

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Gary Bryson: The Quaker movement started in England in the mid-17th century, a time of great religious and political ferment. Peter Jones teaches comparative religion at the Friends’ School in Hobart.

Peter Jones: It was an interesting period. It was Britain in the middle of the 17th century, and you’d had the Protestant Reformation which developed after the 1530s and the Anglican church had replaced the Catholic church as the established church. But the difference of course was that Henry VIII wasn’t really interested in changing anything other than the headship of the church. So nothing really changed. But the mistake he made was to get the Bible translated into English, and as that was happening at the same time as the Grammar schools were starting up and the printing press had been invented, suddenly there was this sort of burst of literacy, only affecting a relative handful of the population, but enough. And once they could read the Bible, people found all sorts of stuff in it. And that of course, resulted in the development of what they used to call the Dissenters, or Nonconformists.

By the middle of the 17th century, Charles I had brought back the High Church doctrine, and so the Anglican church was split between the Low Church, the Calvinists, and the High Church, and the Puritans had come to power as a result of the Civil War in the 1640s. Now out of all of this, you’d still got a lot of people who weren’t satisfied with any of it. They didn’t like the Catholics, they didn’t like the High Church or the Low Church Anglicans, and they didn’t go along with Calvinism. And they’d been heavily influenced by some of the radical reformation ideas on the continent, particularly coming through the Netherlands and Germany, groups like the Anabaptists and so on.

So there were pockets of people around Britain who were meeting in each others’ houses and just talking, and this was the time of an incredible ferment of ideas, you got all these political ideas with the Civil War, the Divine Right of Kings had been challenged, and you got this tremendous theological debate that had been going on for over 100 years. And it was into this that George Fox walked in 1650.

Reader: But as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.
George Fox, 1650


Peter Jones: Fox grew up in a little village in Leicestershire called Fenny Drayton, and his mother was descended from a long line of martyrs, from the Reformation. His father was a churchwarden, so they were Church of England, Anglican. And he was a very serious youth, and he began questioning a lot of things when he was a teenager. And he went on a bit of a spiritual search, going around talking to people. He tells all this in his journal, and he couldn’t find the answer anywhere. And eventually he had this vision; a voice spoke to him that ‘there is even one Jesus Christ who can minister to thy condition’. And he realised that everyone had a hotline to God, truth, the light, whatever you want to call it.

Kevin Clements: I’m sure he was a very uncomfortable character in reality.

Gary Bryson: Professor Kevin Clements is a director of the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland.

Kevin Clements: He originally wanted to become a clergyman, and then had this kind of revelation really, that there was no need for him to go through professional theological school and to join an institutional church, that he could both receive a theological insight directly and speak very directly as well. He was a very uncompromising character, from what we can tell from his journals.

The first revolutionary idea was that of God in every person, so that was a very clear idea I think that he had. It was a little bit heretical at the time, I suspect, and on the basis of that, if there were that of God in everybody, then it was absolutely crucial that you treated others as though God resided within them as well. So the kind of Quaker lingo on this is that you treat each person as a holy place. And out of that he then developed, well before Albert Schweitzer, a theology that was based on a very deep reverence for life, and for the equality of all people in the face of and under God.

Peter Jones: He would go into churches and challenge the preachers. So he would walk in and argue with the preacher, and sometimes the preachers would organise with the congregation to throw him out of town and throw rubbish at him. But two things basically happened; he locked onto a number of other people who were also sharing his ideas, and they also travelled around, we call them the Valiant Sixty, and they travelled particularly around the north of England; and he met Margaret Fell.

Reader: The next day being a lecture or a fast day, Fox went to Ulverstone Steeplehouse, but came not in till people were gathered. I and my children had been a long time there before. And then he opened the Scriptures and said, ‘The Scriptures were the prophets’ words, and Christ’s words and the apostles’ words, but what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? Art thou a child of Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?’

This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down n my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit, to the Lord, ‘We are all thieves, we are all thieves; we have taken the Scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves’.
Margaret Fell, 1652


Kevin Clements: Margaret Fell was a deeply and profoundly spiritual woman who was in every way a kind of an equal of George Fox in terms of her own ability to understand the Bible and Christian theology, and its implications for ethical behaviour.

Peter Jones: She was an older woman; he was 45 when he married her, she was 55, she had a grown-up family, and it was very much a marriage of partners. Between them they organised and set up the network that became The Society of Friends.

Kevin Clements: Their beliefs gave them a certain fearlessness and in retrospect a kind of naïve fearlessness. I mean George Fox and others instituted teams of Quakers to do what Quakers say we ought to be doing, which is to ‘speak truth to those in power’. And they were very uncompromising.

Peter Jones: A lot of Quakers were sent to jail. Margaret was always going to London to try and get George and all the other Quakers out of jail. A lot of them did die in prison, and a lot of them of course emigrated to the United States. Quakers wouldn’t fight, that got them into trouble, they wouldn’t swear oaths, they said ‘Let your yes be your yes, and your no be your no’, so they got sent to jail because they wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t pay their tithes, they got sent to jail for not doing that. They were in hot water at every level.

They went to see the King and wouldn’t take their hat off, and the King was so annoyed he took his hat off, and they called him ‘Our Friend Charles’ instead of ‘Your Majesty’. So there were all kinds of goings-on. And sometimes it was a bit extreme; there were some Quakers who stripped naked and walked through the streets and did all kinds of weird things. James Naylor got carried away by a bunch of women, and they walked into Bristol with him, proclaiming him as Jesus on Palm Sunday, and he got sent to jail and had his tongue bored through for blasphemy by the Parliament, and so on. So it was a period of tremendous ferment, and Quakers brought these ideas like equality and simplicity and the peace testimony. They realised that you aren’t going to bring about a revolution through violence, and that of course is still central to Quakerism. So these were the ideas that scared the Establishment.

Gary Bryson: Peter Jones and before him, Professor Kevin Clements. George Fox died in 1691, but the movement he founded flourished, taking root in the Americas, Asia, parts of Africa, and in 1832, Australia, when the English Quakers, James Backhouse and George Washington Walker set up shop in Van Diemen’s Land.

Today, there are two distinct branches of Quakerism: the evangelical tradition with a structured service presided over by Quaker ministers; and the silent tradition, without sermons or hymns, where each member of the congregation speaks only according to the promptings of God within. It’s to this second tradition that Australian Quakers belong, a non-proselytising tradition that seeks to teach by example.

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Gary Bryson: Teaching by the example of your own life was one of George Fox’s key ideas. Early Quakers lived according to a long list of testimonies concerning peace, temperance, the injunction to dress plainly and to practice simplicity, to keep high standards of honesty and integrity, and to address others using thee and thou. Quaker values today have been simplified, but are intended to be every bit as exemplary. Sabina Erica.

Sabina Erica: These are the guiding lights for us. Living reasonably simply, not using up more of the world’s resources than we need to - hard one that sometimes. They’re all just advices, and we try to live by them. We are asked to live in moderation with respect for other people, and ourselves.

Peter Jones: In terms of values, we usually refer to the four older Testimonies, that’s the Peace testimony, the Testimony on Simplicity, on Equality and Honesty and Integrity. But today we would add the Testimony on Community, and that’s global community, and the Testimony to the Earth, which is reflecting our concern for the environment.

Kathy Rundle: I usually tell the children, or talk to the children if they ask me, about the SPICE of Quaker values: S for simplicity; P for peace; I for integrity; C for community and E for equality. And simplicity heads the SPICE, doesn’t it?

Gary Bryson: Kathy Rundle is a teacher and archivist at the Friends’ School in Hobart.

Kathy Rundle: Simplicity doesn’t mean always wearing daggy, dull clothes but it means perhaps wearing clothes that are practical and wear well, and will wash well, and will give value and service. But simplicity’s is much more in the way of looking after the world, of living simply, of walking softly on the world, of recycling, that’s how I might express simplicity. When I choose a car, I want to choose a car that will go well, will get me places safely, and won’t use too much of the world’s fuels and energy. I think they’re some of the ways that we might see simplicity expressed in the community today.

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Gary Bryson: One of the Quakers’ most enduring values is that of pacifism. This stems from George Fox’s famous Peace Testimony of 1658.

Reader: Ye are called to peace, therefore follow it; that peace is in Christ, not in Adam in the fall. All that pretend to fight for Christ are deceived; for his kingdom is not of this world, therefore his servants do not fight.
George Fox, 1658


Peter Jones: The Peace Testimony of course is the only one that’s actually written down in that form, and Quakers have been very consistent upholders of that. The Peace Testimony itself I think has been a major source of commitment to social justice, because Quakers are not only just concerned to respond to war as it presents itself, but they’re also enjoined to respond to the causes of war, the structural sources of violence, and insofar as these relate to inequality and marginalisation and rejection and so forth, Quakers had a ministry to ensure that those kinds of divisions were overcome in order to remove one of the root causes of violence. So I think the Peace Testimony and the injunction to live simply, the reverence for life, the simplicity and the notion that there’s that of God in every person and so forth, results in quite a radical religious humanism.

FRIENDS’ SCHOOL PLAYGROUND/SCHOOL BELL

Child: When we first came, I came in Year 7, and it took me a while to get used to that silence. And we have Gathering, which is we sit in silence for one period a week. And I think everyone now after coming to this school and growing, and getting used to it, actually really respects and enjoys the school’s ‘silence-ness’.

John Green: We just want people to have a sense of their own value, the value of others, to be able to go out and think critically, to have opinions that they can hold to, to have compassion, to have a sense of service, to have a global perspective. And all those sorts of things are incorporated in a curriculum in a Quaker school.

Gary Bryson: John Green is Principal of the Friends’ School in Hobart, the only Quaker school, incidentally, in the Southern Hemisphere. Quaker values are a large part of the ethos of the school, although, says John Green, the intention is not to turn out Quakers, but to show by example how a good life might be lived.

John Green: Very few of the young men and women who leave here will become Quakers, very, very few indeed. There are very few Quakers actually working in the school. But there’s a very, very strong Quaker ethos. After all, Quakers, it’s just a way of viewing the world, viewing other people, and there’s no creed. It’s questioning your attitudes, questioning the way you live and actually taking your belief, and not preaching your belief, but living your belief. So really it’s a modelling process, and I think that reflects in the way we teach, too. You don’t instil values, you model values.

Child: Like you know that it’s a Quaker school when you come and you know that the silence is all part of that, but it’s not pushed on you in any way, and no-one tells you like what to believe or what specific things they want us to think or anything like that. It’s very background to the running of the school.

Child: I wouldn’t even consider this a religious school. It’s a school with strong, strong values, and those values are instilled in a very subtle way into the students, but it’s not a religious school where you have to come here and follow the Quaker beliefs exactly, but we all do agree with those values.

Gary Bryson: What are the other values that they’re talking about here?

Child: I think one of the things the school promotes is equality between everyone, they’re big on equality, and that’s why we’ve got such a good student-teacher relationship. Most students are very friendly with most of the teachers.

Child: Another thing that the school promotes is no violence, which is also a very good sort of idea to have in life. Em, You can really tell it that we’re non-violent sort of people. Like in the junior school, instead of the tug-of-war in, like, the athletics carnival, it’s the peace pull. It’s quite good, because, they’re sort of humble.

Gary Bryson: What about silence; how do the children respond to moments of silence? Schools are quite often very noisy places.

John Green: It’s interesting, because silence is one of those things that is not highly valued in the modern world. But it’s amazing when you talk to young people that they actually quite like it, and I think it just gives them time to reflect and to start to feel that there are perhaps more important things than the selfish pursuit of self-interest. It’s perhaps the only times in their life that they get a chance to actually experience silence and reflection, and it’s surprising what comes out of their minds and their thoughts when they’ve experienced it.

Kathy Rundle: Silence is a blessing in many ways. In this very noisy world it’s really good I think for us to have silence, and it’s also very tricky and hard to come to silence. In my tutor group we begin each morning with a very brief period of quiet and it’s quite accepted by the children that this would happen. We begin all of our staff meetings and all of our business meetings with quiet, our assemblies begin and end with quiet, and it’s just a normal part of life.

Gary Bryson: Kathy Rundle, and before her, John Green. Silence of course is a vital part of the silent tradition of Quakerism. But how do Quakers understand this part of their faith, and what goes on as they listen to that of God within them? Professor Kevin Clements.

Kevin Clements: I think Quakers make a bit of a fetish of silence as a way of responding to the noise that surrounds them. In that silence unmediated by clerical ritual or whatever, you can discover both the static that’s preventing you from being at one with yourself, and hopefully penetrate through it, so that you can discover and discern that which animates you, and that which makes you alive, that which stimulates you to engage with others.

Gary Bryson: It’s not always productive though, is it? I’ve read accounts of Quaker meetings which are said to be alive in that sense, but I’ve also read accounts of meetings which are said to be not alive.

Kevin Clements: Well no, Quakers are individual human beings like everybody else, and very fallible, and sometimes Quaker meetings are appalling and divisive. And insofar as people assert their own self interest and ego over the interests of the meeting and over their willingness to listen to the eternal promptings of the spirit, then they become no different from any other human activity. But you know when you’re in a very gathered Quaker meeting. There is something that’s binding people together in a very transcendent way.

Sabina Erica: Yes, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work. People talk about a gathered meeting, where it’s like everybody has been able to put aside all their daily concerns. I mean it’s really easy to just sit there and think oh, did I remember to do this? And I must remember tomorrow to pick up my dry-cleaning and so on. So emptying your mind of those things and trying to focus on the spiritual, and listening for the voice of that of God within you - if that really happens, the whole hour can be silent and it can be very, very powerful.

Gary Bryson: Sabina Erica. Although Quaker meetings are held in silence, individuals are allowed to speak, if genuinely moved by the spirit to do so. This is not always such an easy thing to do.

Sabina Erica: You might think, oh no, I really don’t want to speak. This is why the Quakers were called Quakers, because they were said to quake before the Lord. But you can actually be almost shaking with nervousness in a meeting, thinking, no, no, I really don’t want to, and then there comes a point where you just can’t not, and you hop up and speak. And it might be three words, and it might be longer. And you can usually feel it. People have said to me, Oh, but isn’t that open to abuse? People could get up and rave on, get all their problems off their mind and so on. Well that happens from time that someone will speak, as it were, intellectually rather than spiritually. But it doesn’t matter. And if it goes on too long, usually another friend will stand up. I can remember my father standing up once and saying, ‘I think our friend has spoken long enough’. And that’s how it is.

Peter Jones in classroom: … you may freely eat of every tree of the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die…

Gary Bryson: On Encounter today on Radio National, exploring the faith and practice of Quakers in Australia.

How do Quakers today understand their theology? While the ideas of George Fox are firmly centred on the teachings of Jesus Christ, are modern Quakers moving on from traditional Christianity? How do they understand Christian beliefs like sin, the nature of Christ and the Resurrection? Or more universal religious concepts such as the after-life? I put these questions to all of our Quaker contributors.

Peter Jones: I would define myself a radical Christian, but that means that most Christians would then say well, I wasn’t a Christian. Quakers range right across from very Christo-centric friends, right through to what we call universalists. But the Quakers have always argued that we’re moving on, and I’ve never ever heard a Quaker discuss the Trinity, for example, they don’t even care. It’s irrelevant. Who was Jesus, you’ll get every answer under the sun. I would simply say we don’t know. If you said to me, was Jesus the Son of God? I’d say, well, what’s God? What I would argue is Jesus was a very special person, he was unique and it’s his teachings we’re interested in, and his relationship to the idea of the light within and what he taught that matters. Quakers live their ideas, they’re not really concerned about the theology, and in that respect, I don’t think we ever bother to talk about it.

Gary Bryson: Does Jesus Christ play a part in how you understand your religion?

Kathy Rundle: I would think that Jesus Christ plays a part, an important part. An equally important part with other people who have explained their thoughts, and explained their ways that lives on earth could be lived well.

Kevin Clements: Personally, I mean I come out of a Christocentric base, but I’ve discovered within The Society of Friends a space for really discovering something different about that base than I discovered within the Anglican or the Methodist churches, which is where I came from.

Gary Bryson: But do you regard yourself as a Christian?

Kevin Clements: I do regard myself as a Christian, although that’s not as important to me as struggling with this whole business of what it means to be a human being.

Sabina Erica: My own hesitation about saying I’m a Christian is probably because of the way in which it’s been abused. I feel very strongly that the life of Jesus provided an extraordinary example which it would be wonderful to follow. There are many aspects of his work and teaching, which I would see as very inspiring, and I would encourage people to live that way if I could. But as for whether Jesus was the Son of God and God on earth and went to heaven and all that, don’t see it as important really. But there would be other Quakers who would feel that it’s important to say that we belong to the Christian tradition, and that the Bible is an important part of that tradition.

Gary Bryson: When George Fox was working out his ideas, Jesus Christ was an extremely important part of that, and when he talked about the light within, or when he talked about seeing God in others, he meant seeing Christ. Is that still the case today for Quakers? When you talk about seeing God in others, what are we actually talking about here?

Sabina Erica: Walking cheerfully through the world, seeing that of God in everyone? For some people it would be seeing something that reflects the life of Jesus Christ in people. It’s the same for me as saying that I can see, or that I would like to see and would try to see, that in people which is the power for good, the power to live in equality with other people, which is so easy to say, and so difficult to do.

Gary Bryson: When you think about God, what sort of a God are you thinking about? What sort of image of God do you have as a Quaker?

Peter Jones: The idea of a creator, a loving creation, is something that’s so far beyond human understanding that we can’t even begin to scratch the surface. That’s what we’re seeking, and that’s why, although we’ve got the Bible on the table in the meeting house, we regard it as it’s not a revelation that’s sort of fixed in time. It’s an ongoing revelation, and that’s why we have our own book of Christian faith and practice in The Society of Friends full of our ideas, which we update constantly, because it’s an evolving idea. And so Quakersism is a way of living but it means I can walk with my Buddhist friends, my Hindu friends, my Muslim friends, my Jewish friends, and we’re walking together, and it doesn’t mean we all have to be the same. We’re on the same search, and we’re living our lives. I think the Quaker expression is ‘let your lives speak’. Rather than say, ‘this is the theology, this is truth, and we’re going to slaughter the rest of you if you don’t agree with us.’

Gary Bryson: Well when you look at traditional theological questions such as sin for example, how do Quakers understand sin. How do Quakers understand good and evil, those sorts of ideas?

Peter Jones: Quakers aren’t very good about handling good and evil and sin. Good and evil we find very difficult because we have to accept that there is evil in the world. What happened at Auschwitz, what happened in Cambodia, what’s happening now in the Sudan for example, that’s evil, and you have to oppose it. But who are we, given that none of us is perfect to say a person is evil? We would say the seeds are within all of us, and perhaps at certain times and places that power comes about. What we reject is this idea of Satan or predestination or original sin. I don’t think Quakers have got time for that.

Sabina Erica: The actual term ‘sin’ is not used, but perhaps if they see people straying from what Friends might feel is the right path, which is not laid down in words, but is a feeling, and that person might even bring it as a concern to the meeting. So it’s very carefully thought about. If it’s a little thing, the overseer might just visit them or have a chat with them or something, but people are not punished.

Kevin Clements: Quakers have a very well-developed ethical framework, and so sin is when individuals fail to see God in the other, and act as though the other was not as important as themselves, and I think that’s probably the biggest sin in Quakerism, that you elevate your own self-interest above the interests of others.

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Gary Bryson: Do Quakers believe in life after death in that way?

Sabina Erica: Not in that way, not in the way of heaven. Because they believe in that of God in everyone, they believe that that goes on, that what that within you has done in your life goes on, in that sense, yes.

Peter Jones: In the 45 years I’ve been a Quaker, I’ve never ever heard any Quakers discuss the afterlife or the resurrection. The Quaker position is usually that Jesus has already come and proclaimed the values of the kingdom. We’ve chosen to ignore them, so there’s no second coming, Jesus isn’t going to intervene in history again. As Fox said then, and I think virtually all Quakers today, silent Quakers, would say, Yes, you live now, and you live those values and you try to seek out those values of the kingdom and live them now.

Kathy Rundle: I don’t know about an afterlife, but for me I think when I have died, what will remain, the memories, the good thoughts, and the ethos and the values I might have given to my children, which live on in their children and their children, that is as close as I get to an afterlife.

SINGING

Gary Bryson: Quakerism has never been an easy spiritual option. It demands courage and commitment and strength of conviction. There are Quakers in jail today for refusing to pay taxes because they don’t wish to contribute towards military spending. In George Fox’s day, Quakers set up a meeting for suffering to consider how best to assist Friends who were being punished for their beliefs. The meeting for suffering still exists today.

And Quakers continue to punch above their weight. Worldwide, there are perhaps a hundred thousand who practice in the silent tradition, and only a thousand of those in Australia. Their presence in any number of humanitarian campaigns, from negotiating international peace deals, to collecting donations for the poor, is out of all proportion to their numbers, though their contribution is not always appreciated. Peter Jones.

Peter Jones: Quakers use the expression ‘Speak truth to power’, and that of course is very difficult today because it will get you into trouble, but that’s no different from 300 years ago. It might mean whistleblowing today, and everybody knows how difficult it is to be a whistleblower in today’s corporate climate or if you’re working for the government or any of the other public sectors. But we’ve always tried to speak out, and if you’re prepared to accept the consequences, that’s something I think that we’ve steadily maintained our witness for over the years. And today I think it’s one of the more important ones as the disappearance of morality has meant that it doesn’t particularly matter what you do as long as you don’t get caught. And therefore having standards of integrity and standards of honesty makes you quite unusual.

Kevin Clements: Quaker meetings would feel very uncomfortable just being hourly spiritual exercises each week, were they not committed to some broader agenda of transforming relationships, transforming the world, challenging arbitrary power, raising significant question marks over militarism and the use of force and coercion, not challenging injustice and repression and oppression.

Sabina Erica: I think that Quakers generally need to be quite strong if they’re going to try and follow those guiding lights and guiding principles that are there. And they’re there for every area of life, whether it is in your relationships with partners, with friends, with people who are different, or your work or in your play, your fun, celebrations. It’s always there, so really, all of life should be a meeting for worship.

MUSIC

Gary Bryson: Author and peace activist Sabina Erica, and before her we heard from Professor Kevin Clements, Director of the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland.

This program also featured Peter Jones, Kathy Rundle and John Green from the Friends’ School in Hobart. And my thanks also to students Alex Given, Year 7; Nicola Neilsen, Year 9; Gideon Cordover, Emma Haly and Jessica Pincus, Year 10; and Bridget Dunne, Year 12.

Readings today by Nick Franklin and Lara Cole. Technical production by Charlie McKune. The series producer is Florence Spurling. I’m Gary Bryson, thanks for your company.


MUSIC USED IN THIS PROGRAM

Century Classics IV: 1600-1700
DHM 05472 77603 2
Track 2: “Ave Maris Stella”, Composed by Claudio Monteverdi, Performed by Cantus Colln.
Track 9: “Kyrie”, composed by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Performed by Gradus ad Parnassum – K Junghanel

Angels – Vocal Music 12th-17th Century
Harmonia Mundi ED 13050
Track 1: “Stirps Jesse Florigeram (motet)”, preformed by Ensemble Venance Fortunat.
Track 2: “Ave Stella Matutina”, performed by Ensemble Lucidarium
Track 3: “Parasti cor meum…”, performed by Maria Cristina Kiehr & Concerto Soave.

“17th Century Recorder Music”
Globe GLO 5065
Track 1: “La Merula”, composed by Tarquinio Merula, performed by La Fontegara Amsterdam.

“Maskes & Fantazies”
Astree E8504
Track 8: “Adsonus Maske”, composed by J. Adson, performed by Le Concert Francais.

Pilgrimage: Music of Faith”
Harmonia Mundi HM OZ-4
Track 7: “Motet: Quam dilecta: V. ‘Beati qui habitant’.”, composed by Jean Philippe Rameau, performed by La Chapelle Royale.

Further information:
The Quakers Home Page (Australia)
The definitive set of links to writings, groups and activities representing the Quaker movement in Australia.
http://www.quakers.org.au/
Quaker Electronic Archive & Meeting Place
International site with links to wide range of useful historical and contemporary resources about Quakerism.
http://www.qis.net/~daruma/
BBC Guide to the Quakers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/subdivisions/quakers/index.shtml
George Fox: An Autobiography (full online copy)
http://www.strecorsoc.org/gfox/


Producer: Gary Bryson

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