Thought for the week: Frances Voelcker fires the engine
‘We have to acknowledge our privilege and redouble our effort right away.’
The Quaker machine is one with very small units of energy at the periphery, some whirring away, others with almost flat batteries. Some of that energy gets directed towards Area Meeting. Then the Area Meeting whirrs, more or less speedily depending on its size and complexity. In turn, some of that energy gets directed towards Meeting for Sufferings. And so on, into the Central Committees. At each level, some energy goes up, and when there is enough energy arriving at the centre, it can serve the whole. But currently our Quaker machine operates at slightly less than steady state.
If we want the centre to coordinate anything radical, it has to receive and accumulate enough energy from the whole to engage the gears needed to turn the whole engine. Sometimes Yearly Meeting generates a huge charge, but unless Meeting for Sufferings and the Central Committees rapidly get into that gear, and those attending Yearly Meeting return to their Area and Local Meetings and keep working as turbines to prolong the charge, it will dissipate.
If the decision to revise our own internal Book of Discipline took years, then how much greater and for how much longer is the effort needed to turn around an unjust and unsustainable economic system that has been in place in more or less its present form at least since New Testament times? This means we have to acknowledge our privilege and redouble our effort right away.
Sometimes lines of song or poetry will come to me during worship. One line that comes to me often is ‘Ewch ymaith dan eich amod’. It is the last line of a poem written by Gerallt Lloyd Owen, the chief bard of the 2005 National Eisteddfod. Although the poem is about the need to resist Wales being over-run by monoglot English speakers, the message has a wider application.
Eisteddfodd Genedlaethol 2005
Mae gwledd o groeso heddiw
Ond croeso dan amod yw:
Amod ein bod, bedwar ban,
Yn rhwystro llifio’r llwyfan.
Da chi dewch, ac wedi’ch dod
Ewch ymaith dan eich amod.
(A sumptuous welcome here today
But with a precondition:
That we in all four corners resist
The flooding of the stage.
So come, and having come,
Go from here under this condition.)
Britain Yearly Meeting
Warm welcome to the party here
But under one proviso
That all of us on every side
Act to reduce the rising tide.
So, welcome, but know, when you go
You have dynamic work to do.
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