Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 23rd July 2023

Dear Friends,

I began thinking about this letter at about the time that a media frenzy was sparked by the Sun making allegations about the behaviour of an initially unnamed TV presenter. As the speculations swirled and outrage was stoked around who, what, why, and the like, I found a fragment of advice from the Sermon on the Mount springing to my mind, namely, “Judge not …”. This fragment often comes to me when people are laying into each other in apparent moral outrage. As an aside, I also often wish this advice continued “and don’t jump to hasty conclusions”.
 
The quote – in Matthew’s version, this time in a more modern translation – reads more fully “Don’t pass judgement, so you won’t be judged. Don’t forget the judgement you hand out will be the judgement you get back”. The counsel to avoid judging others is common to Jewish and Christian traditions, so Jesus may be simply quoting folk wisdom here.  The phrases stating that the judgement that you get back will be the same as that you give out might be folk wisdom too – if you are not harsh in judging others, they will respond by being tolerant of you.
 
Quakers have not had much to say about judging and judgement, or at least modern ones have not. Earlier Quakers often appear to gleefully assume that the misfortune of their opponents was engineered by God. If you look up judgement in Quaker Faith and Practice, there is a single reference pointing us to advice number 22, where we find “Respect the wide diversity among us in our lives and relationships. Refrain from making prejudiced judgements about the life journeys of others…”. This is clearly in a section about preserving the unity of the meeting. Paul has similar advice to his correspondents in Romans 14 in a surprisingly liberal passage.
 
Many religions have the notion that at the end of our lives we are judged by a higher spiritual authority or God, or that we are simply subjected to the laws of karma, which amounts to the same thing.  Such an idea of judgement would raise Jesus’s saying from simple advice about how to get on with others to something of more eternal significance – judgement by “God”.
 
The silence of modern Quakers on this version of judgement perhaps stems from two factors, one that we have – surely rightly – concentrated on the supremacy of all-embracing love (compassion trumps condemnation), the second stemming from the influence of modern science, whose success in explaining much of the physical universe leads many to conclude that there is nothing else. Stressing the supremacy of love, however, does not actually free us from difficult choices about judgements; we feel drawn to bringing in a better world, and part of that is likely to lead us to be critical of those whom we perceive as damaging it, physically and socially on whatever scale. We naturally seek to bring pressure for change. Simply saying “tut, tut” feels ineffective. Can we really be expected not to do even that?
 
Modern science has surprisingly or inadvertently led to many having a different take on the idea of judgement. As more people are now revived from apparent clinical death, many (but far from all) report vivid experiences of a continuing existence, often greatly at odds with their prior beliefs. Subsequently they choose or find themselves compelled to come back to this life, which now feels dream-like in comparison. These reports are often bottled up because to speak of them is to risk ridicule. The contents vary widely, but a few include a detailed review of incidents in the person’s life which they watch in the company of a loving presence. There is no judgement except from the experiencer him/herself. The twist is that the events are experienced not just from their own point of view, but from that of all affected. I am convinced that these reports merit consideration. Even if they are a kind of hallucination, they offer possible clues about how our brains operate and about our deeper motivations. The experiences are usually life-changing in a variety of ways. They do not put the fear of God into people in the way it would have been understood in previous centuries, but they do often lead to a change in perspective, to a less condemnatory approach to others, and to a less materialistic view of life’s goals. They offer no answers, but they provide a few hints and plenty to chew on.

Bob Harwood

On behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms and Nancy Wall)