Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 20th August 2023

Dear Friends,

“Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.”
 
These much-loved and very familiar words from Quaker Faith and Practice provide us with an ideal for Quaker communities.  We all know that the reality often falls short.  As Samuel Beckett once put it:  “Try again.  Fail again. Fail better.”
 
In thinking about community, I’ve been helped by M. Scott Peck’s book “A Different Drum”.  Peck suggests that groups typically go through four stages when living and working together.  The first stage he calls pseudo-community.  Everyone is nice to everyone else, and on the surface everything is harmonious, but it’s all superficial and unreal, because real differences and difficulties are not being addressed.  There comes a point where the latent conflicts surface, and the group moves into the second stage:  chaos.  This is very painful, and at this point the group faces a choice.  It can retreat to pseudo-community, which feels safe and familiar:  or it can move forward into the third stage, which Peck calls emptiness.  This is the point where different individuals question their own entrenched positions, and ask themselves what they would be willing to let go of.  If this stage is successfully completed, the group can finally move forward into a genuine community, in which either differences are resolved, or the group has found a constructive and honest way to live with them.
 
In Quaker Faith and Practice 29.17, there is a minute from a 1985 meeting of 300 Young Friends from all round the world.  It is a powerful example of the sort of process Peck describes.
 
“We have come together from every continent, separated by language, race, culture, ways we worship God, and beliefs about Christ and God… We have been challenged, shaken up, at times even enraged, intimidated, and offended by these differences in each other. We have grown from this struggle and have felt the Holy Spirit in programmed worship, singing, Bible study, open times of worship and sharing, and silent waiting upon God.
Our differences are our richness, but also our problem. One of our key differences is the different names we give our Inward Teacher. Some of us name that Teacher Lord; others of us use the names Spirit, Inner Light, Inward Christ or Jesus Christ. It is important to acknowledge that these names involve more than language; they involve basic differences in our understanding of who God is, and how God enters our lives. We urge Friends to wrestle, as many of us have here, with the conviction and experience of many Friends throughout our history that this Inward Teacher is in fact Christ himself. We have been struck this week, however, with the experience of being forced to recognise this same God at work in others who call that Voice by different names, or who understand differently who that Voice is.
We have often wondered whether there is anything Quakers today can say as one. After much struggle we have discovered that we can proclaim this: there is a living God at the centre of all, who is available to each of us as a Present Teacher at the very heart of our lives.”  

Tim Pitt-Payne

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