Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 22nd September 2024

Dear Friends,

Recently in Meeting someone read Advices and Queries 22 – ‘Respect the wide diversity among us in our lives and relationships. Refrain from making prejudiced judgments about the life journeys of others. Do you foster the spirit of mutual understanding and forgiveness which our discipleship asks of us? Remember that each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God.’

We were led to reflect on the prejudices which so often lurk unnoticed in our inner depths – unnoticed because noticing them is uncomfortable and challenging.

And I remembered something which came to me the previous time I was in Meeting, when there was ministry expressing concern about what we can do to change society for the better, in a time of anxiety and disturbance.

Maybe I should have spoken up on one of these occasions, but I didn’t so I’m taking this opportunity to share a story and a brief reflection on what it may mean.

In one iteration of my lifelong meandering journey of faith, from fundamentalist literalist evangelical to (fairly) open-minded questioner, I was PA to a Baptist minister. One of my tasks was to choose a small quotation to put on the front of the weekly notice sheet.

One week, I chose a quote from the late, beloved, Rabbi Lionel Blue which said something close to the following: ‘There’s a little bit of Hitler in me. Is there a little bit of Hitler in you too?’. Sadly someone took offence on the grounds that the quote was from a non-Christian source, although my suspicion is that it was its nature rather than its origin that had really upset them. Although the minister was perfectly happy with it, he asked me to be more careful in future – it was he who got the flak!.

While this is an amusing anecdote, I think the quote bears serious reflection. It is really about our shadow side, the darkness, thoughts and attitudes we would prefer others not to know, the things we wish we could just shut out of our consciousness. And what comes to me now from it is that perhaps progress in being truly the people described in Advices and Queries 22, people who are able to create the changes we long for, depends, at least in part, on how willing we are to face, acknowledge and accept our shadow, to know ourselves as people capable of great evil given the right circumstances, as well as great good. Just like the people about whom we carry prejudices!

How willing are we to follow the inner light when it chooses to shine in the dark places? Are we prepared to ‘descend into the cellar’ and allow the light to show us whatever lurks there?

I wasn’t sure about sending this, but this morning I came across this poem https:// tomhirons.com/poetry/sometimes-a-wild-god and once I’d read the serendipitous second I made my decision.

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