Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 29th September 2024

Dear Friends

Faith, Hope and Charity

Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians (13:13) that faith, hope and charity will abide. Charity, aka love, is mentioned a good deal amongst Friends, as is faith, which even features on the front of our big red book, but there’s no mention of hope in the index, though the word itself is mumbled multiple times at every business
meeting.

How to nurture hope, the energy that inspires us to keep going at a time of war, dislocation, famine, poverty and climate emergency? Without hope how are we to heed William Penn’s call in 1682 to mend the world?

Quaker activists are supported by their communities and rescued from hopelessness by the example of early Friends, whose letters were full of encouragement, eg George Fox’s letter from Launceton Jail in October 1656: Be patterns, be examples… and you will come to walk cheerfully (ie courageously) over the world.

Margaret Fell, who later married George Fox, wrote about making faith a living action by integrating Quaker practice, belief and faith into everyday life. She called this ‘witnessing a living hope’. Some of us have found this image helpful as we continue, with very little perceptible effect, to call for peace.

‘Hope has made a comeback,’ said Michelle Obama recently. Is she right? Hope so.

Qf&p 21.17: True Godliness don’t turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavours to mend it: not to hide their candle under a bushel but set it upon a table in a candlestick. William Penn 1682

Patricia Cockrell

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