Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 13th April 2025

Dear Friends,

Human beings are part of the natural world, though we behave as if we aren’t.

We tend to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, rather than just another link in the chain. Humans evolved from organisms that crawled out of the sea about a billion years ago. A billion years from now, the sun will grow too hot for life on earth. So, it’s quite possible that we’re only halfway through our evolutionary journey, and nowhere near the pinnacle of anything.

We tend to think of ourselves as singular, rather than composed of multitudes. There are 39 trillion microbes living inside us: bacteria, viruses and fungi, without which we would not be what we are. Am I separate from these organisms or am I made of them? Am ‘I’ really ‘we’?

Christianity struggles with the ecological dimension of our existence. ‘God created man in his own image,’ according to Genesis 1:27; ‘in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’

This story might please the human ego, but it can give rise to an exceptionalist mindset, in which we grant ourselves the right to make or break the natural world.

Isaac Penington turns this on its head when he describes ‘the sweet, tender, melting nature of God, flowing up through his seed of life into the creature, and of all things making the creature most like unto himself, both in nature and operation’ (QF&P 26:30).

In this account, we are like God not because we are separate from the natural world, but because we are made of the same stuff as the natural world. Our role is not to control nature, but to allow the energy of nature to flow through us and through the ecosystems – human, fungal, or whatever – to which we belong.

Jonathan Heawood

Quakers value diversity. We share this Friend’s message in the hope that it will speak to others.
PaCET: Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms