Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 17th August 2025

Dear Friends,

Recently I went to an unusual concert in Exeter Cathedral. The concert’s focus was on our planet and its future, on the natural world and our relationship with it. At its heart lay Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, excerpts from which were interwoven with additional choral, orchestral and spoken pieces on climate and environmental issues. One of the most moving and memorable sections was the reading of a passage from Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ (1994) in which we are reminded that this planet, the pale blue dot, is ‘the only home we’ve ever known’ and that we need therefore to cherish it. In his Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock proposes that the Earth is a self-regulating mechanism, implying that it has no need of our stewardship in order for it to survive (I believe that he has actually said as much). I am not so sure myself: it seems to me that at the very least we have a duty to future generations to look after this homeland of ours. The participation in the concert of the Devon Youth Chamber Orchestra, together with a hundred or so primary school children, who spiritedly opened the whole concert with their own rendering of the ‘chaos’ at the beginning of the oratorio, helped to drive this point home.

The produce of the earth is a gift from our gracious creator to the inhabitants, and to impoverish the earth now to support outward greatness appears to be an injury to the succeeding age.

John Woolman, 1772, Quaker Faith & Practice 25.01

Roger Cockrell

Quakers value diversity. We share this Friend’s message in the hope it will speak to others.

Pastoral Care and Eldership Team: Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Theresa Samms, Emily Slater.