Article submitted to Bristol Post for their “Tuesday Thought” column.
Quakers have “Advices” instead of a Creed. The first Advice includes the phrase, “… God, whose Light shows us our darkness and leads us to a new life.” I soon realized that “leads us to a new life” is standard evangelical Christianity (a thought with which many modern Quakers have difficulty). But what is that “darkness” which we are shown? Presumably it refers to things that we do, or are in the habit of doing, which we do not yet realize are harmful. Some of these personal failures have been listed in the Ten Commandments, and the Seven Deadly Sins (pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth).
But recently I realised that “our darkness” does not refer only to individuals, but to society as a whole. Our whole culture once had practices and attitudes which were universally accepted, but which with hindsight we now regard as abhorrant. Some examples would be bear-baiting, witch-hunting and burning, capital and corporal punishment, slavery, sexual exploitation and racism. In Nazi Germany: the Holocaust. In South African: Apartheid.
Nowadays there are practices which we are in the process of rejecting: hunting, prostitution and sexism, people trafficing, and unfair world trade, to name but a few. But what aspects of our darkness have we not yet been shown? Which activities and attitudes do we now regard as perfectly OK but will be regarded with horror in time to come? People will ask, “Were they really still doing that in the 21st Century?” Just as proposals to abolish the slave trade were met with outrage, especially here in Bristol, so too will shining a light on these practices be challenging.
In the future people may look back in horror on our admiration of militarism and willingness to spend vast sums on war-mongering. Similarly, As is the case with slavery, Bristol may be asked to apologise for profiting from the ‘defence’ industry. “You mean really intelligent people, scientists, psychologists, many of them church-goers, actually spent their working lives devising ever worse ways of killing and maiming people? Even though they knew most of their victims were civilians? Surely not nice Bristol people! Ugh! It’s disgusting!”
We are also slowly accepting our ‘darkness’ in our destruction of our planet – stealing from our grand-children, befouling our own nest, We say we have abolished torture, but our government is accused of conniving with it. People are trying to stamp out small-scale bribery and corruption, but we remain apathetic about multi-national corporations wresting power from our hard-won, fragile democracies, by influencing our elected politicians to act in their behalf rather than ours. What are we doing about the grotesque increase of inequality? These are some of the darknesses of which I am becoming aware. What others are there which we have not yet been shown? And who will help the Light shine on them?
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