Think Peace - Part 2

Peace - a leading of faith

The second of six articles exploring the meaning of peace.

Looking for meaning

Our huge psychology textbook at university was a great read, being crammed with insights into just about every nook and cranny of the human psyche. It could explain all sorts of intriguing experiences, from why we get dizzy to how we remember and learn. It was rather weaker, however, on the more subtle aspects of our mental and emotional life. Despite the voluminous index, the book contained no entry on 'love', for example; instead, there was a section 'bonding', the prosaic term psychologists prefer to use for love. The book explained that organisms 'bond' in order to reproduce and so perpetuate the life of their species. To illustrate, there was a picture from the 1970s of people dancing in a nightclub and another of an exotic African bird with fancy feathers. The book claimed that birds and human beings 'bond' in similar ways and for the same reasons. In order to attract a mate, the males of many bird species have evolved colourful plumage; when human beings want to get hitched, we dance flashily in nightclubs. The book clearly fell far short of describing why we love (and I can only wonder about how its authors dance).

From one story about the meaning of love, to one of many possible others:

A long time ago, in a land under military occupation, in a society riven by injustice and oppressed by fear, there was born a man whose whole life was to bend towards love. How does he live? He includes what the world has excluded; he gives to those from whom the world has taken away; he affirms those whom the world has denigrated; and he blesses those whom the world has cursed. In giving love in ways that are taboo, he turns what seems impossible into reality. In being vulnerable before those he challenges, he demonstrates love's subtle power. While loving himself and others, he tells others to do likewise and to have faith that such abundance is possible. In giving hope to the people, he shakes the foundations of those who seek their oppression. His life culminates in setting his face to the powers that be, and he shows them that not even their threat of death will turn him from love. In completing this last act of loving defiance, his life is finally paid out and he can say, 'It is finished.' Yet the meaning and power of his life resonate beyond his death, for his life continues to exemplify the extraordinary transformative potential of love. His spirit remains with the community whom he left in grief, for he had told them, 'And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.' [footnote 1]

* * *

Like the psychology textbook, this story, which is one of many possible stories about Jesus, also explores the meaning of love. How differently they convey their meaning! The textbook, associating love with a biological function, seeks to deduce its meaning. As such, it appeals to our sense of reason in order to communicate the meaning of love. By contrast, the story about Jesus seeks to evoke the meaning of love by telling us about a person who loved and how he lived. Rather than deducing meaning rationally, the story uses creativity to help us to imagine the meaning of love. The textbook and the story each approach the meaning of love in their own way and so tell us something of their own about its meaning.

Clearly, we will never comprehend the meaning of love if we rely only on rationalising it, even if there were an excellent rational explanation. Similarly, the humour of a joke cannot be communicated by explaining it; the character of a piece of music cannot be reduced to the arrangement of notes on a page; and we cannot encapsulate the meaning of death in biological terms alone. If we want to understand and respond to our experience in all its aspects, we need not only to approach it in rational ways, but also creatively.

This is not to suggest that imagination somehow trumps reason. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker are notable among modern-day scientists for famously demonstrating the explanatory power of reason with compelling explanations of much that we normally consider mysterious. Among their subjects are the evolutionary process and even the reasons why we become religious at all. [footnote 2] Their analyses challenge anyone who would use religious notions merely to compensate for scientific ignorance. However, these explanations cannot encompass the totality of our experience. They inevitably struggle even with the questions with which they deal, let alone with what those questions might actually mean. Indeed, as the late scientist Richard Feynman pointed out, the more that science and philosophy shed their light on our experience, the more aware we become of the universe's mysterious character. The once-cherished notion that science and philosophy would one day dispel all the mysteries of the universe is not being confirmed by experience. Rather, we have an 'expanding frontier of ignorance', Feynman said. [footnote 3]

The first article in this series suggested that peace, as Hebrew shalom and Arabic salaam (wholeness and integrity), is what it means to become fully alive in relation to one another. [footnote 4] It argued that a commitment to shalom/salaam is born when awareness of our human situation, in which we stand between love and deliverance on the one hand, and extinction on the other, leads us to choose life and love over fear and indifference. Reason alone will not encompass this understanding of peace (rational though peace is). Just as we need tools of the imagination to explore the meaning of love, so we will need them also to frame peace, as shalom, in a meaningful way.

'Religious' meaning

'Religion' is an awkward term. I use the word here mainly to refer to activity that enables us to experience and live in the world more authentically and more meaningfully than would otherwise be possible. Such activity might include communing, communicating, waiting, praying, worshipping, and acts of witness, for example. [footnote 5] As such, religious traditions offer creative ways of discerning meaning within (and giving meaning to) the aspects of our lives that resist being reduced to the merely rational. Science and religion need not be antagonistic to one another or even mutually exclusive. Both are empirical disciplines; both involve faith; both share an interest in exploration. As such, both offer ways of approaching the unknown authentically.

One of the weaknesses of our mostly secular culture is that established ways of responding creatively to our human situation have been gradually eroded. For example, political problems are considered as just that - political - rather than the reflection of deeper personal, cultural and spiritual issues. By tackling only the political aspects of social issues, we treat the tip of an iceberg as if it were the whole thing. A religious perspective can help us to recognise this; and a religious discipline can furnish us with the means to respond more authentically and effectively to the issues we face. As a way of being attentive to our world, religion can offer a space for our experience to be just what it is in all its fullness. As a way of understanding our world, religion can offer ways of discerning meaning within that experience, and of bringing meaning to it. As language, narrative, ritual and witness, religion can help us - both individually and in community - to sustain, share and deepen our encounter with reality, and to live accordingly.

With the gradual disappearance of religiosity in Western culture we have lost many resources for the creativity of thought and practice that are quintessential for the conception and practice of peace. I would argue that this weakness of secularism is so serious as to count among the major contributors to present day injustice and war. For example, the tendency to treat people in war and famine as expendable is one example of a failure of the imagination that has devastating results. It feeds indifference to the horrors of war and injustice and makes us more likely to perpetuate them. All compassion - 'feeling with another' - requires imagination. If we undervalue imagination, we will surely be less capable of compassion.

This is not to say that a secular peace commitment is inauthentic. However, I do suggest that it is more difficult to plant and nurture a peace commitment in a secular culture than in a religious one. Of course, this can only be true insofar as a religious culture can dispose us to be attentive to the world and support us in creative and rational ways of living in it - many religious contexts do nothing of the sort. For example, forms of extremism in all religious traditions involve a failure of imagination and reason, rather than an attempt to promote them, and so our history has often seen religion used to laud hatred and violence as noble.

Also, in the West, religion does not appear to present itself very well to secular culture. In particular, although many of us find secular perspectives on our existence inadequate and are left hungry for meaning, religious views can often seem far-fetched. In the Abrahamic traditions, for example, the notion that the world was made in a week by an old man in the sky is still a common belief about the way the universe came into being. When such beliefs are held unquestioningly, the hold they have on our imagination can obscure feeling for whatever 'God' might truly mean for us, if anything. An alternative way to approach religious meaning is to begin with our own experience, including our shared experience, and try to see whether an understanding of 'God' might emerge from that. Even though there will always be more that we do not know than do, we can still meaningfully relate to religious language and activity through the lens our experience. The experience that leads us into a commitment to peace is a good place to start.

Finding meaning in our 'shakenness'

An experience that religious people often point to is that of being touched and guided by a power of truth not of their own. The first article in this series described how encounters with the world can leave us touched - or 'shaken' - and oriented away from living within a lie and towards living within a deeper truth. [footnote 6] Ritual, prayer and witness can help us to become more attentive to our 'shakenness' and responsive to it. Stories, symbols and the arts in general can help us to evoke, share and deepen the experience. In these ways, religion might meaningfully frame an experience of shakenness and help us to explore its significance as part of a journey towards a more authentic and abundant life. Within a Christian framework, for example, being 'shaken' suggests being touched and moved by a redemptive power of love and truth that exists within and beyond us, and that in being touched, we know the meaning of grace. In this sense, we might think of peace as more than a commonsense approach to political problems; it is more than a merely reasonable response to the world. Rather, peace, as shalom, expresses a living body of faith, suffused by a fundamental conviction about what it means to be alive in the world.

Faith - meaningfully being in the world

It follows that although religion concerns questions of meaning, more important than this is translating that meaning into how we live. Just how do we live in a world, in which more is unknown than known, which is full of adversities, yet in which we encounter meaning nonetheless? Christianity is concerned with responding creatively and affirmatively to existential questions such as these, as John Macmurray reflects:

Real Christianity stands today, as it has always stood, for life against death, for spontaneity against formalism, for the spirit of adventure against the spirit of security, for faith against fear, for the living colourful multiplicity of difference against the monotony of the mechanical, whether it be the mechanization of the mind, which is dogmatism, or the mechanisation of the emotions, which is conformity. [footnote 7]

Macmurray's description of his faith runs in some ways counter to the historic emphasis within the Christian tradition on doctrine, creedal formulations and moral taboo. Yet Jesus did explain that his teaching concerns primarily how to live, rather than what to think. His saying, 'I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly,' (John 10:10), suggests that it is life's abundance, more than notions of right and wrong, that Jesus calls us to recognise and embrace.

Although religious traditions are often rightly criticised for their dogmatism - their claims of certain knowledge about this or that - we might better understand religious faith as a path of both knowing and unknowing. The father who pleads with Jesus to heal his son, yet whom Jesus challenges to have faith, replies with a cry, 'I believe; help my unbelief!' (Mark 9:24). This is a statement of faith, for it involves the courage to trust, even in the face of uncertainty. The man throws himself open to a power that he only vaguely perceives and understands, and he recognises that he takes a risk to himself in doing so. Yet still he trusts. This is the vulnerable, mysterious and yet redemptive and necessary nature of faith.

If finding meaning depends on the appetite to imagine and the discipline to reason, then faith involves the courage to trust in that meaning. As such, faith is the courage to live authentically in the world even in the face of adversity, such as some physical risk to ourselves or simply the inevitability of unknowing. Even so, faith involves discipline, for sound faith is humble yet affirmative; unknowing yet trusting; and careful yet courageous. Blind faith fails to connect imagination with reason and so shares much with folly; it is affirmative, trusting and courageous but not humble, unknowing or careful.

In the first article in this series, it was suggested that peace, as shalom, concerns the integrity of the relationships we have with ourselves and with others at every level from the interpersonal to the international. [footnote 8] So we might understand a faith-based commitment to peace as the courage to journey towards shalom and work for the same in the wider world.

I hope that these ideas help to show how religion can offer ways of understanding the world and living in it meaningfully, and how we might discover and deepen a commitment to peace as a leading of faith. The remainder of this article explores the distinctiveness of a commitment to peace as a leading of faith, focusing on the experience of early Quakers.

Beyond a notional faith

As the music psychologist John Sloboda observes, there is a difference between noticing music ('recognising that something is happening') and listening to it ('feeling that something is happening'). [footnote 9] Anyone who enjoys music can tell the difference, and knows that it is a most important difference.

One of the significant challenges that dissenting movements like the Quakers brought to the 17th Century Church was the importance of this same difference in religious life: that to recognise something as true is not enough; the religious person is involved in the truth, insofar as he or she understands it.

Dissenting Christian movements of the time complained that the faith of mainstream Christianity had become notional, rather than genuinely experienced by its followers. It was as if hardly anyone was involved in the music, although no one would deny that it was there. Isaac Penington, an early Quaker, re-asserted that we find the basis of faith in personal and shared experience and he rebuked the Church thus:

[Professors of Christianity] speak not of [Christ] as persons who feel the thing, and speak from the present sense of it, and acquaintance with it, but only as persons that bring forth a notion they have received into their understandings. [footnote 10]

Whether or not the 17th Century Church was quite as secular as early Quakers claimed, they did reclaim the truth that religion - its language, narrative, ritual and witness - becomes meaningful only when it bears upon the meaning and course of our existence.

The religious experience of early Quakers

Early Quakers certainly distinguished their worldview from a secular one, believing that they did not arrive at a commitment to peace by their own power of reason or passion alone. They believed that the presence of God within them was transforming them, so that their lives and work in the world would reflect peace and advocate it as God's will for humanity. Early Friends' experiences were therefore those of being changed and guided. Like many people of faith, their conviction was that they were guided by a power both beyond their own nature and not reducible to the natural law of the world. [footnote 11] This was their faith (that is, their trust) in the face of adversity.

Early Friends often described the guiding power as the 'inner Light' - God's power and truth present within and among them. They believed that true faith allows this inner presence to work upon us and transform us, and that the Gospel stories pointed the Christian community towards this realisation. [footnote 12]

So, early Quakers believed that through a 'present sense' of the 'inner Light', our lives come to embody it. As it begins to guide us in the world, so the Kingdom of Heaven grows on Earth. What is the 'Kingdom'? Shalom - the wholeness and integrity of the world flourishing in relation to itself and to God. [footnote 13]

The theological outlook of an early Quaker

Early Quaker William Penn's theological writing worked these ideas through. He sought to align Quakers with the broader Church by affirming the radical otherness of the nature of God. That is, he believed his community was guided by a power of truth that was unambiguously '…of God'. [footnote 14] At the same time, he stressed Quakers' experience that God was present within and among us, rather than inaccessible, as many believed. On this basis, Penn said that the principle of true religion is 'within man [sic], but not of man, but of God'. [footnote 15]

Furthermore, Penn believed that experience of the presence of God within and among us was a precondition for an authentic Christian life. We cannot simply read about God in a book or listen to a preacher and proclaim ourselves Christian, he thought; only through our experience can faith become authentic. Quakers believed that experience was the primary means and authority for determining the truth of religious ideas.

Based on their experience of the nearness of God, early Quakers therefore believed that there was an intimate relationship between God and humanity. To support this view theologically, Penn drew on John 1 in particular. Here, 'the Word' means Christ, an eternal power of truth.

In the beginning was the Word [Christ], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people… (John 1:1-4)

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9)

Penn believed that if 'all things came into being through him' then the origins and nature of human life flow from divine life. He appears to imply that the existence of the world is the will of God; that we are each and all part of God's earthly body; and that the divine life force is present within us and among us. Whilst the Fall story tells us that we have chosen to forsake our divine source, Quakers believed that we could come back into communion with it by allowing Christ, experienced inwardly as 'the light of all people', to transform and guide us. Therefore, when the presence of Christ within us points us towards shalom, we begin to incarnate God's will and so stand in a true relation to our world.

For Penn, 'the true light, which enlightens everyone' refers to the eternal and universal principle of Christ, rather than the person of Jesus. Jesus would embody this principle, yet it would abide after his death, just as it had done before his birth. Christ's presence among and within us is therefore an enduring reality, rather than one confined to the short period related in the Gospels. It is also an accessible reality, for any person at any moment and in any place can discern its presence, if sufficiently attentive and responsive to its prompting.

Therefore, Quakers believed (and still do) that any moment is potentially sacramental, in that an encounter with truth is possible that can transform the individual, the faith community, and the world.

The first article in this series suggested that a commitment to peace, as shalom, begins with a meeting with the world as it really is that shakes us awake spiritually and politically. Indeed, many early Quakers' stories describe coming to a commitment to peace at times of uncertainty and disturbance, in which they faced a crucial choice about how to live. They even earned their odd name from shaking as they encountered the presence of God. Crucially, Penn's thinking frames this experience in religious terms as sacramental. That is, the experience puts us in touch with God - the divine life force within us but not of us, through which 'all things came into being'.

Faith and practice flow from this sacramental experience of, as Penn put it, the 'life, light and grace' of God, (remembering that this is the 'God' of our personal and shared experience, rather than a notional understanding of 'God'). This suggests to me that the life of God flows into the life of the person and the community; the light of God is the proper guide of the person and community; and the grace of God transforms and redeems the person and community.

Divine instrumentality

In the first article, I suggested that a loyalty to others (alongside ourselves) leads us to become socially instrumental, as each of us plays a role in fulfilling the life of our social context. Many people of faith, including Quakers, take this a stage further by claiming that we can be instrumental in the fulfilment of God's work among people by allowing the power of God to work through us. We might call this 'divine instrumentality': being an instrument of God's will in the world. Quakers and many other Christian groups believe that an act of true social instrumentality is one of true divine instrumentality; or in other words that God's will for the world is the social good.

The notion of being divinely instrumental might seem rather grandiose! However, if we accept Penn's reading of John (that our human life and power flow from a divine source) and recognise that much in our lives already incarnates shalom, then divine instrumentality at least partly describes our everyday reality. After all, to try to do God's will is common throughout the Christian tradition and many others.

Insofar as we can be instruments of God's will, we do not simply do peace; peace is done to us and through us by God. This is important to an understanding of nonviolence as power [footnote 16], or what Gandhi called satyagraha - the force/way of truth. [footnote 17] The idea here is that the power of God (which is the power behind shalom) flows into the faith community and through their faithfulness into the world. We cannot possess this power; we can only participate in it, and only when we have the courage and imagination to let it speak through our acts.

This is not as esoteric as it might seem. Musicians, for example, often speak of music flowing through them, rather than something that they construct by their own power alone. For example, of his Vienna Concert, Keith Jarrett wrote,

I have courted the fire for a very long time, and many sparks have flown in the past, but the music on this recording speaks, finally, the language of the flame itself. ( [footnote 18]

And of Madam Butterfly, Puccini wrote,

The music of this opera was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public. [footnote 19]

Johannes Brahms and Stéphane Grappelli, among others, have described the experience of musical creativity in similar ways. [footnote 20] In order to be truly creative, a musician must be attentive and receptive to their relationship with the universe. The creative process involves partially 'emptying' oneself so that a creative power can flow through us and be made manifest as music.

Similarly, Gandhi, Penn and others talk about the power of nonviolence being 'within us, but not of us'. It is expressed through our deeds and lives when we make room for it - partly giving ourselves up to it, as it were. It is in this way that divine instrumentality, in which we become instruments of a power that lies within and beyond us, becomes possible.

I feel I should add a caveat to this. Many believe that the ultimate expression of faith is to give oneself up completely to it. However, I would like to suggest that our own resistance to 'giving ourselves up' is actually also an important part of how we relate to God, for it suggests a mutuality between God and ourselves that lies at the heart of an authentic relationship. How can we be present to God if we are merely instruments of God's power? I wonder whether, when Jesus asks, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?' (Mark 15:34) he is speaking out of this mutuality himself. Although Puccini said that his music was dictated to him by God, only he could have written the music in the way that he did. Similarly, our distinctive personalities and communities are important in the way we let God into our lives and express our faith in the world in such a rich variety of ways.

The Lamb's War

Gandhi's experience of nonviolence as power finds a much earlier expression in the Quaker idea of the Lamb's War, which illustrates how Quakers conceived of their commitment to peace in terms of divine instrumentality.

Early Quakers conceived of war in broader terms than violent conflict. They saw that a continuous spiritual 'war' between love and fear was taking place in each of us, as well as in our social world in general, and that politics reflected this conflict of values. They believed that waging this 'war' on the side of love was an imperative of faith, yet also observed that there was more than one way to do so: in the way of the lion, which Jesus rejected, or in the way of the lamb, which he demonstrated with his whole life. The way of the lion is the soldier's way, involving a readiness to lay down one's life for a cause beyond oneself, as well as a readiness to kill for that cause. The way of the lamb requires the same readiness for personal sacrifice, but rejects killing as inconsistent with God's will. Instead, the Lamb's War involves a creative, nonviolent struggle for justice in a condition of vulnerability before others, where the power of influence is 'within us, but not of us'. As such, early Quakers did not reject the idea of war as struggle and conflict, but did reject violence as a means of waging it. [footnote 21] The testimony of William Dewsbury, an early Quaker, describes a sacramental turning point from the way of violence to the way of nonviolence in the midst of war:

And the word of the Lord came unto me and said, 'Put up thy sword into thy scabbard; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my children fight,' which word enlightened my heart and discovered [ie revealed] the mystery of iniquity, and that the Kingdom of Christ was within, and the enemies was within, and was spiritual, and my weapons against them must be spiritual, the power of God. Then I could no longer fight with a carnal weapon against a carnal man …and my will was brought in subjection for the Lord to do with me what his will was. [footnote 22]

Testifying to the covenant of peace

In the process of being transformed by the power and truth of God, we enter a deeper, mutual relationship with both God and the world. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this relationship is often called a 'covenant', which signifies the bond or partnership between humanity and God that is at the heart of religious faith and practice. [footnote 23] It makes a claim upon our lives, such that within the meaning of an authentic life of faith, we are not only loyal to ourselves and to the wider body of life to which we belong, but also to our covenant with God, whatever we conceive God to be.

When we express this loyalty through the way we live and relate to the world, we testify to our covenant (relationship) with God. Quakers' founder George Fox explained that his commitment to peace arose out of the covenant with God, saying that the reason he would not bear arms was because he 'was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were'. The covenant comes first and the life committed to peace arises out of it; without the covenant, there is no testimony in the sense that Quakers use the word. In being rooted in a covenant with God as Quakers experience it, the Quaker peace and social testimonies are the discernment of God's will for the Quaker community and provide a vision of authentic society: one of peace and nonviolence; equality and community; truth and integrity, and simplicity and mindfulness.

Fox pioneered the view, which Penn and others would later reflect, that Christ, as an eternal and active principle present to each of us, calls us into a renewal of the covenant with God, which is in peace. He urged his fellow Quakers: 'Live in the peace [wholeness and integrity] of God, and not in the lusts from whence wars arise.' [footnote 24] By lust, Fox means attachment to what does not really matter or does not belong in a truly abundant life. Such attachment leads us into betraying God, ourselves and one another. He thought that violence takes place when we reject the covenant with God, and so is not only problematic in secular moral terms but blasphemous also. Within this view, violence is a form of idolatry because it involves placing faith in something that does not offer the real potential of redemption. The fourth article in this series picks up this theme.

A covenant of peace without God?

In these and many other ways, a religious framework of meaning can deepen and broaden the meaning of peace, as shalom. Yet many are repelled by religious language today, believing that it primarily concerns matters of metaphysical belief rather than meaning that might illuminate our human situation. And whilst many are open to the possibility that a power 'within us, but not of us' moves us towards a commitment to peace, to begin labelling this principle 'God' or 'Christ' might appear to do more than we can know is right.

Although early Quakers were themselves convinced that the principle of Christ was operating upon them and through them, they nonetheless insisted that we should interrogate our own experience to judge the truth of this claim. At every turn, they emphasised the primacy of experience - both individual and shared - as the prime arbiter of religious truth.

David Gee, Quaker Peace & Social Witness

Questions for reflection and discussion

Can religious traditions help us to turn towards peace, as shalom/salaam, or do they mainly divide us, creating the conditions for oppression and war?
Are early Quaker experiences of 'Christ within' and the 'covenant of peace' meaningful to you or alien? Is there anything in their message for our modern, secular society?
What can you most strongly agree with in the article and what do you disagree with?

What do you think peace means?

The purpose of this article is to help feed a conversation about the meaning of peace. Please tell us what you think about this article or send your own views about what peace means.

Write to Disarm, Quaker Peace & Social Witness, Friends House, 173-177 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ
Email disarm@quaker.org.uk
Fax 020 7663 1049

Notes

1. John (19:30); Matthew (28:20) [Go back to text]

2. Dawkins, Richard: 'The Blind Watchmaker' (London: Penguin, 1991 - first published by Longman, 1986); Pinker, Stephen: 'The Blank Slate' (London: Penguin, 2002) [Go back to text]

3. Feynman, Richard et al: 'The Feynman Lecture Notes on Physics' (Addison-Wesley, 1965), cited for example at Fonorow, Owen: 'The Myth of Medical Science', published on the web at

4. Shalom and salaam share the same Semitic root. The context for these articles is the Judaeo-Christian tradition and for the sake of brevity, the Hebrew version of the term is used. However, the meaning of peace as wholeness and well-being is also significant within other traditions, including Islam, and this commonality provides rich potential for conversation between the faiths that share this understanding. [Go back to text]

5. This reflects a typically protestant worldview - religious traditions such as Buddhism might well emphasise other activities as more meaningful than, say, worship or prayer. [Go back to text]

6. After Shanks, Andrew: 'God and Modernity: A new and better way to do theology' (London: Routledge, 2000) [Go back to text]

7. MacMurray, John: 'Freedom in the Modern World' (London: Faber, 1933), p.66, cited in Fergusson, David A S: 'John MacMurrary in a Nutshell' (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1992), p.25 [Go back to text]

8. Integrity in relationships does not always mean harmony and does not always exclude separation and solitude. The togetherness and harmony often associated with healthy relationships can be inauthentic ways of relating if they are essentially dishonest. [Go back to text]

9. Interview in Else, Liz: 'The Power of Music - Show Me Emotion' in New Scientist magazine, 29 November 2003, pp. 40-42 [Go back to text]

10. Penington, Isaac: 'A Question to the Professors of Christianity' (England, 1667), published at

11. Penn, William: 'Primitive Christianity Revived…' (Cincinatti: B C Stanton, 1829 - facsimile, originally published 1696) [Go back to text]

12. Penn offers the following: John 1:9 and 14:6, Romans 1:19, Titus 3:4 and 2:11-12, Acts 8:28, 2 Peter 4, Romans 8:6 and 10:6-8, 1 John 3:9 and 10:12, 1 Peter 1:23, Matthew 8:19, 8:23 and 8:33, Proverbs 1:20-23 and 8:1-4, Deuteronomy 30:12, Psalms 119:10 and 51:6, Isaiah 26:2, Corinthians 7:7. ibid. [Go back to text]

13. Peace is used as a term of salvation in the Bible, and is therefore a fitting characterisation of the Kingdom of Heaven. [Go back to text]

14. Penn, William: 'Primitive Christianity Revived…' (Cincinatti: B C Stanton, 1829 - facsimile, originally published 1696) [Go back to text]

15. ibid. [Go back to text]

16. The spelling 'nonviolence' without the hyphen is used here to refer to the power of change that arises from living within the truth of shalom. As such, it is a positive value and is to be distinguished from 'non-violence' with the hyphen, which is used here to refer simply to the absence of violence.[Go back to text]

17. 'Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement "Satyagraha", that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase "passive resistance"...' Gandhi, M K: 'Satyagraha in South Africa' (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1928 - trans. Valji Govindji Desai, republished on the web by Yann Forget, 2003, at

18. Jarrett, Keith: 'Vienna Concert' (music CD) [emphasis added] [Go back to text]

19. Cited in Cameron, Julia: 'The Artist's Way' (London: Pan, 1995), p.2 [Go back to text]

20. ibid., pp. 2-3. Brahms: 'Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God.' Chilton Pearce: 'We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself.' Grappelli: 'Great improvisers are like priests. They are thinking only of their god.' [Go back to text]

21. The earliest Quakers were not all non-violent; however, by 1660 the movement's leaders had rejected violence as a means to any end and this position has remained the corporate Quaker position ever since. [Go back to text]

22. Cited in Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, 'Quaker Faith & Practice' (London: Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995), 19.45 (emphasis added). [Go back to text]

23. For a brief discussion of the meaning of 'covenant' as 'bond', see 'Heinrich Bullinger, the First Covenant Theologian' (no author given), published on the Covenant Protestant Reformed Fellowship web site at http://www.cprf.co.uk/articles/covenant6.htm - accessed 10 September 2004. [Go back to text]

24. Fox, George: 'Ye Are Called to Peace' (Epistle, 1958), published at the Quaker Electronic Archive and Meeting Place,

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