What can love do today?

The Arc of Friends and Science

Two poles: 1. I can’t stand this anymore; I’m hunkered down and please don’t talk about what is going on. And 2: This is the time for us, the issues of the day reach to the roots of the emergence of Light that illumines today – time for courage.

The reality of these poles is apparent to me as I do work around and with Quakers not only in the West but elsewhere.  And there is a deep significance to these poles of which we are the better for knowing.  I’ll be as brief as a wordy-writer can try to be.

Pole 1:  In the 1970s, Martin Seligman hit the world stage with research on Learned Helplessness. He demonstrated how people encountering crisis service centers that did not respond to their appeals, their actions, their cries – how these seekers turned away and fell down the ladder of functionality.  He encouraged people to recognize that the ways in which government agencies and non-profits responded to people in crisis and need, while never intending to do harm, did so.  People became helpless and dependent, and their lives degraded.  And many blamed them, the victims.  This brought about a revolution in how agencies respond to humanitarian needs on the streets and offices near them.  You can read of one community-award winning example in this book by Jill Shook: Making Housing Happen – faith-based affordable housing models (Cascade Books, Eugene, OR, 2012).

Learned helplessness is alive and well today and is being catalyzed by many people in public leadership right now.  Learned helplessness is visible in the history of Germany in the 1930s. 

Dictators know well how to bring about learned helplessness, and we must not let them.  We must not allow ourselves, our meetings, our communities, our families, don the mantle of helplessness.  Putting on that defense is a ticket to demise.  Buying that ticket, having it in our pocket, our minds or hearts is not our way.

Pole 2: Exploration of our Quaker history puts bullying into helplessness before us again, this time in tyrannical England in the mid-seventeenth century.  The antidote?  The courage to seek, share, and follow the Light.  Any reading of the valiant sixty, of the Journal of George Fox, simply cannot miss the realization that Fox and his followers were courageous.  They were not sitting around in their houses debating the issues to oblivion or avoiding the hard work that was needed on behalf of their neighbors and fellows – many in jail, battered, bruised, made homeless, sick, and even dying.

This is a season for courage.  Not necessarily the courage to be the first to run into a burning house, for few of us are in situations to do so.  No, each of us is called, following the example of Fox, to seek the Light and to act in accordance with our leadings and calls.  Our practice is not about seeking shelter for ourselves and comfort (although we all need such at times and do well to accept it); calls and leadings are typically about love of neighbor – even when they are trying to make us helpless.  Perhaps there is no greater work, nor more important task today – than to love our neighbor even when their positions and actions scare us, overwhelm us, revolt us, and more.  Perhaps there is no more important task than to find ways to support the good of our heritage.  For when the good of our heritage has flourished, bad and devastated have turned around to healthy and flourishing. Such efforts by American and British Quakers earned a Nobel Peace prize.

Friends- take heart.  Seek the Light daily, and do not be shy unless you just have to be.  Each of us is as a spoke in a wheel, and it won’t turn ‘round to goodness without each different and unique spoke holding up its part.  

Seek small groups that nurture our courage and help us to hear the Light, to see it, and to follow it.  There are many ways to do so.  First, we need to know where we are, and we must know that change is possible.  And it is.  Then, we can explore what is ours to do and how.

To see the science part of pole 2, the same Martin Seligman has led and influenced science around the world on character and virtue, of which love, courage and wisdom are parts.

There are many tools, Friends. What might you do?