The first part of that is a common enough saying
among a lot of Christian groups, nonconformists more than others. The
second is my own summary of what a lot of people seem to mean when
they say it, or anything like it, in certain situations. And funnily
enough, I cannot help but agree with it. It’s not simple, though.
Consider…
Our ways are not the World’s ways, but that
doesn’t mean there’s nothing for us to learn “out there”. We
should have care to keep to our traditions and not let our inevitable
interactions with the wider world contaminate the way we do things,
as Quakers, that we not not drag worldly patterns in that disrupt
Quaker patterns. Yet we have obligations to the wider world where we
interact with it, and legal obligations that apply to us as much as
others, and we cannot put our hands up and say “our ways are not
the World’s ways” and expect it to mean we are let off. Health
and safety, safeguarding, employers’ obligations, equality law –
we have to live with these things, and really, they exist for good
reasons and we shouldn’t push back against them. Where there’s a
reason that a more Quakerly way of doing them will work better, more
fittingly for us, then we should figure out what that Quaker way is.
We cannot just say “well, we’ll do it our Quaker way” and then
not do it at all.
Our ways are not the World’s ways, but our ways
are not fixed and unchanging. I would bet that any Yearly Meeting
that has existed for more than 20 years has had significant changes
in its practices and structures over its life – and those that have
existed anywhere near as long as Britain Yearly Meeting (formerly
London Yearly Meeting) will be unrecognisable in detail, if not in
principle. In large things and small things we have changed with
conditions, with changes within and without our Religious Society.
Our ways are not the World’s ways, but many of
us know that activities in the World can sometimes benefit from
lessons we learn from Quaker ways. Do we really have such collective
hubris that we think nothing can ever apply similarly in the other
direction?
Our ways are not the World’s ways, but they are
not perfect. They are even further from perfect when we think we have
the final answer in how to do things – especially when we actually
don’t know how to approach a situation at all. “We should do this
in a Quaker way”, I have heard, but not always when anyone has the
faintest idea what a Quaker way of doing it would look like.
Our ways are not the World’s ways, but we can be
creative. We can learn, we can adapt and adopt. When confronted with
new situations we can’t just fit the things we already do into them
by jamming and squeezing and pushing. Best that we work out properly,
with both reason and love, and with any luck the guidance of the
Spirit, the new Quaker method to apply to the new problem. And best
that we do that before we need to put them into practice, wherever
possible.
Our ways are not the World’s ways, but we don’t
always know what they are.
Written June 2019
