The Quaker Way?

The traditional view of a supernatural God "out there", beyond and above us, has never truly felt meaningful to me.  Nonetheless, despite reading and largely agreeing with much rational, atheist writing (e.g. that of Richard Dawkins), I am still left with a sense of the holiness, depth, mystery and "connectedness" of all things in the universe, especially of all living things. A purely biological explanation of how we came to be may be correct, but somehow misses something to do with our connectedness, our sense of the "spiritual" depth in our lives, of the fundamental mystery of life, consciousness, and total, unconditional love that appears key to our very existence. Life is not shallow.

The Quakers seem to have the right ideas. Let me quote from the Quaker faith in action webpage:

"Quaker faith springs from a deeply held belief in living our lives according to our spiritual experience. Some of our spiritual insights, which we call our testimonies, spring from deep experience and have been a part of Quaker faith for many years. These Quaker testimonies arise out of an inner conviction and challenge our normal ways of living:

• they exist in spiritually led actions rather than rigid written forms
• they are governed by continuing spiritual experience and are not imposed in any way
• they require us to search for ways in which we can live out the testimonies for ourselves

It’s not easy, but with loving advice and a supportive community, Quakers are encouraged to keep trying.

Truth and integrity
Quakers try to live according to the deepest truth we know, which we believe comes from God. This means speaking the truth to all, including people in positions of power. Integrity is the guiding principle we set for ourselves and expect in public life.

Justice, equality and community
Quakers recognise the equal worth and unique nature of every person. This means working to change the systems that cause injustice and hinder true community. It also means working with people who are suffering from injustice, such as prisoners and asylum seekers.

Simplicity
Quakers are concerned about the excesses and unfairness of our consumer society, and the unsustainable use of natural resources. We try to live simply and to give space for the things that really matter: the people around us, the natural world, our experience of God.

Peace
Perhaps Quakers are best known for our peace testimony. This arises from our conviction that love is at the heart of existence and all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, and that we must live in a way that reflects this. The peace testimony has led Quakers to refuse military service, and to become involved in a wide range of peace activities, from practical work in areas affected by violent conflict to the development of alternatives to violence at all levels from personal to international. Read more about Quakers and peace."

Quakers are well known for their peace and reconciliation work across the world. They were central in bridge-building in N.Ireland. They have always maintained that war is ultimately futile and that there are better ways to solve international problems and disputes.  They have always had a very ethical way of doing business.

Fundamentally, Quakers look for "that of God in everyone". This sounds quaint, but it has deep meaning: in every human we see something of the depth and mystery that is at the core of all life. We are part of a complex interconnected web of life: in the face of every living thing we glimpse the ultimate meaning of life, the ground of all our being. We see what some would call God.

Steam trains, love and forgiveness

This weekend was rather special: we spent 3 days with one of our sons, his wife and our younger grandson in Kent. On Friday our other son and his wife and our other 2 grandchildren joined us for a family meal. It was a very happy time. Yesterday we took both grandsons (aged 2 and 4) on a Santa Special steam train and, of course, they loved it, especially the Christmas gifts they got from Santa.

This time of year can be very hard for many people: expectations seem to heightened at Christmas and for those who are lonely and unloved it can be a very cruel time. So, this Christmas let's spare a thought for our friends who don't have a family, or whose family is broken, those who have lost someone recently or who are suffering from mental or physical illness. I have a loving wife, a wonderful family with 3 grandchildren who are precious. Although my faith in God, if she/he exists, is weak, I do feel that I've been blessed and held by a love greater than I can explain or comprehend. Perhaps it is wishful thinking. Who knows. What I do know is that love and forgiveness are the greatest of gifts, especially at Christmas. 

Katla Volcano

The 1918 Katla Eruption

In the last 4 weeks there have been 500 small tremors under and around Katla, a volcano in Iceland. Last summer (just 24 hours after we drove across it!) an earlier flood caused by a small Katla eruption washed away the main bridge across the ring road in the south of Iceland near Vik. Katla erupts every 40-80 years and another is due. The consequences can be dramatic with 20% of the Icelandic population wiped out in an earlier one a few centuries back. It's dust cloud can affect weather on a worldwide scale reducing the temperature across the planet for several years. We could be in for a very cold spell for a few years if Katla decides to erupt big time.

Dumbing down of skills

In my professional life I interviewed many graduates aspiring to become radio frequency (RF) engineers. Very few, in recent years, had what I would call "the knowledge". By this I mean a "gut instinct" for RF that does not come from an academic course, important though this is.  Rather, this "jizz" came by living and breathing RF through building radio things themselves, however simple. A great many "good" graduates in communications electronics knew little or nothing about radio or radio engineering, had never touched a soldering iron ever and were rejected.  A good RF engineer could usually be spotted within 2 minutes of the interview starting.

In the UK we have a growing, and very serious, issue with poorly educated science and engineering graduates who come out of universities without the skills needed to start work in industry. One answer was the sandwich course in which young A-level students were accepted on a company training scheme that married "on the job" skills training with educational training, usually to HND or degree level. People spotted young, with real RF "jizz" (easily judged in interviews) usually went on to become the best engineers we had.

The problem that I saw in radio engineering recruitment is also seen in other areas of electronics and engineering. We are risking our nation's future unless we educate young people well and equip them with the skills they need to live and work in the 21st century. Good creative and innovative engineers are essential.

Soul shards

Michael Rainey, a ham radio friend from New Hampshire posted this on Facebook today.   I thought I'd share it here too. It is the chapter called, "Soul-Shards" from Douglas Hofstadter's book, "I Am A Strange Loop", a book I have not read (yet).

"One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents house and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

After a few minutes of emotional pondering - soul-searching, quite literally - I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.

“In the living room we have a book of the Chopin etudes for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad - and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frederic Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority - to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frederic Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards - scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frederic Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being - his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions - and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin etude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”

Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange."

The Four Horsemen Cometh?

We increasingly behave like lemmings running towards that cliff edge. The question is when will we reach it? 2012, 2013?

In Europe there are no signs of solving the Euro crisis. In the USA the congressional committee tasked with getting bipartisan support for huge spending cuts has totally failed to come up with anything. The indebtedness of the UK has risen to 492% of GDP, according to new research.  World CO2 emissions were higher still last year and the rate of increase is accelerating.  When ARE we all going to wake up and realise all this is not a computer game, but for real?

Somehow  as individuals and nations we've lost our way and got our values all wrong. Maybe this is the big wake-up call we need to change our behaviours, individually and nationally, to sustainable and better ones. I can't see it happening without a lot of pain though. Rarely before have we needed innovative and creative thinkers, strong communities, and human kindness and generosity so much.

The alternatives are too frightening to contemplate: mass unemployment, resource shortages, poverty, civil unrest, lurches to the far left or far right leading to violent revolution on a scale not seen for nearly 100 years. And on top of that we have a planet that is being cooked.

Sometimes it seems the Book of Revelation was right and those Four Horsemen really are riding towards us. If this reads like a tract for the Jehovah's Witnesses then please forgive me. I am a rational person but the portends for humankind are not good unless we change and change fast. It is up to us. No-one else is going to save us.

Time travel in quantum universes?

Although not a particle physicist I am fascinated by the news that CERN scientists have repeated their recent neutrino experiment and yet again confirmed that neutrinos seem to be travelling faster than light, despite theory saying this is impossible. This work may still be in error and the results may yet prove false. More tests are being carried out at other research centres over a longer timescale to see if the results hold up.

If true however, it raises all sorts of questions about the nature of space-time and our ability to move about in its many dimensions. Will we, one day, be able to look into the past and future? Maybe not in a way that allows us to interact, but simply look at who are ancestors were and our descendents will be.

Theories will have to be re-written and who knows where this will take us.