Are We Able to Open to Whatever Transcendent Conscience Might Call Us To Do Collectively?

Our broken electoral and political systems are shamefully inadequate to halt our collective complicity in the violence committed in Gaza and Ukraine, and elsewhere in the world. What are we called to do about that complicity?

Are we called to risk arrest and imprisonment in witness of our professed ethical beliefs and concerns, as early Quakers did in seventeenth-century England in witness of theirs? I think that the answer to this question, for most people in the USA of any religious denomination or none, including Quakers, now seems clearly to be a resounding “No!”

Are any of us prepared to support, with even a small fraction of the donations of money and time many of our fellow citizens made to the Kamala Harris pfesidential campaign in 2024, the work of people like Roger Hallam in the UK, who is serving a five year prison sentence for discussing over Zoom with four other people plans for a nonviolent demonstration in opposition to the genocide in Gaza)?

If and when the constitutional right to assemble peacefully to seek redress for political grievances becomes criminalized in the US (as it already has been in the UK through vaguely worded Orwellian and Kafkaesque laws), what will we feel called to do, to prevent the massacre of more children and parents in Gaza and elsewhere, directly supported by our tax dollars?

Former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges wrote in a recent Substack essay:

Roger [Hallam] argues that if 10,000 people are willing to engage in civil resistance, which means accepting prison terms for non-violent civil disobedience, carry out grassroots educational campaigns and mobilize public assemblies, they can [inspire] one to two percent of the population to embrace the militancy to rupture the existing order.

He draws on the research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and Maria J. Stephan who examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

“It’s not only about changing the world,” Roger says. “It’s about seeing the world in a different way, one that rejects the narrative of the dominant ideology. It is a re-enchantment of the world. It is about our spirit taking center stage. This is where it belonged all the time. But the spirit only becomes real through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.”

What does the Inward Light (also known among Quakers by terms like Spirit, God, or the sense of the gathered meeting) call members and attenders of Old Chatham Meeting to do -- collectively -- in this situation?

Can we find the collective discipline, faith, and courage to open ourselves to whatever this transcendent force might call us to do?

~ John Breasted