Eco Congregation Ireland

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Eco Congregation Ireland (ECI), to those of you who do not already know about it. Eco Congregation Ireland is based on the wider UK Eco Congregation program. It is designed for the Christian churches, and encourages church based projects. However, anyone from any where and non Christian churches are most welcome to use their materials. The information is web based and can be downloaded from the internet for free. It encourages churches to consider environmental issues in the context of their Christian life and mission, and to take positive action. There is an award scheme.

I am the Ireland Yearly Meeting representative to ECI. I attended my first ECI meeting in Dublin in January. Coming from a very liberal Cork background at first I felt that I was a fish out of water among the representatives of the more structured churches. How wrong I was! Very quickly I discovered that we all had the same deep commitment to caring for Creation and the same desire to get it higher up on our own church's agenda.

The Eco Congregation Ireland program consists of 12 modules. A big chunk of the program explores the relationship between our Christian teachings and our responsibility for care of the earth. For those of us who are church or meeting goers and deeply committed to environmental issues, these sections provide a real sense of justification and validity for what we have been doing for years. They bring us back from the far periphery of Christian activity to the mainstream. No longer do I feel I am on the lunatic fringe! These modules strive to expose the theological justification for taking care of our environment. Indeed they use the phrase, 'theological imperative' for Christians to be environmentally aware and active. These modules include ideas for bible study, hymns, prayer and sermons, and have plenty of biblical references for all of us to draw inspiration from.

Other modules focus on practical activities for church groups. Sunday schools and youth groups each have a section with great ideas and not a little humour. Church administration, buildings and grounds are all dealt with in very practical, down to earth, realistic and achievable steps to help us to tread more lightly on the planet.

Environmental aspects of our own personal lives, nearby and global neighbours, and inter church activities are not forgotten. I loved the inclusiveness, versatility and huge encouragement I was given to spread out the program beyond our usual boundaries and to include anyone and everyone who is interested.

For people who would like to participate in the ECI program the information is on the web. The first step that you are asked to do is a simple audit of your church or meeting house, and then to look through the modules and pick out which you might like to tackle. ECI really like you to fill in the registration form at the end of the audit and send it to them, so they know how many people are using their material - it helps them to get funding. Down here in Cork we are making a start. We hope to have an audit of the Meeting House and Grounds well under way before this goes to print. Contact me if you would like to know how we are getting on.

Natasha Harty tel 021 4652429

http://www.ecocongregationireland.org

Children of Light

To begin my reflections on Martin Lynn's Children of Light I'd like to play a word game just to help get you oriented to my approach. I'll call out various words and you tell me their opposites. OK:

..."up"..."high ....... big ........ long ....... black" -

now here's another for you- "Creativity"..(???) ........

Let me suggest an opposite to creativity, one that pops into my head - "tradition". Creativity/Tradition. Creativity on the one hand, and its opposite, tradition on the other .... creativity vs tradition. Can you get you heads around it? Can you ponder for a moment how they can stand opposite to one another?

Martin uses an historical approach to achieve four objectives:
1. He wants to address the legacy to present day Friends handed down by William Edmondson and Margery Atkinson, and to see how we've treated that legacy.
2. By examining early Friends beliefs he wants to investigate from whence came the power that drove them to do the amazing things they did.
3. As an outcome of examining those beliefs of early Friends he aims to define the essence of Quakerism using the phrase "Children of Light" as a useful vehicle.
4. He wants to suggest a vision for the future of the Society.

Martin then examines the implications the encounter with Light had for the beliefs of early Friends and the way they viewed the world around them. How for the individual Friend:
* the Light was the paramount authority
* the Light's source shown from outside in
* the Light taught, and was identified with Christ
* the Light was open to all persons everywhere
* the Light was revelatory and changed lives

How for the world:
* the Light struggled against evil
* the Light showed the kingdom to'be present here and now upon the earth
* he Light created community amongst the people
* the Light manifested the immediate presence of God at work in the world.

Having enumerated the above, Martin says: "You may feel that this attempt to define the beliefs of Early Friends is of historical interest but no more, that it has only limited relevance for today's Society of Friends. I would suggest that it does in fact have a lot to say today."

I would suggest to you, Friends, that there is indeed a limit to the relevance for today's Society in listing the beliefs and insights of early Friends - even as amazing and far-reaching as those insights were.

Before I go any further I want to echo Martin's sentiments when he says, "I want to challenge and provoke, though I do so with no desire to offend." 1 have no desire to offend either, and I don't even particularly have a wish to challenge anybody, although some may find it challenging-but what I do want to do is to have Friends to stop and think about things before we make an idol of tradition. I hope I don't lose you at this point. If you can stay with me I'll try to explain myself, and then you can judge for yourselves if there is any merit in what I'm saying.

I'll start by asking you this: Can somebody give me a word that's the opposite of the word "limit"? Quick; without taking too much time to think about it- what's the opposite of "limit"? [unlimited / infinite / unending / etc]...... There is of course no written list of beliefs, however appealing, that can have unlimited, unending, and infinite relevance for our lives. Likewise, there are limits to the relevance of early Friends beliefs for us today - but it's where to draw those limits that Friends today might agree or differ.

Martin Lynn mentions two limits, "You may feel that this attempt to define the beliefs of Early Friends is of historical interest but no more......." He posits that some folks might feel that those early beliefs of Friends have relevance - but only historical-and no more. "No more" is the limit these hypothetical Friends would set to the relevancy they attach to early Friends' beliefs. In the same quotation Martin uses another limit, "I would suggest that it does in fact have a lot to say to today." "A lot" is the limit he chooses in this sentence to express the relevance he attaches to early Friends' belief. My point here is that there is a limit to the relevance of tradition, and that Martin is actually working within limits that he himself is setting.

It is possible - especially in the context of spiritual experience - for tradition to stand in direct opposition to creativity. I agree with Martin Lynn's analysis as he sums up the many aspects of the Light he has enumerated. Martin states, "What unites all of these aspects of the Light is that at the heart of the Quaker spiritual experience is an overwhelming sense of encounter with God." And later he adds, "...life on earth is about encounter." The emphasis here is on the experience of encountering, and it is my contention that a dogged adherence to tradition can thwart, nullify, or inhibit an authentic creative response to an encounter with the Numinous. The tighter we cling to our tradition as the paramount source of our identity and as the prescribed gateway to the Light, the greater the danger of setting human parameters to that encounter. To define the essence of Quakerism patterned exclusively on an encounter that happened 350 years ago is to rob Friends today of an unprogrammed, first-hand encounter the like of which was experienced by early Friends.

The people who we now call "early Friends" went through a process of seeking, at a time when they experienced the established traditions as ineffective, irrelevant, and incapable of authentic encounter. They were making tradition, not following it. As Martin Lynn says, "They were a people called to be different, to be dangerous, a people called to live outside the world...."

Friends it is easy, comfortable, and non-threatening to live in the wake of early Friends' trail-blazing - busy being an organisation, feeling awkward and threatened by the prospect of what a truly unprogrammed creative encounter with The Living might mean - afraid to risk the possibility of loosing who we think we are for the glory of becoming who we are yet meant to be.

There are two aspects to the beliefs and actions taken by early Friends: the first is the content of what they came to believe, derived from an authentic encounter; the second is the process they created to facilitate the act of encountering.

Give me their process as a basis to start from; but don't give me their content as a rule to follow. If we have an authentic encounter with The Living, the encounter itself will dictate the content, and will act as the platform for our creative response. And we, like early Friends, may have to create a brand new vocabulary just to talk about it. We need to look at early Friends encounters through the lens of our own encounters and make whatever judgements we feel are required; but we do not use their encounters as a tool to fashion the shape of our own encounters. An irony arising within Quaker tradition is this: it's a part of our tradition that tradition is not the encounter.

But what if I've never actually had what I could honestly call a first-hand encounter with The Living; what if I'm just an aspirant, a 'wannabe' whose only means so far of getting close has been to rely vicariously on the encounters of others? If that is the case, then there's no better place for me to study the fundamentals of encounter than in the lives and traditions of early Friends - but their response is not the final definition of Quakerism; that revision lies in our own unfettered creative encounter.

Christian-Jewish Dialogue in Vienna 2006

The annual conference of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ) took place in Vienna from 2 to 5 July, 2006. It was entitled "Encounter with History - Learning for the Future".

The conference was organised by the ICCJ jointly with the Austrian Co-ordinating Committee for Christian-Jewish Co- operation. It was attended by some 130 participants from a wide range of countries spanning Europe (including Russia), Israel, North and South America and Australia. The ICCJ serves as the umbrella organisation for 38 national councils and is located in Martin Buber House, Heppenheim, Germany - at one time the home of Martin Buber.

Website addresses are: http://www.iccj.org and http://www.jcrelations.net.

Together with Sister Carmel Niland of the Sisters of Sion, Secretary of the Irish Council of Christians and Jews, I attended the conference on behalf of the Irish Council. The venue was Kardinal Konig Haus in the suburbs of Vienna, a Jesuit seminary converted into a residential conference centre and named after the late Cardinal Konig of Vienna, known for his respect for persons regardless of their religious or other backgrounds. In its extensive and wooded grounds, and with excellent conference facilities, the centre was much appreciated by participants.

Opening on Sunday evening and closing on the following Wednesday evening, the conference had a very full programme including plenary sessions with lectures and discussions, smaller discussion groups, music recitals and visits in and around Vienna to places of Jewish-Christian interest with attendance at Jewish and Christian services.

The following selection gives an indication of the range of subjects covered in the talks:
* the Christian-Jewish problem in Austria from the Revolution of 1848 to the rise of National Socialism;
* the Lutheran Church in Austria 1938 to 2006;
* how the State of Israel affects today's Jewish-Christian dialogue;
* do Monuments Preserve Memory?
* the present situation of Christian- Jewish dialogue in Central Europe.

The lectures, which were wide-ranging and informative, were given some in English and some in German with simultaneous translation into both languages. Each day included a variety of site visits from which, in some cases, participants could chose and, in others, were for all participants. There were visits, inter alia, to:
* Judenplatz, the medieval Jewish quarter of Vienna including the Main Synagogue followed by Jewish evening service;
* Klosternenburg Abbey with its medieval altar with panels depicting Bible stories followed by monastic evensong;
* The Austrian Parliament and a welcome to the International Council on behalf of the Parliament's President.

A full account of the conference is given in ICCJ News #31, Autumn/Winter 2006 and on the website http://www.jcrelations.net.

As the conference unfolded and we were told of the history of the Jewish community in Vienna, it became clear how poignant and evocative the city was as a venue for Jewish-Christian dialogue. By the first quarter of the 20th century, there was a large Jewish community in Vienna numbering up to 200,000 and supporting (by 1938) 80 synagogues. Of these latter, 42 were destroyed in the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht on 9 November, 1938.

By that time many Jews had already, due to increasingly anti-Jewish official policies, left Austria leaving about 58,000 still living there. At the end of the war, only 219 Jews were found (having survived in hiding) in Vienna. Today, the Jewish community in Austria numbers about 7,000 living mainly in Vienna.

As someone not from Central, or even Continental, Europe, I sensed at times, amongst local Christians at the conference, a continuing feeling of pain and guilt at the treatment of Jews during the Nazi period, a feeling associated with the difficult realisation of the need to acknowledge and change earlier anti-Jewish attitudes. This realisation had been felt in institutional religion where, in the case, for example, of the United Protestant Churches in Austria, the process had a self-admitted "long and difficult history" culminating in the statement "Time to Change" in 1998. This process was described in a lecture by a senior representative of those churches.

Amongst the moments during the conference which I found personally moving and memorable were when - as part of a small Bible study group - I listened to a shared Jewish-Christian exploration of a Biblical text. Unlike most such dialogues, which usually concentrate on an Old Testament/Hebrew Bible text, this one took a New Testament one, Mark's account, in 5:21-43, of the healing of the haemorrhaging woman and the raising of Jairus' daughter. The rabbi's comments on the story, drawing out some of its Jewish aspects (for example, the ritual purity concerns with menstruation and death) shed an illuminating and culturally credible light on the story. As well as some of the Christian understandings of the passage, we were reminded of the Jewishness of Jesus and his immediate context.

On one of the site visits, some of us were taken to the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery of Vienna to see the 800 or so graves of Christians buried there amongst many Jews. These were persons whose grandparents had been Jewish but who had, in a later generation, become Christian yet were regarded as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws. Many of the graves were inscribed with both a Cross and a Star of David. Walking between the graves was a most moving experience so forcibly bringing home in what detail the Nazi regime had controlled those whom it targeted, in both life and death.

As regards contemporary Christian-Jewish dialogue, one of the Jewish speakers struck a refreshing note amongst some of the more academic contributions. She referred to the tendency to treat Jews as "theological objects", that is, either as demons because of the attitude that they were responsible collectively for the death of Jesus or angels in that they were the people from whom Jesus sprang. In a plea to be treated as ordinary human beings, she asked: "We are just getting over being called 'the devil's children' - please don't make us all into angels."

Finally, one metaphor (in the form of a painting) offered by one of the speakers, which was applicable to all present, was that of a memory box. This was a box in which we can put painful memories so that we don't have to have them in our consciousness all the time but can still retrieve them in order, in the words of Deuteronomy, to "remember so that you will not forget".