David Gee
The Quaker movement has strived from the first to face the world as it is – in care, thoughtfulness, and faith. At times courageous, at others faltering, the intention to be a community of hope still runs like a thread through the Quaker story.
But what can hope mean in our own disturbed age of anxiety and affliction? As an activist, I’ve been working with these queries for a while now, and in this I’m far from alone. So many of us are feeling pressed to ask what shape hope can possibly take as horizons close in and optimism retreats. Is this also you?
To help explore the practical meanings of hope today, I’ve been gathering various resources at hopeswork.org. You’ll find some queries to dwell on, some suggestions for cultivating a conscious hopefulness, and a blog taking a creative look at some of the themes. Please have a look round.
I started hopeswork.org after hearing activist friends struggle to hold faith with their work. It led me to wonder why we seldom pause to wonder what hope means for us or to enquire after its health.
Clearly, as the strain builds in our communities and societies, and on the earth, shallower hopes are easily uprooted – they don’t survive experience for long. But the very unease of our times can also urge deeper hopes to the surface.
My own journey with these questions has led me in unexpected directions – away from hope as a prediction about tomorrow and towards hope as a clutch of commitments that need making today, and without pushing the doubts away.
For a hope that bets everything on a better tomorrow doesn’t bear our predicament well, nor is it adequate, I feel, for a journey in faith. But a hope that invests in the life within us and around us, and finds promise there, still commends itself – today, tomorrow, always.
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David Gee is the author of ‘Hope’s Work: Facing the future in an age of crises’ (DLT, 2021) and lives in Oxford.
This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents
- May 2023
- Narrated Newsletter
- Friends’ Fellowship of Healing
- Artweeks Exhibition at the Meeting House
- Redressing Inequalities
- Book Review: Passengers: True Stories of the Underground Railroad by William Still
- Hope’s Work
- Report on St Hilda’s College Chaplaincy
- Monthly Appeal May 2023 – Refugee Resource
- Lately
- Epistle – Junior Yearly Meeting 2023
- Connecting to Quaker Faith Through Film
- Quaker Question and Answer – Charles Worth
- From Quaker Faith & Practice 12.03
- Meetings for Worship – May 2023
Back to May 2023 Newsletter Main Page
Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 529 • May 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
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