Te Deum and Quakers

I decided to up the stakes and try singing the Te Deum (in English) this morning, but my memory of it had faded and my sight reading is distinctly shaky, so I crashed at the second “change of gear”. Amazingly, we had got the whole congregation singing it at our 25th wedding anniversary (16 years ago!), but I think we seeded proper musicians at strategic points throughout the building.

Also, for the last two Sundays I’ve attended the local Quaker meeting. That makes a good complement to the Te Deum: the Quakers with their universally inclusive view, reached in a communal silence; the Te Deum with its triumphalist, hierarchical, and even a bit militaristic vision of the cosmos, heaven and implicitly hell, flung out over space, time and eternity.

I realise now that these same two elements were in my thoughts yesterday when, after a morning made difficult by quite turbulent thoughts, I had gone and sat in “cutthorn“, allowing its firm but gentle silence to pentrate. One thought on my mind was the problem of the insistence, the inescapable constant repetition, in the Koran of the last judgement. I had been metaphoring it away until now, but there’s a section (14:49-50) that really sticks in my liberal gullet: “For on that day thou wilt see all who were lost in sin linked together in fetters, clothed in garments of black pitch, with fire veiling their faces.” Yes, this is referring not to a forensic punishment, but to the “karmic” causal outworking of destructive acts; yes, the love of God doesn’t mean that everything will suddenly become happy and smiley; but the imagery is so extreme that it left me with little room for my equally strong conviction of the supremacy of love in the universe.

But then I realised that this imagery is precisely what I had already been imagining as the situation in the equatorial regions at the end of this century, on the 6 degree temperature rise scenario that our governments and the majority of the population still seem to be determined to head for. You might say, “hell bent” on heading for it. As members of one society we are indeed “linked together in fetters”, and in the drying up of the tropics, and the temperatures in which the trees of the tropical forest die and give up all their carbon to the atmosphere in a spiralling vicious circle, indeed seems like a veiling in fire. And I have already come to terms with this. In my nightmares I have come to tterms with it and I know that it is only within the inner silence of  reality that there is a presence that can hold even this possibility.