By Kay Augustine

A few weeks ago, Friend Amanda, during worship, shared a moving quote from Alice Eliott Dark’s recent novel Fellowship Point. I was reminded at the time of a quote later in that same book which had sent me on an internet search. The book’s protagonist, speaking of her ancestor who had, generations earlier, settled the land where she was living, writes, “Even good, charitable William Lee was a pillager, a colonialist in his own pacificist, Quaker way.” (p. 556)

Pacificist, I thought. (Even now, my autocorrect insists I meant to write “pacifist.”) Is that a misspelling? And so my search began. While what I found did not answer the question of whether Dark used that spelling deliberately, I did find the search rewarding.

According to the Wikipedia entry for pacificism, the two terms were long used interchangeably, “pacificism” being considered simply an archaic spelling into the 1940s. The theory as distinct from “pacifism” was developed by A. J. P. Taylor in The Trouble-Makers (1957) and by Martin Caedel in Thinking about Peace and War (1987). Caedel, a British scholar, has been described in the journal Quaker History as “the pre-eminent historian of British peace movements.”

According to Wikipedia, Caedel “categorized pacificism among positions about war and peace, ordering it among the other categories:

• Militarism (violence normalized)
• Crusading (interventionism)
• Defensivism (violence prevention)
• Pacificism (violence prevention and abolition)
• Pacifism (violence rejection)”

To return to the passage Friend Amanda shared, a passage I had also noted when reading the book, Agnes Lee, the novel’s protagonist, is writing to a friend, and comments on a Bible verse given her by that friend: “The Lord said unto me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Then Agnes goes on to write, “The world through the looking glass, the parallel universe as it should be, so close to us yet impenetrable except when we accept the graces and the love offered to us. What I have learned is that grace and love are offered all the time, in every new moment, at every glimpse of the sky, or dawn of a day that has never before existed, or squirrel skittering along a branch, or conversation with a sister or a friend, or the sense of time suspended when reading a good book. We are free, always, to accept what is offered; it is we who don’t recognize this. That is our free will. The result is what we call our experience, which in turn forms our beliefs. There are a lot of bad ideas in the world. I have less and less patience with any ideas at all. Animals, flowers, the sea. Friends. Children. Art. The end.” (pp. 495-6)

So. Dark says our experiences form our beliefs. And our individual experiences are bound to be widely varied, which is why some of us Friends will be pacifists and some pacificists, all working in our own ways toward the hope that our children may one day live in a more peaceful, more humane world.