Peter Jarman is a member of the Institute of Physics, which works to advance scientific education, research and application. After graduating in nuclear physics at Imperial College he studied the effects of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, joined the first Aldermaston march in 1958, and embarked on a career which culminated in his joining the team working on detection of the Higgs boson (nicknamed the ‘God particle’ because ‘without it was not anything made that was made’ – John 1.3) at the high energy accelerator CERN in Geneva.
Abandoning a youthful grounding in 'fervent Sunday school choruses and the evangelical calling', he joined the Quakers and now, in retirement, describes himself as a nontheist (or post-theist) Buddhist Quaker and a member of the Nontheist Friends Network and SOF. 'My faith as a Quaker scientist,' he writes, 'is anchored on the evidence of things seen as well as that which is not seen.' Seen and Unseen is a modest 60-page pamphlet, costing no more than a cup of coffee, engagingly distilling the life-experience of Jarman the scientist (observation, the objective, the seen) and Jarman the social activist inspired by the inner guide of conscience (experience, experiment, the subjective, the unseen). After a spell (I suspect a short one) investigating the low energy life of tomatoes for the Agricultural Research Council, he became the Geneva-based Europe Secretary of Quaker Peace and Service, regularly visiting the Soviet Union and establishing friendly relations with communist officials as well as dissidents. In 1991 he and his wife Roswitha, who had fled East Germany as a refugee, made their home in post-communist Moscow, running Alternatives to Violence workshops and programmes designed to build civil society. Similar projects took them into the Ukraine and the Balkans during the post-Tito civil war. Jarman believes in 'comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable' (and wonders, on the side, 'are Quakers too damn comfortable?').
Before the Soviet system collapsed, the Jarmans linked up with a Russian historian named Tatiana Pavlova. Her speciality was 17th century English history, where she encountered Quakers – particularly the True Leveller and later Quaker Gerrard Winstanley, about whom she wrote a book. When the censors blocked publication, Tatiana responded by reminding them that Lenin had arranged for Winstanley’s name to be inscribed on a monument outside the Kremlin, commemorating revolutionaries of the past. The censors backed down, and Jarman comments that ‘thousands of copies appeared on kiosks throughout Russia’.
Tatiana became a Quaker and, with the Jarmans, established a meeting in Moscow, held in the crypt of an Orthodox church where prisoners had been shot by the KGB, whose headquarters in the dreaded Lubyanka was nearby. The meeting place had to be kept secret as the Orthodox leadership was hostile to religious observance outside their control. A large letter Q was placed at the top of the stairs to the crypt. This would have meant nothing to the authorities, since there is no letter Q in the Cyrillic alphabet!
But it helped me locate the meeting on a visit to Moscow.
Seen and Unseen divides into two parts. The first reflects on Quaker and Buddhist faith and practice.
Referencing Don Cupitt, Richard Holloway, Dinah Livingstone and even me, Jarman writes that God is not a supernatural being but ‘a symphony of poems.
God is poetry created by conscious awakenings and the promptings of the universal unconscious. Whilst poetry is purely subjective, it does involve perceptions and glimpses that lie beyond the consciousness of the poet… If God, as the SOF members assert, is a creation of the human consciousness, the experience of ecstasy is not diminished.’ In the second part, Jarman the physicist focuses on ‘the awe, wonder and beauty of the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, in our universe with its fundamental particles and their interactions’.
Where William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, Peter Jarman sees in a single green leaf the transforming of sunlight and carbon dioxide into oxygen and the universal life force. And he invites us to give thanks for it. Investigation… reflection… action:
Jarman joins the dots. As a stimulant this pamphlet will give you far more for your money than that cup of coffee. Read it, and use it as the basis of a workshop study group.
David Boulton is a broadcaster, journalist and author. His latest book is Through a Glass Darkly, a defence of Quaker nontheism.