David Belden and I share a birthday, one year apart. A lifetime ago, we celebrated together in Caux, and we’ve kept in limited touch over the years. I worked with him to get his doctoral thesis available on the For A New World website. And now he’s brought out ‘a memoir of activism and healing’, with the title The World Remakers’ Child.
David Belden’s autobiography takes us on a roller-coaster life journey, from Moral Re-Armament (full-time volunteer worker, then doctoral research at Oxford) to Californian prisons and the restorative justice movement. “A new project to re-shape society,” he calls it. A rich full circle. Feeding the world, politics, feminism, social movements, class, anti-imperialism, sex and divorce, therapy, carpentry and writing science fiction novels. Late-learning to cry, to show emotion, even to come to terms with what he’s feeling.
There’s a chapter headed “Burned out on movements”, but there’s the endless urge to work for a better world, a better future for all. David finds “a connection with the human race”. “We are descended from the survivors… It’s in the DNA they gave us to have faith against the odds,” he writes. “Not all who wander are lost,” he says. At 17, he went to India, and then a few years later, Ethiopia, and he met the suffering of the world, and it was this that took him away from Moral Re-Armament. The movement was very strong on personal change, but where was the social dimension, the economic changes that the world also needs? This deep passion for change in the world remains for him up to today: is there a way of holding together, in harmony, the importance of personal change, but also the need for changes in structures, in economics, in society?
His brief history of Moral Re-Armament and its initiator, Frank Buchman, conclude the book, with balanced judgements and the question that I personally share: why isn’t this movement better known, more talked about, studied? In a recent blog, Belden talks about his book and Frank Buchman, and the links with Alcoholics Anonymous.
My own relatively new short explanation of what the movement is about is: “Ubuntu”, a Southern African word and concept, which I translate into English as “Our shared humanity”. Not so far from Rajmohan Gandhi’s We are one humanity message and web site.
Other links to David talking about his book:
https://uucb.org/education/personal-theology/personal-theology-archives/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1cX1KJrJSo
English