Sitting at peace in Meeting for Worship my thoughts and ponderings were with Friends around the country, both those I have had the pleasure of meeting and knowing and those for whom this is still to come for me.

These thoughts included the amazing ability that Friends have to discern, quietly and with loving care, considering how we can find the way to reach a conclusion that Friends, with perhaps a few exceptions, are content to own. It is this shared ownership of these deliberations that makes our Meetings the special places that they are. That there seems no limit to this ability; even being able to move forward when faces outside of our Meetings are turned against us gives an even greater strength. We can still walk bravely across the world, and we do!

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Comments

• Posted by Justin Meggitt on November 14, 2009

  I read this piece with some sadness. It presents us with an account of intolerance and intransigence but I am afraid to say that it is not so clear that these are necessarily wholly the failings of the visitor.

  From what David has written it is evident, as the visitor himself noticed, that actually he is not welcome, unless functionally he becomes someone else, and his ministry is not valued, unless it ceases to be ‘contentious’. He may eventually be ‘accommodated’ but it seems only if he revises and relativizes his ideas so that they cohere rather more closely with David’s own understanding of such things as the nature of religious truth and where religious authority resides.

  David did the right thing by trying to explain to the visitor where ministry should come, and that might well have been a very difficult task, however I worry that the notion of the ‘gathered meeting’ is used here as a way of ensuring that the meeting remains comfortable and untroubled - not quite, I think, the purpose of Quaker Meetings.

  Quakerism attracts a lot of people who, like me, value their own opinions rather more they should, and a not inconsiderable number who are looking for a ready audience at which to preach on their pet obsessions. To put it bluntly, this visitor might well be a very difficult person indeed. However, I do find David’s article disturbing on many levels. At the very least I wonder whether the visitor was shown the text of it before it appeared in the Friend and shared with all of us? If I were that visitor and picked up a copy of the Friend, I would be pretty upset if this were not the case.