‘We don’t experience that blaze of soul-warmth when a room full of people gather into the Spirit.’
After last week’s letter from 2037 about selling Meeting houses, Keith Braithwaite has one from 2052
‘We all do whatever seems individually good and right for us to do.’
There is a road near my parents’ care home called Meetinghouse Lane. They can’t remember whether or not there ever was a Meeting house. Maybe it’s become one of those meaningless names that developers use, like having The Avenue with no trees. I haven’t thought about Meeting houses in a long time. Some US university bought the archives when Friends House was sold, didn’t they? Maybe they’ve digitised everything by now. I’ll check when I get home.
I was a teenager when Yearly Meeting made the decision to start selling Meeting houses, the ones that were left, anyway. I do remember all the excitement about the reparations fund, and even accommodating refugees. That was fine if it was an old one that was a pub or a house before, or if it had a warden’s flat. Not so much with modern purpose-built ones. How long did that last before they were turned into flats for commercial rent? Or demolished. All in all I think that the great sell-off raised about a £150 million, which sounds like a lot – it certainly was celebrated. It soon got spent, though. And the thing about money is you can only spend it once. But a building you can use again and again.
Friends felt good about spending money, especially if they could believe that it came from selling things that were tainted. Sure, you couldn’t do anything with a Meeting house that you didn’t own. You couldn’t host like-minded groups. You couldn’t use it as a collection point or a distribution point, or a ‘warm bank’ (which was a thing back then), or build any sort of connection with your town or borough. But you would have a splash of cash to spend. Once.
The plan was to spend all the cash by a couple of years ago, I think, but it went much sooner than that. I was about thirty when it suddenly looked as if the fund wasn’t going to go anything like as far as anyone thought (surprise – inflation!) and Friends House was sold off in a bit of a panic. Well, it’s now the nicest hotel and conference centre on the Euston Road, so there’s that. I’ve been there for a trade show.
Britain Yearly Meeting still exists, and it still owns a few of the really old listed Meeting houses. It’s like a sort of miniature National Trust. You can be a ‘Member’ and go along for a cup of tea and a biscuit and a look around and there might even be some worship. And of course it is still a charity.
Regular group worship is all online now. When it happens at all. After five years of on-and-off-again pandemic we got out of the habit of Meeting face-to-face. I was about ten at the time. I did go to a few Young Friends events, but those sort of faded away. Yealand, was it we went to? It was near the sea, I remember that.
So the Society ended up kind of atomised. None of us had a Meeting house to go to – not even for Yearly Meeting. We worshipped more and more at home, online but alone, or maybe just with family. And then just alone. Why start a Zoom call? We all know that we’re all worshipping, right?
And yes, it certainly is a boon that since those pandemic days that those who have mobility problems, or who can’t leave their home for some other reason, can join in what collective worship there is left.
Some say that this is just fine, and it doesn’t matter if there’s a Meeting house to go to, so long as there are Quakers and they worship, somehow, somewhere. And some say that it wouldn’t matter whether or not there’s a Religious Society of Friends to be a member of, so long as you are a Quaker and do the work. And some even say that it doesn’t matter whether or not anyone is a Quaker, so long as you do the work anyway. Maybe so.
And for a while the numbers of people doing the work, and coming to online Meetings and being Quakers, did go up. I remember some huge online Meetings. And there was more diversity, which we desperately did need, which was good. Did that follow from the tiny contribution we made to the vast current material inequality born of old structural injustices? Maybe. Good, if so. And yet… it’s the Religious Society of Friends, not the loose affiliation of solitary thoughtful good-doers. Or it was. Did we really once have a United Nations office? Did we really once get called on from around the world to go help build peace? Where would you go now; who would you ask?
Each of us does what good we can in our home, our job, our street, our town. But what about the big problems, the ones that need a big organisation? We got out of the habit of being big, of being substantial in the world, of there being something at the end of Meetinghouse Lane worth finding.
And is it spiritually healthy for regular worship to be at home, and usually solitary? Quaker worship was collegiate and communal and collaborative from the start. Until Covid, you went to a Meeting for Worship at a Meeting house, and the journey maybe was part of it. You left your home and went out into the world, walking the face of the Earth, passing strangers and friends, seeing the sky, feeling the breeze and maybe that did something. Primed us for the Spirit, somehow. And we met, a real Meeting, a handshake at the door, the vestibule or anteroom, and then stepping across the threshold into the shared silence. Into the atmosphere of love breathed in and out by the Friends there before you. Well, that’s how I heard it went, anyway.
When we decided in 2025 to detach membership from Area Meetings, it was at first a liberation. There was a surge in membership from peripatetic Friends, many of them young, some not so much. And then, members attending Area Meetings for business started to fade away. Because, well, why would you? And then, more and more on a Sunday morning, Friends didn’t bother to open the call because, well, why would you?
So now we sort-of are the thing that critics accused us of being. We all do whatever seems individually good and right for us each to do. We don’t get our spiritual sharp edges rounded off by rubbing against other Friends, face-to-face where we can read the body language and hear the breathing. We don’t experience that blaze of soul-warmth when a room full of people gather into the Spirit. If we don’t ‘Meet’ is it ‘worship’?
I’m not sure the quality of our discernment has survived now that it’s always mediated by technology. But what else will we do, detached from place as we are now? One thing my dad does remember was that when Friends House was sold there was a lot of talk about how it was immoral to have this big asset sitting there when it could be turned into cash to do some good. And he says that he said at the time: ‘that’s Judas Iscariot talking’.
Comments
Several decades ago I dabbled in New Age ‘spirituality’. one useful tool I learnt was to look back on my decisions from seven years in the future.
Keith Braithwaite has taken a brave leap, even further into the future, and helped us to see how our decisions will look if we look only at the immediate consequences.
The result is a truly prophetic challenge. Thank you.
By Ol Rappaport on 15th November 2022 - 8:53
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