Photo: Alexander Grey on Unsplash.
Afterlife fellowship: Fee Berry from QFAS
‘People often exclaim that they didn’t realise we existed.’
The Quaker Fellowship for Afterlife Studies (QFAS) is in its twenty-fifth year of existence, having come together at Ammerdown in 2000. QFAS has around 170 members and publishes a biannual newsletter, Reaching Out. We study evidence for the afterlife, including near-death experiences, afterlife communications, dreams, mediumship and channelling, angelic communication, and other related subjects. Despite our history and participation each year in the Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) fringe, people often approach us and exclaim that they have been looking for just such a group and didn’t realise we existed.
Happily, more than twenty Friends joined us for our special interest group on Zoom as part of the BYM fringe on 6 July. Using a slideshow, Rhonda Riachi offered the group an introduction to the sorts of subjects which QFAS studies, and an opportunity to discuss the reasons why one might be interested in studying the afterlife.
The group split into smaller breakout rooms briefly, and then were brought back to the main meeting to share the things which had been discussed. Rhonda then shared some interesting quotations from Quaker faith & practice and elsewhere on the subject of the afterlife. She also mentioned our own anthology of members’ experiences, The Life That Never Ends.
‘QFAS is trying to learn what we can about the afterlife from the experiences of others.’
An excerpt from one of the quotations, from Jenifer Faulkner in Quaker faith & practice (21.57) speaks succinctly to the purposes of QFAS: ‘Can we face up to the fact of death? Can we prepare ourselves in some measure for dying? I feel I have to try and tell you of my experience and the understanding it brought me – however personal and limited.’
That is the essence of what QFAS is doing, trying to learn what we can about the afterlife from the experiences of others, and how to live our lives in the knowledge that death will one day ‘turn us over from time to eternity’ as William Penn eloquently put it.
QFAS as a group is experienced in holding online meetings. Since the lockdown in 2020 prevented QFAS from meeting in person at our annual conference, we have been running regular gatherings on Zoom. We meet online on the second Saturday of the month, except in August, when we take a break.
On Saturday 14 September we will be holding a one-day online conference on astral travel and the astral planes. Anyone who wishes to attend can contact QFAS through our website at https://quakerafterlifestudies....
This article is part of our coverage of Yearly Meeting 2024, including its preparation week, when QFAS ran a special interest group.
