A Kelavbit longhouse
Brought to heal: Tony Philpott reports from the Quaker Universalist Group (QUG) conference
‘The idea behind universalism is that there is not one way to spiritual truth, but that we can learn from different views.’
Our last Woodbrooke conference was in 2019, and in the uncertain world of Covid we wondered whether we would ever return. We had to cancel in 2020 and went online in 2021, so it was a pleasure to return to Woodbrooke this month for our first ‘blended’ conference.
We had about thirty people at Woodbrooke and thirty online. Two of our speakers were online and two stayed with us. The conference was well-received but it was very complex to organise, and the only way we made it work was to hire a technician at Woodbrooke for the weekend and charge those online a fee to pay for him.
The idea behind universalism is that there is not one way to spiritual truth, but that we can learn from different views. At this conference we considered four totally different views of health and healing.
Monica Janowski told us about the longhouse culture of the Kelabit people in Sarawak, and how this has been affected by the introduction of a charismatic form of Christianity. Has there been an improvement in ‘health’ in its broadest sense? Yes and no. Yes, in scientific approaches to medicine. No, because as people move from the longhouse to the town there is a breakdown of community support and a loss of respect for the forest.
Staying in Asia, we had an overview of Chinese medicine by Ranald Macdonald. Ranald explained three techniques: acupuncture, herbalism and massage. Finally, he showed how the three religions of China – Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism – give us different approaches to health and healing. On the Saturday afternoon he led us in a session of Tai chi.
Nearer home, Gervais Frykman joined us online and introduced us to the Friends Fellowship of Healing (FFH), whose work can be traced back to George Fox. In the afternoon people were led in a healing meditation by Pauline Frykman. Like all Quaker groups, FFH has had to learn how to adapt to Covid, and online healing is one of the gains from our forced lockdown.
Our conference was rounded off by another online contributor, Neil Morgan. He named his talk ‘From Division towards Wholeness’. He explored the idea of integration in several ways. We need to integrate thinking and feeling; and we need to avoid the defence mechanisms of denial and disavowal, both at an individual level (e.g. denying one’s own death) and the societal level (e.g. denying climate change). Finally, he argued that scientism and materialism deny God or ‘the spiritual’ and ‘We keep ourselves human, we keep ourselves healthy, by asking the spiritual question, even if, as I imagine, there can be no right or wrong answer.’
We learnt much at the conference and we hope others will benefit too by looking at our website at https://qug.org.uk, where recordings of the talks will be available, or by purchasing our conference pamphlet which we hope to produce in the summer.
