Eye - 23 October 2015

From scenic simplicity to respectable peculiarities

Scenic simplicity

Friends from Bakewell Meeting enjoyed their fifteenth annual residential weekend in September.

Local Friend Alison Gray took part in this year’s gathering at Ilam Hall Youth Hostel, near Dovedale.

She told Eye: ‘The Peak District is well supplied with youth hostels and over the years we have visited most of them, delighting in the fact that we do not have to travel far to find stunning scenery and good company.

‘This year the theme of our all-age event was “Simplicity”, and we ended our weekend with worship outside, where the falling leaves contributed to the ministry of “trusting, letting go and moving on”.’

Success at Somerset stall

Street and Wells Friends went to a fair as part of their Quaker Week activities.

Kevin Redpath told Eye that Quakers in Somerset set out a stall at the One World Fair at Wells Town Hall on 18 October. It was ‘a very successful day of outreach, meeting new enquirers and old Friends’.

The Fair, which hosted thirty organisations this year, was organised to mark One World Week – an awareness raising week founded in 1978 by the World Development Movement. They describe their origins as stemming from ‘a desire that, for one week in every year, the churches should draw the attention of their communities to the fact that the world consists of one human race which shares one planet in which all may enjoy fullness of life’.

Respectable peculiarities

‘It is always fascinating to turn up references to Quakers in unexpected places,’ writes Roy Payne, of Ludlow Meeting.

He went on to tell Eye the tale of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), a renowned engraver and early naturalist who wrote and illustrated A History of British Birds.

Roy happened across an intriguing passage in reading Thomas Bewick’s autobiography, My Life, penned during a brief sojourn in London:

‘There is another sect growing into great importance as a religious society and that is the Quakers… They have many excellent rules laid down by which they regulate their conduct in life, and with all their peculiarities, their simplicity of manners command the respect of the thinking part of mankind.

‘They have, it is true, been characterised as “English Jews” by some, and others have said of them that they are not now a religious society, like the Methodists – “they are an aristocratical [sic] civil community; a trading company, and a set of respectable, industrious economical, money getting disciplinarians; who possess no more practical religion than the members of the Church of England”.

‘This may no doubt be the opinion of some, but I could never form such a one, of at least the great majority of them, for they appear to me to deserve a better character. I wish, indeed, to see them leave off a part of their puritanical appearance and some other stiffnesses in their deportment.

‘Were all men Quakers, I think the world would have a very sombre appearance, but this is balanced by their keeping their word, by their detestation of war and by their constant endeavours to live in peace with all men.’

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