Eye - 28 February 2020
Eye spied
Modern… quiet… freedom… inspiration… eagle-eyed readers have spotted Friends popping up in the leaves of a number of books, newspapers and magazines in recent months.
As Young Friends General Meeting (YFGM) prepared to gather in York last weekend, the i newspaper featured the voices of Young Friends. Jak Hutchcraft, in an article published on 17 February, described the historical roots and concerns of Quakerism and wove in the experiences of modern Young Friends. The writer found their preconceptions challenged: ‘What I found during my time with Young Friends wasn’t the archaic and arcane group I was expecting, but something that felt very modern and fluid.’
One Friend told the paper: ‘Going to a Quaker Meeting is an important part of my life… but my Quakerism isn’t for an hour on Sunday… it’s through my whole life, it’s how I live everything.’
The article also reflected nontheism among Young Friends: ‘I don’t call it God, I prefer the inner-light… I don’t think there’s a being out there that’s watching over us, more of a spiritual guidance within us.’
Jak Hutchcraft quotes statistics from The Young Quaker magazine in 2017 that suggested the Society was ninety-nine per cent white, sixty-one per cent retired and had only twenty-eight per cent in the lower income bracket. One Friend responded: ‘This isn’t good enough… we’re not spreading the word. I think that this is at least the right path, and we should make people aware of it as an option.’
Meanwhile, the powerful impact that a Quaker woman had on the lives of refugees in York features in the February edition of The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) Journal, which can be found at http://bit.ly/AJRquaker.
Described as a ‘quiet and even timid woman’, Mary Hughes’ tireless efforts in the 1930s and 1940s included ‘an active and energetic role on the York Refugee Committee’. The article, written with the help of her son David Hughes, now 100 years old, describes her ‘seemingly endless responsibility towards those in danger’, which included her fostering two children who arrived via the Kindertransport and later managing to get their mother out of Germany to join them.
David Hughes told Eye: ‘My mother joined Friends some time in the late 1920s, partly through friendship with the Quaker Rowntrees of York.’ He added a line from a letter written by his mother: ‘It’s too much for me, I know, but I’d rather die than not do this.’
David also wrote: ‘I drifted away from Friends many years ago, but still am a Quaker in mind and spirit, read the Friend, and carry some of the Advices in my wallet.’
Mary Hughes’ story embodies the sort of attitude praised in the January-February edition of The Idler magazine, in which Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, mentions Friends in his article on life lessons.
‘In the United States you have people… arguing that conservative Christians should just withdraw, do the monastic thing and walk away from politics. It’s very tempting but the problem with it is the abandoning of the rest of the world to go to hell in a handcart, while we preserve our purity. In fairness to the Quakers, they’ve never done that. They claim the freedom to go out and argue to change things… The fact that institutions are so toxic is an index of how muddled and stuck human beings are. You can’t have a go at un-muddling human beings without un-muddling those institutions too.’
Freedom and Quaker involvement in the Underground Railroad, a nineteenth-century network of secret routes and safe houses in the USA used to help enslaved Americans escape, also appear to have inspired Margaret Atwood in her novel The Testaments, released last year.
Val Major, of North Somerset Area Meeting, told Eye about a number of mentions of Friends in its pages. The first, on page 113, shows Quakers being arrested for suspected involvement in the ‘Underground Female-road’, which enables women to escape the Republic of Gilead.
Just nine pages later there follows a mention of a ‘Meeting House and Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)’ being used by SanctuCare – the Canadian organisation for refugees from Gilead.
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