Letters - 04 November 2016
From a spiritual home to visually impaired Friends
A spiritual home
Thank you Chris Tortise (28 October) for expressing what I have always felt since the first Meeting for Worship I attended, aged twelve, at Great Ayton Friends’ School in 1944. There was silence and no sermon or hymn-singing, as there was at my mother’s Methodist church, where I had been bored and uncomfortable – even a schoolgirl could stand and ‘minister’! I joined Friends as soon as I was eighteen, and later met and married another Young Friend when we were ready.
While travelling in the US, at the end of a two-year working sojourn, I purchased a booklet for travelling Young Friends and stayed overnight on my travels, meeting and appreciating Friends there, as did my husband and I years later. (Then the booklet was for older Friends!)
Audrey Davies
Our testimonies
I’m astonished at what Robert Crowley (21 October) read into the event at which Ben Pink Dandelion gave a talk at Ipswich Meeting House, and at which I was the welcomer at the door. It was as though we had been present at two different occasions.
He says in his letter that no one seemed to have any idea, apart from our speaker, what being a Quaker means. How on earth was he able to read that into a hall full of people? I can’t read anyone’s mind, let alone a crowd of them. So, I must inform him that I am very clear why I am a Quaker and I would suspect – though I couldn’t possibly actually know – many in the audience would, too. How did he pick up that we consider ourselves superior…?
It sounds like a case of heavy projection and, given that Robert Crowley calls himself ‘an argumentative and intolerant Quaker’, I can only suggest that the hairs rose on the back of his head, as he described it, because they were only too ready to!
Andrew Sterling
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