Letters - 06 July 2018
From helping hands to building bridges
Helping hands
There is good sense in our Friend Raymond Hudson’s suggestion (1 June) that we should look at a charity’s website before deciding whether to donate. But I cannot agree that money should be withheld from charities in order to put pressure on them to cease supporting people with large families.
I believe the approach of Christian Aid is analogous to that of our own National Health Service and I applaud it. When you ring for an ambulance, the responder asks: ‘Is the patient breathing?’ They don’t enquire about the patient’s family size, nationality, or even the extent to which the emergency might be the fault of their lifestyle before arranging to despatch an ambulance. Every person who needs help simply gets help.
That, to my mind, should also be the approach of Quakers, whether we are directly involved ourselves, or supporting other charities. After all, we assert that every single human being is unique, precious, a child of God. Do we really want to go back to the Poor Law days of dividing people into the deserving and the undeserving, and punishing the latter – and their children – for their supposed fecklessness? I hope not.
Stevie Krayer
Recognising red lines
Joel Wallenberg’s article (1 June) does not take us ‘back to “all men are rapists”’, as was suggested in the letters pages of the 22 June edition of the Friend. That would be trivialising something very important. Rather, it addresses the pervasive cruelty that exists in ordinary male-female relationships – physical for sure, but also psychological, and so often fuelled by alcohol. It is also fuelled by expectations aroused by pornography and the media that blur ‘red lines’ for what is acceptable, both for men and for women.
The #MeToo campaign is important, but it can also be disturbing for women and, it seems, bewildering for men. Change has to come from both sexes working separately and together on recognising red lines.
If Quakers first consider this for themselves, as Joel C Wallenberg suggests, they might then be in a better position to challenge this behaviour more generally.
Jenny Cozens
Mules and calves
The ‘iconic Quaker image’ of the two mules (22 June) with the message ‘Cooperation is better than conflict’ is much loved among Friends.
However, some years ago when I visited Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum, I was interested to note a predecessor of the Quaker image.
In the museum’s recreation of a Cooperative shop in the early 1900s was a small poster showing two calves torn between buckets of milk, with the message ‘Cooperation is better than competition’.
The two posters are clearly related. At the time I researched the dates and ‘calves in competition’ was created and produced on posters several years before ‘mules in conflict’. Was there ever an acknowledgement of the indebtedness?
Susan Robson
Cooperative schools
‘Private education does not sit at all well with our core beliefs’, wrote Jennifer Armstrong in her excellent letter (15 June). I agree.
The public/private divide in Britain’s education system is central to the maintenance of our increasingly unequal society. I wonder whether Quaker schools have considered joining our varied state system by adopting the model of self-governing Co-operative Trust Schools.
There are now hundreds of these schools all over Britain – secondary as well as primary. They have been an excellent way of resisting the recent trend of forcing schools to become academies.
Cooperative schools adopt a multi-stakeholder model of democratic governance – with students, parents, teachers and community representation on their councils, feeding into their governing bodies.
The cooperative values of caring for others, democracy, social responsibility, honesty, equality and self-help are not a million miles from those of the Religious Society of Friends. The cooperative movement, which supports cooperative schools, remains a living alternative to capitalist associational forms in many sectors. Anyone interested would do well to find out about the Schools Co-operative Society and/or the Co-operative College in Holyoake House in Manchester, if they are seeking advice as to the best way forward, school by school.
Stephen Yeo
Quirky Quakers
John Myhill (25 May) reminds us that there is some benefit from some of the older ways of worship that have long disappeared.
I well remember the long ministry in prayer – lying prostrate on the floor – of a dark-cloaked old lady. This was in the 1960s and was an ordeal for me at the time. The eldest member of the Meeting felt that it was too difficult to stand for twenty minutes, so remained seated. His comments were that the practice was mostly given up in the 1930s.
He wished others would follow suit. As I understand it from a Friends House librarian, the practice arose from the earliest days of our Society in times of persecution, when prayer in Quaker Meetings was interrupted by the authorities in order to make arrests.
By standing around a praying Friend the arrests would commence with the Friends standing – leaving the speaker to finish his prayer.
Peter Robson
Lessons
A reading of the ‘Thought for the Week’ entitled ‘Lessons’ (15 June) would not have left me aghast had I seen it in the Daily Telegraph, or even the Guardian. But the Friend?
Can it be that as Quakers, – with our wealth of insight, intuition, tenderness – and principles of equality between peoples, we could ever entertain fear or suspicion in the presence of another human being, based merely on their nationality – in this case, Russian? Sadly, it would appear that we could.
Two very worthy quotes spring to mind. The first is from Advice & queries 39: ‘Be discriminating when choosing means of entertainment and information.’
For further guidance let us consider: politics and mainstream media are the entertainment division of the industrial-military complex.
Beryl Williams
Seeds of a good idea planted
When I was a small boy growing up in Shaftesbury, Dorset, I was very impressed by a local landowner, who planted extensive woodland on the local hills, improving farming in surrounding valleys. I could never understand why adults did not seem interested in large-scale schemes to reduce flooding or prevent the spread of deserts.
Seventy years later the Woodland Trust has launched an imaginative project to create a ‘Northern Forest’ from Liverpool to Hull. The intention is to plant fifty million trees in twenty-five years to improve the environment of ten-plus cities and to combat climate change.
Our Meeting decided to support the first year’s planting in the Smithills Estate, near Bolton, in memory of Mary Sudbury, the Quaker and engineer who was born in Manchester and died earlier this year.
This would seem a good way for Quakers to follow up on the Canterbury Commitment to work for sustainability. Northern Meetings would appear to be particularly well placed to take a leading role, as this seems the right sort of scale to make a real difference.
Andrew Rutter
Building bridges
I read the accounts from Cambridge and Brighton (15 June and 22 June) with interest and a sense of recognition.
In Manchester our large central Meeting house is used by many organisations. Eleven years ago there were protests in the Jewish press about our allowing the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to hold meetings, including the claim that such meetings were an incitement to racial hatred.
Fortunately, Area Meeting (AM) had a well-established policy on lettings, and there was no evidence that the PSC had advocated violence at any of its meetings. After much discussion the letting was honoured. A number of Quakers attended so we could be sure about the character of the meeting.
The other response was to set up a bridge-building group – people from the Quaker and Jewish communities who met to get to know each other.
We did not always agree, but did understand each other better. When the Anne Frank exhibition was on in the cathedral members of the Jewish group invited Friends to put on an exhibition to show what Manchester Quakers had done to help Jewish refugees in the years leading to the second world war.
We did so, extending the exhibition to cover ways in which we had helped refugees and asylum seekers from other backgrounds. As AM clerk this was a stressful time, but we did seem to manage to bridge the divide. Recently, we agreed to a request from a nearby synagogue to use our Meeting house while they are homeless due to a redevelopment project.
Margaret Gregory
