Letters - 08 June 2018
From understanding and articulating to disunited nations
Understanding and articulating
I enjoyed Richard Seebohm’s article (25 May) but was stopped in my tracks by a comment about the afterlife in relation to Alzheimer’s. The assumption is that since people with the condition seem to have no sentient life they illustrate the possibility that there is no eternity for any of us in the sense of an afterlife.
A common premise is that because people at an advanced stage of dementia cannot communicate with us on our terms they effectively cease to exist as sentient beings. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, when I worked with adults with dementia, we understood that they gradually withdraw into their own interior mindscape. Even before the terminal stages of the illness, when communication is increasingly difficult, the utterances of the ill person can be seen to have their own rationale which, by careful response and validation, make perfect sense in terms of the life lived, and earlier experiences of attachment and loss.
People with Alzheimer’s might not be sentient on our terms but they are intensely feeling beings, their lives dominated by primitive feelings of frustration, fear and anxiety (sometimes expressed as anger) in a world they cannot control or understand. We used a technique called validation therapy and, drawing on attachment theory, made physical and emotional contact through therapeutic circle dance.
If we try to understand all people on their own terms, our hopes for ourselves become easier to see and articulate, and we don’t consign anyone to the margins of our particular heaven.
Dorothy Jerrome
Worship and wisdom
I agree that we need to find words that speak to a wider audience. We also need to communicate the richness and depth of our collective and individual understanding and experience. I want to use the word ‘worship’ because for me it is about connecting to deep wisdom. I am opening myself to a presence that is always there when I remember to tap into it. Being guided by that wisdom is a spiritual practice that helps me find my direction. Meeting one another in worship is a sacred act.
This discussion is part of a wider issue about inclusivity and how we share our knowledge with others without over-simplifying. We need to engage creatively with this issue, so we can pass on our gifts and learn from others. Being open-hearted and welcoming is to invite people to join us in our journey, to be part of our faith community and make a home with us, if they wish. Quaker faith & practice is invaluable because it is an evolving anthology of our wisdom that describes our core beliefs and practices in a way that is open to new light and grounded in tested experience and beliefs. We are not asked to agree with it all; simply to find what speaks to us in that moment. Its purpose is to reflect our leadings and discoveries, with all our differences, struggles and insights. It defines who we are and why we are with many different words. Let us be enriched by diversity!
Ruth Tod
John Dennithorne and Doreen Robb
In 1952 a Friend called Doreen Robb wrote and illustrated (with lithographs) A Promise of Rain: an impression of a Welsh mining valley. A small number of copies had been published by Hornsea School of Art Press. She gave one copy to the Quaker and sculptor John Dennithorne, who for decades had worked among the unemployed around Merthyr Tydfil, an area which she also knew.
I am researching Quaker work in the region from the 1920s onwards and the life of John Dennithorne. I would like to reproduce some pages with illustrations from this 1952 publication. I would welcome information about the writer and to know from whom I might get permission to use the work.
I would also be glad to hear from any Friends who knew John Dennithorne, who died in 1984.
Christine Trevett
christinetrevett01@gmail.com
Kneeling ministry
I was interested to read John Myhill’s letter (25 May) about this rare phenomenon – kneeling ministry. He is the first person I have heard speak of it.
My first visit to a Quaker Meeting for Worship was in Birmingham in 1949 or 1950. I think it was in the Handsworth area, held in a hall. Not knowing anything about worship, but having been brought up in a pacifist family during the second world war, I was interested to learn more of the Quaker Peace Testimony.
I persuaded a friend to accompany me to Meeting one Sunday. At the time we were both sixteen or seventeen. We entered the building at the start of the Meeting. Everybody was settled, so we sat down on the two remaining empty chairs in the front row of a semi-circle and waited for it to begin – and waited and waited.
At least half an hour into the Meeting the person beside us knelt down to pray, so, ‘naturally’, we followed suit. It was only on rising that we saw that everyone else had been standing!
On leaving the Meeting my friend said: ‘Never, never ask me to go a Quaker Meeting again. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life!’
Thank goodness that today we have someone on the door welcoming everyone, especially first-time visitors, and handing them written material describing how a Meeting for Worship operates.
That first experience did not prevent me from becoming a Quaker, but I have never experienced kneeling ministry since.
Mary Stone
John Myhill asks if praying on one’s knees has been part of any Friends’ experience.
I attended Hitchen Meeting in Hertfordshire in the 1940s and 1950s when Edith Grubb (daughter of Edmund Grubb, the Quaker theologian), although no longer young, would sink to her knees to offer vocal prayer. She knelt on a hassock. Hassocks used, in times past, to be provided in Meeting houses. I do not remember whether we stood up at the same time.
In addition, the contributions to ministry of another member, George Parker, who was a professional singer and teacher, were sung.
The prayers and singing added much to the depth of the Meeting.
E Mary Andrews
Population control
Speaking ‘truth to power’, we should be involved in all those activities controlling our population increase. Is it time we took a public stance in favour of termination of unwanted pregnancies?
Those who watched David Attenborough’s programme Blue Planet II, are well aware of his recurrent theme that the ever-increasing number of our own species is the primary cause of the universal degradation of the planet.
In those countries where population control has been established benefits have followed: a rise in economic standards, education, women’s suffrage and better nutrition.
The traditional controlling factors of world population were flood, famine, war, and diseases such as plague, TB, smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, measles and diphtheria. Nowadays appropriate vaccination programmes are continuously updated.
In my latter years as a GP, in my maternity booking clinic when a patient said she was pregnant my immediate response was: ‘Do you want to be?’ Every child should be wanted by its mother. Otherwise its future is bleak.
I believe it is time for Friends to support any campaign for all women to have the option of terminating unwanted pregnancies. Many people will argue that such a concept is impractical. Sixty-five years ago, when I was in Northern Nigeria, I was approached by women asking for sterilisation, with words like: ‘I have ten children, it is enough.’ I have seen Irish women make a similar plea.
Today there are several hopeful changes to our social thinking. Some churches are more tolerant of termination. The ‘facts of life’ should be taught in all schools.
Edwin J Wrigley
Disunited nations
In the 1930s the League of Nations failed to intervene to prevent or punish Nazi Germany’s expansion and its occupation of other countries. Its involvement in the Spanish civil war, which became a proxy war, was an example of where an aggressor practiced for a future world war.
The League was discredited and disbanded. Perhaps it is time for its successor, the United Nations, to be replaced, as it cannot deal with an imperialist superpower that is taking a dominant role in a proxy war in Syria.
Neil Simmons
Comments
Edwin J Wrigley will be interested to know that there are already Friends addressing the issue of population
Our group Quaker Concern Over Population was established in 2013 as the result of a minute of Gloucester Area Meeting recognising my Concern about population growth. Our website is on qcop.org.uk We have organised a number of events including at Bath and Warwick YMGs.
While we would most certainly support a woman’s rights over her own body, it is even more important to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. The website discusses the case for this and gives numerous examples of what is happening around the world. It also discusses population and consumption, and what we as individuals can do.
We invite Friends to join us, and there are contact details and an application form on the site
By RogerP on 7th June 2018 - 20:17
Please login to add a comment
