Letters - 09 December 2011
From praying for peace to the question of tax
Quietly praying for peace
For the past eighteen months, Slough and Windsor Meeting has held a mid-week Meeting for Worship once a month in a public room of a centrally located bar. We had hoped to attract people unwilling to come into our Meeting house. A very small number have been attracted but none of them have continued. However, the Meetings have been more successful as in-reach and we have been grateful for support from other Meetings. The number of Quakers attending has averaged seven.
We decided to hold an extra Meeting at 11am on Armistice Day. Churches Together in Windsor were informed and this time we had nearly twenty, including Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans and a Catholic. We had deliberately avoided the word ‘silence’ by inviting people to ‘quietly pray for peace’. Nevertheless, our visitors expressed appreciation at having a chance to have more than a two minute silence at that time. We will be considering repeating the Armistice Day Meeting next year. Others may like to consider doing the same, either in their own Meeting houses or in a more public place.
David May-Bowles
White poppies
This year I am the mayor of Dorchester and, back in September, there were rumblings from a few members of the local branch of the Royal British Legion along the lines of ‘is the mayor going to wear her white poppy at the Remembrance Day service?’ My practice has been to wear both red and white.
I met with members of the Royal British Legion to explain my reasons. It was an open and frank meeting and, although most understood my reasons, there was a clear message that the Legion also stood for peace and that if people wanted to wear white poppies it would be better done at another time. For some, the wearing of a white poppy was considered insulting.
It seemed to me that a symbol that was supposed to be promoting the cause of peace was causing more conflict. I met with the two men who were really opposed to the white poppy on Remembrance Sunday and offered a compromise – if I did not wear my white poppy would they come to ‘a time for peace’ at another time? They agreed.
The Remembrance Day service was organised by myself and a United Church minister. We posed three questions around the subject of conflict with time for reflection afterwards. I had many positive responses about the Quaker silences and some even said that it was the most meaningful Remembrance Day service they had been to. We have agreed to hold ‘a time for peace’ next May and I have had a letter from the Royal British Legion saying that they will support any initiatives organised to promote world peace.
Was it a cop out or a compromise? It felt fine in the end and we have a new peace initiative in a town where there is a long-standing military tradition. I am grateful for the support of Dorchester Meeting and Churches Together.
Tess James
There will be a funeral
When my (ex) husband died in 2009, leaving his body to medical research, my son turned to me and said, ‘But how can we have a funeral if there is no body?’
It was a dilemma. It would have felt wrong to have a memorial service in the local church or some sort of gathering in the church hall, for Keith had been a long-standing attender at Blue Idol Meeting. We couldn’t go to a crematorium as there would be no body to be cremated. But we didn’t want to do nothing. We wanted, and needed, to mark his life and passing. The family thought long and hard about this, then asked the Meeting if we could hold a celebration of Keith’s life at Blue Idol Meeting House, to include Quaker silence together with poems, music, readings, Quaker ministry and refreshments afterwards.
A year later we were invited to a Service of Thanksgiving held at Central Hall, Westminster, and organised by the London and South East Committee of Anatomists. The friends and families of all those who donated their bodies to medical research were invited. There were thousands of people there. It was an impressive and moving celebration, encompassing all religions as well as including thoughtful, secular contributions. We were also invited to the Streatham Crematorium where, early in the morning, before the general public held their services, the bodies of those who had been used for research were cremated. It was a gentle occasion: a very brief service led by a sensitive Anglican priest. My daughter collected the ashes a couple of days later and, after a few weeks, Friends gathered to scatter these in the garden at the Meeting house after Meeting for Worship one Sunday.
So rather than no funeral, there have, to date, been four events to mark Keith’s life.
Kim Hope
Moving forward
The recent (18-20 November) residential weekend gathering of the Progressive Christianity Network (PCN) of Britain at Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden near Chester was an ecumenical gathering that included two Quakers.
Those present were considering the key themes of Karen Armstrong’s book The Case for God, led by John Churcher, a Methodist minister and chair of PCN Britain. The Quakers left sufficient copies of Quaker Faith & Practice on a table for everyone present to take one, and they were invited to do so.
On Sunday morning, the four groups who had been discussing the implications of Armstrong’s argument were asked to present their responses on practical ways forward – as individuals and for PCN Britain as an organisation. The first group to do so, a mix of Anglicans, Methodists, United Reformed Church, a Unitarian and one of the Quakers, did the whole of their presentation using only quotations from Quaker Faith & Practice (slightly adapted in some cases). The whole gathering found it inspiring and encouraging.
The initiative to do their presentation in that form had not come from the Quaker.
Michael Wright
Winter fuel allowance
I am sending my winter fuel allowance to a charity for the elderly (2 December) but will not be including Gift Aid because the allowance is paid tax-free.
Ioan Thomas
Housing sympathies
I couldn’t but sympathise with Kester Ratcliff and Friends attempting to save the Bristol Quaker Workhouse and bring it back into a good twenty-first century use. It reminded me of how I and other members of a London Quaker action group set up the Some Friends Community (SFC) in east London some forty years ago. We wanted to live communally as an alternative to a ‘happy family’ life, which we saw as not being available to all, and as an alternative to the bed-sitter, which was too lonely for some.
Whilst we used Quaker methods and acted as a co-operative, in effect we achieved this goal following the approach of an unusual activist-entrepreneur, ‘B’. He worked for a radical Christian charity but had money of his own. He identified disused buildings owned by a London council. Eventually they agreed to let the upper floors of a Victorian ‘over-the-shop’ type building to us. ‘B’ lent from his own pocket so that we could fit out the place, making ten or so rooms and proper escape routes in case of fire. I lived at SFC for seventeen years and it kept going until 2008 – but that’s another story.
This positive, and Kester’s negative, experience suggests that if Quakers can successfully combine the entrepreneurial and the co-operative then big things can happen. After all, Quaker entrepreneurs used to abound – they developed nice new economic ways of making iron, biscuits and chocolate without which our present world would be very different.
Perhaps we need a Quaker Development Academy to foster the co-operative and the entrepreneurial in tandem, all powered by Meeting for Worship! Do let me know when its first meeting will be!
Jeffery Smith
The question of tax
Recent letters to the Friend have considered the question of withholding a proportion of one’s taxes as a protest against military spending. It can be tempting to present the argument in terms of easy syllogisms and question begging. The truth can be a little bit more complicated than that.
Notably, I do not think I have ever heard a plea to be allowed to withhold tax payments equivalent to funding for the domestic police forces. Yet, a functioning police force must be underpinned by some degree of militarism, with rule of law requiring the state to have the monopoly on violence: with it being vital that those agents of the state who abuse their power are held to account.
The greatest burden of my criticism, however, is the unfalsifiable nature of assurances of approval - were those withheld taxes to go towards ‘more just causes’. Humanitarian aid will often be required in conflict or disaster zones. There may be a distinction in the minds of anti-war activists between opposing the presence of Western troops and murderous violence towards any perceived Western influence, but there is none in those who recently launched appalling attacks against unarmed aid workers in Afghanistan.
From my conversations with serving soldiers, I am in no doubt they would seek to interpose themselves between endangered aid workers and potential attackers.
It is often said that war situations divides us into sheep and wolves. There appears to me to be a third category. Sheepdogs.
Alec Macpherson-Glasgow
