Letters - 16 August 2019
From Quaker schools to Marjorie Sykes
At its heart
What is the problem many Quakers have with Quaker schools? At Sibford School where I am on the school committee (its governing body), we are not funded by Quaker money but by parents’ fees. We are not run by the Society of Friends either, though we have a Quaker head. The governing body is largely Quaker, however, which ensures Quaker values and ethos permeate throughout the school, having a profound effect on everyone. We are a fantastic source of outreach. Would critics prefer us to close down the schools early Quakers founded?
Some say private education is elitist. Don’t all members of society benefit from Quaker values? We offer places to a diverse range of families and help those in need with generous bursaries. Some people will always opt for a private education (particularly as state schools are increasingly struggling with underfunding).
We are not a hot-house school but are a non-selective, broad-intake school that nurtures each individual child. Our pastoral care is outstanding and we are proud of this. We have our share of high flyers but also run a wonderful ‘support for learning’ department, which enables pupils with dyslexia to succeed far beyond their expectations, and less academic children are offered numerous paths to achieving successful qualifications and career paths.
We produce well-rounded young people who leave school confident that they can make a difference in the world. I invite critics to visit us to see what we are really about. I think you will be impressed. What better way to instil Quaker values in wider society than to educate children at a school run with the Quaker ethos at its heart?
Sarah Lane
Tone of the gathering
There is a Quaker side to Reg Naulty’s review of Appeasing Hitler (2 August). In September 1938 the Quaker parliamentarian T Edmund Harvey was among the many MPs who welcomed prime minister Neville Chamberlain back to parliament after the Munich Agreement, writing to his wife, Irene, how Neville Chamberlain ‘carried the House away – many congratulated him, me included’.
The Munich Agreement was sufficiently important to the Quakers that they convened a special gathering about it, held in Friends House in November 1938 and bringing some 1,500 Quakers together from Britain, Europe and America. The tone of the gathering was one of penitence for the Quakers’ failure in the twenty years since the end of the first world war to have used the interval ‘to better advantage for the Kingdom of God’. The Quaker process of silent worship ‘led the Meeting into a deep place in which one after another testified to the peace and power of God and to a deep sense of humility in our human weakness and failure’.
The Quakers felt very deeply their responsibility for the settlement at the end of the first world war, which they judged had been unfair to Germany and had caused the rise of Nazism.
An influential figure of the time, Corder Catchpool, took his support for the redress of Germany’s grievances so far as to be accused of being pro-Nazi. Generally, the Quakers’ response to the approach of war was one of bewilderment and self-searching.
Mark Frankel
Minutes and happenings
This is a propos of David Boulton and Elizabeth Bailey on Peterloo (26 July). I was clerk of London and Middlesex General Meeting on the day of the big anti-Iraq war demo in London on 15 February 2003. I have checked the minutes and it does not show up there at all, even though many Friends went straight from the Meeting session in Westminster Meeting House to Trafalgar Square. The fact that something does not appear in the minutes is not sufficient evidence that it did not happen.
We stick far too slavishly to local agendas. I understand that, once upon a time, there was an item at the end of every agenda for ‘Such other business as the Lord may show us’. If it was still there, Quaker Business Meetings might show more awareness of the world.
Margot Lunnon
Gratitude and positivity
We should feel gratitude for the good things we have been given, and do our best to make something positive out of the negative. The latter may need much courage – and willingness to suffer.
Suggestions that we feel guilty for the good things, or about our forebears’ misuse of privilege are unhelpful. Neither is it helpful to get trapped in victimhood. As Maya Angelou said (in 1993): ‘History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.’
It is only human to react to disaster with tears, anger, frustration – to exclaim: ‘It isn’t fair!’ Life is not fair. However, we are left with the challenge of what to do about it. It may be an opportunity. Maybe only patience and time will reveal that it was not quite the setback it seemed. Waiting can be a huge challenge to such basic trust we might have in a loving God.
Karen Armstrong wrote that ‘the religious quest is not about discovering “the truth” or “the meaning of life”, but about living as intensely as possible in the here and now… to discover how to be fully human’. She came to believe that at the heart of all the great religions is compassion. She was echoing Saint Paul: ‘Faith, hope and love… the greatest of these is love.’ We all need that compassion, that loving kindness, if we are to become the people we have it within us to be.
Patricia Gosling
The time is now
In response to ‘Looking for cows’ by Dana Littlepage Smith (2 August) may I offer the following, from Stephen Grellet: ‘I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.’
Rajan Naidu
Influence and experience
I am one of the ‘significant minority’ of UK Quakers who self-identify as nontheists. I always spend the first few minutes of silent worship reminding myself of the external factors that shape everything I think, say and do.
While acknowledging the inevitability of being influenced by those factors, I also recognise that this can result in a disconnection from how one actually is.
Silent worship facilitates a condition of mind in which I can reconnect with my true self. This leads me to identify, and take ownership of, the values of peace, equality, truth and simplicity. The alignment of those inner values with the Quaker testimonies is the bedrock of my membership of the Religious Society of Friends.
I do not pretend to understand silent worship – any more than I can understand why, for example, music can inspire us. It is a mystical experience (those practices of contemplation and self-surrender by which we gain knowledge of ethics and aesthetics that is inaccessible to the intellect) and I see no value in trying to do other than simply accept it.
Whatever different opinions might be offered to explain my experience, the experience itself remains what it is. And it is the experience, not descriptive words about its provenance, that I regard as the ‘essential in which we are unified’.
Like some other nontheists I have been the recipient of negative comment about my refusal to attribute my experience to God, spirituality or anything else. I am saddened and puzzled that some Friends see this as a source of disunity.
Glenn Hull
Marjorie Sykes
I have recently finished my research about Marjorie Sykes, the UK Quaker and educator who went to live in India in the 1920s and joined the Indian independence movement. It has taken me all over the UK and India tracking down people and information. The outcome is a lengthy and heavy manuscript. Most of it comprises a collection of hard to find, out of print and translated texts of Marjorie’s thoughts. I believe that someday perhaps a research scholar may find it useful. In such case I would be happy to send them a copy.
Norman Smith
smithmnorman@gmail.com
