Letters - 16 June 2023
From Citizenship to Non-resistance
Citizenship
Steven Burkeman (26 May) almost writes my story.
I too – having been denied German citizenship at birth, because we were sort-of Jewish – applied to have it restored. It took a long time, with a lot of frustration, but I finally succeeded, and I felt grateful to the very kind young woman who steered us through the labyrinth.
Now I have two passports – a British one and a German one. Other members of the family have done the same, as I describe in my book How to be a Refugee.
As for Brexit – the stupidity of that beggars description.
Irene Gill
Virginia Woolf
I was interested in the Virginia Woolf article (26 May). My great-great-grandfather’s cousin, Hannah Whitall Smith, quoted in Quaker faith & practice 21.48 and prolific Quaker author, had to raise her granddaughters in England after her daughter Mary ran away to Italy with the Jewish art dealer Bernard Berenson and moved into the Villa Il Tati in Florence. It was a scandal in my Quaker family.
Her granddaughter Karin married Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s younger brother.
Apparently Virginia Woolf thought her Quaker-raised sister-in-law and her Quaker relatives to be quite boring.
Except perhaps, indirectly, in the 1903 excerpt in Quaker faith & practice 21.48: ‘I find (growing older) even more delightful than I thought. It is so delicious to be done with things and to feel no need any longer to concern myself about earthly affairs…’
According to Wikipedia, Hannah’s gay son, Logan, was in part the basis for the character Nicholas Greene in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I have never read.
David Hickok
What canst thou say?
I was sad to read the various letters recently, expressing regret at not being able to talk about God, or feeling excluded as Christian Quakers, or that Britain Yearly Meeting is becoming a friendly society not a Religious Society.
Mary Stone’s letter (26 May) asks how we can explain what Quakers believe or do in Meeting, when asked by newcomers.
For me, Tony D’Souza’s Thought for the week (26 May) answers all these concerns in a simple, concise and powerful way. Waiting in the Light we can encounter the divine, and rather than rely on the second-hand messages in the Bible, find the word of God within. This is what it means to be a Quaker, this is what we do in Meeting, this is our timeless message. And when we encounter the Inner Light, definitions of ‘God’ become meaningless.
Perhaps Tony’s piece should be published as one of the explanatory leaflets put out by Yearly Meeting?
George Penaluna
Understand our differences
My first impressions of Quakers, about sixty years ago, brought a sense of openness and tolerance, and I had hoped, after forty years of membership, that these attitudes remain the same.
So I was distressed to see, in recent letters to the Friend, that some Friends feel afraid to speak of their Christian beliefs in Meeting, feeling that others belittle those beliefs. Meanwhile non-Christian Friends may also feel isolated.
Each of us is free to have our own beliefs, yet also need to respect and try to understand those of others. Advices & queries 17 may help here, as may the feeling of oneness and togetherness which can come to us as we ‘centre down’ into our Meeting for Worship. And, after all this, perhaps we may feel able to discuss together our differences and similarities.
Judith Smith
Religious experience
The religious experience that attracted me to Friends is sadly what now excludes. I was hooked before I realised that ‘my type’ has been marginalised within this Yearly Meeting for some time.
My experience would have been core to Friends of previous generations. It includes an openness to radical spiritual/illuminist and more orthodox insights, though is not fixated upon doctrine.
Might a few of us still be hanging on? Do you have a sense of the experiential but also rational reality of God? Combined with a focus upon Jesus, as discovered within the gospels? Also, the liberating faith about Jesus Christ, emerging within the New Testament texts? Is the indwelling and living Presence of the Spirit of Christ at the core of who you are or hope to be? Is worship a shared time of prayer, devotion, communion, joy and inspiration? Is your heart and mind open to the profound insights of diverse peoples, faiths and philosophies; yet you know the transformation that comes from exploring a peculiar path?
If all of the above mirrors your experience, please get in touch for mutual correspondence and encouragement: friendoftheway@gmail.com.
Daniel Hughes
What’s in a name
Regarding Stephen Petter’s concerns (5 May), for the corrected re-printing of which much thanks.
The name ‘Jesus’ appears about seventy-five times in the fifth edition of Quaker faith & practice. We can easily compare this to the 1883 Book of Christian Discipline, searchable online, in which that name appears forty-eight times. A search for ‘Christ’ produces 154 hits in the 1883 book, and sixty-seven in the current red book. ‘Christ’ has thirty entries in the index of the 1960s’ blue book. Using this very crude measure, it is not obvious that the Society has rushed to abandon its undoubted Christian roots.
The 1883 book of discipline describes our Society in terms that might be familiar to evangelical Friends in East Africa or South America today, what US Friends would call ‘Gurneyite’ Quaker faith. But it’s now been almost 130 years since the younger Rowntrees and Braithwaites (no relation!) set our Yearly Meeting on its present course, one heavily influenced by Rufus Jones’ mystical interpretation of Quaker faith. Maybe that experiment has run its course. If so, what is the result?
Some Christian Friends – and Christians are still a majority of our membership, I think – see the vigour of the evangelical branches as pointing the way back to a Society in which we are all very firmly Christians. But what kind of Christian? That evangelical Society of 1883 was itself a phase, perhaps owing at least as much to John Wesley as to George Fox.
There’s a good case to be made that the earliest Friends were not Protestant Christians, at least not in the same sense as were the Congregationalists who dominated the Commonwealth parliament and the New Model Army at the time. And very much not as the Anglicans who returned to power with the restoration.
Friends were not preparing souls to be saved from hellfire and damnation come judgement day when Christ returned in some unknowable future. And maintaining social niceties in the meantime. Unknowable but soon, always soon, soon for 1,600 years and the wars of the Three Kingdoms disappointed the Puritans by turning out not to be it.
The earliest Friends believed that Christ had returned, already; it was an accomplished fact, the kingdom had come. Now. Here it is. Christ had returned to teach his people himself – in 1652.
What kind of ‘Christians’ might we Quakers be today if we all believed that proposition? A proposition thoroughly uncredal, entirely heretical, socially outrageous, politically dangerous, and completely unorthodox; one entirely condemned by every other church.
Keith Braithwaite
Non-resistance
Historically, non-resistance, Sermon on the Mount – ‘resist not evil with evil, but return evil with good’ – was a defining feature of Quakerism. I can identify religious and secular grounds for this type of active dynamic pacifism.
Does the Society still hold with this conviction today or is this a piece of Quaker history?
Gerard Bane
