Letters - 19 February 2016
From Area Meetings to ethical banking
Are Area Meetings necessary?
Area Meeting is certainly not the most exciting evening event. But, as an organisation without a separate priesthood, it is a vital working gathering and when I am able to make it – when childcare and transport arrangements are met – it is also a spiritually deepening experience as I discern with Friends on matters affecting the life of Meetings. I try to go mostly because I enjoy a sense of belonging to many of these Local Meetings (LMs).
I serve as an assistant clerk in my ‘home’ LM. I typically worship there on two Sundays of the month. I travel out of my way to additional Meetings on other Sundays. This is because in my home Meeting, located in the centre of the metropolis, my son is the only regular child attender. Although he has developed a loving relationship with the Meeting and especially with his main carers there, our LM is not able to offer what some Meetings in the suburbs can: the norm of seeing, hearing and worshipping with children.
It has been enriching both for my child and myself not only to befriend Quaker children of all ages and their families and learn from the ‘First Day School teachers’, but to feel ordinary and integral in our diverse Quaker community in the widest sense.
The Area Meeting structure has given us a way to build our life as a young Quaker family. It serves as an anchoring point to grow roots and contribute to a Quaker community beyond our Local Meeting.
E. Elize Sakamoto
Qualified pacifism
Andrew Clark’s letter (22 January) encouraging a move along the path of nonlethal (noninjurious) weapons, ‘as a necessary part of just policing in extremis’, has stimulated a return to research in this sector.
Though monitoring of nonlethal technologies is ongoing at the Univeity of Bradford’s Department of Peace Studies, coordinated by Michael Crowley, it focuses on the adverse effects of selected technologies.
The original proposal, set out in a master’s dissertation at Bradford, went far beyond this, proposing the use of nonlethal, noninjurious strategies and technologies to intervene impartially in low-intensity armed conflict, enabling mediation to get under way. The theory was outlined by a special interest group in the Pentagon and advocated by MP John Gilbert, then Britain’s defence minister.
The late Nicholas Gillett was the most active in a large group of supporters in this country, but the research was discontinued because material on the motivation for the Pentagon’s work in this area, included in good faith in the dissertation, turned out to be invalid.
Andrew Clark has prompted further reflection and a colleague, experienced in disaster relief and reconstruction, who has repeatedly seen at first-hand the devastation caused by armed conflict in the Middle East and Asia, is now applying to relevant university departments to further this work.
Barbara Panvel
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