Letters - 19 January 2018
From a caring response to Brexit
A caring response
Mary Brown (5 January) offers a kind and caring response to the needs of our friends with dementia and other needs associated with old age that prevent them from getting to our Quaker Meetings and being included in our Quaker communities.
This prompts some questions:
First, what do we know of the Quaker care homes in our Society? Given that they are independent trusts and charities, much like our Quaker schools, do we know what they are doing in our name and do we support them collectively? Is there a role for Quaker chaplains for elderly care, much as we have chaplains for prisons, universities and hospitals?
Dealing with dementia and later-life care is quite a specialist demand from regular members, elders and overseers. How do we meet the needs of our most elderly and mentally frail who can no longer be part of our regular worshipping communities?
Janet Thomas
Being a catalyst
Roland Carn (5 January) quotes George Lakey [the Quaker activist and writer who spoke to Friends at Yearly Meeting Gathering 2017] telling a story of witnessing a couple fighting in the street and not knowing how to help beyond calling out ‘I’m watching you’ – meaning, I guess: ‘I am a witness’. The fighting continued.
This puts me in mind of a story my teacher once told. He was strolling across London with his wife one day when they came across a young couple fighting. A crowd had built up around the fighting couple. Before my teacher knew what was happening his wife had grabbed hold of his shirt, pinned him against the wall and started shouting, yelling and screaming at him. They had taken over the fighting role, rather than remaining witnesses. The crowd were distracted and the young couple stopped fighting.
Catalysts come in unexpected forms and sometimes we need to risk engaging.
Sue Holden
Red and white poppies
I’m a bit confused by Peter Boyce’s letter (10 November). I don’t dispute that the Royal British Legion does good work supporting those who were ‘used by our country’, although I think it’s shameful that they are not supported by the government out of taxpayers’ money.
Peter seems to be supporting the British Legion’s criticism of the Peace Pledge Union for attacking the ‘glamorisation of war’. He asks: ‘Is there a single person who wears the [red] poppy to glamorise war?’
I would like to suggest that there is a wider picture here. As far as I can see the Remembrance Day events around the country, especially the event at the Cenotaph in London, do glamorise war and that includes wearing red poppies. Poppies and medals worn by ex-servicemen with pride promote the idea that it is honourable and brave to die for one’s country. As a Quaker I feel more comfortable to promote peace heroes rather than war heroes.
Peter also seems to be saying that the sale of ‘replacement poppies’ is misguided and then appears to contradict this by saying that ‘we Quakers [should] wear the white poppy throughout the year’.
Anne MacArthur
In my article on ‘Discernment and inner values’ (5 January) I mentioned our white poppy stall and our proposed banner, which was going to read ‘Red Poppies for remembrance of the past and White Poppies for hope for peace in the future’.
Friends might like to know that before printing the banner, we asked the local British Legion if they would like to meet us. Two people came to tea and we had an interesting conversation in which they said: ‘Please don’t refer to us in your banner. Like you, we are for peace.’
They explained that they were happy for us to give out white poppies. Red poppies are sold to raise money for the welfare of soldiers and families who had suffered in war. We all wish for peace.
In the event, we found that most of the younger people who we approached were pleased to be given a poppy, and we are now thinking how we might build on our experience.
Ruth Tod
Welcoming Prayer
Madeleine Kay describes the commonalities and differences between Experiment with Light and Focusing. I have recently discovered another connection.
Centring Prayer, as developed by Thomas Keating, includes the Welcoming Prayer as a way of breaking into habitual unhelpful emotional patterns. Cynthia Bourgeault describes it as a ‘window of opportunity’, first referred to by Evagrius, a fourth century desert father. It teaches that if I can spot an emotional discomfort at an early stage, I can recognise it and let go, rather than letting it build up into a fully developed state of, say, fear or anger.
Welcoming Prayer has three components. First, focus on the sensation in the body. Second, welcome the sensation/emotion and go back and forth between focusing and the welcoming. Third, let go – this is the point of awareness and surrender.
Rosemary Field
Addiction and fellowship
In her report of the Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs (QAAD) weekend at Charney Manor (12 January) Yveline Arnaud reports one recovering alcoholic saying that unlike QAAD gatherings he had never had an opportunity in an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting to meet with people from other fellowships.
But many AA members today are dually and even multiply addicted and belong to various fellowships. The city near where I live has three treatment centres for addicts who are routinely ferried to AA and other Twelve Step meetings, though in an AA meeting they are asked to confine their sharing to their alcohol problem. At AA conventions AA speakers often share the platform with Al-Anon members. [Al-Anon is a programmme of recovery for people who are affected by another person’s drinking, whether that be a friend or family member.]
Anonymous
(Name and address supplied)
Thanks and applause
Further to the letter from Peter Rivers (12 January), ‘new non-Quaker trustees’ are not the only ones ‘bemused’ by the Quaker practice of neither thanking each other nor applauding.
When I raised this at my Meeting for Worship recently, two septuagenarians, one a birthright member, both educated at Quaker schools, and whose Quaker family credentials stretch back for generations, were also incredulous!
But I’ve encountered this practice previously, most notably at the end of a summer gathering, when the children presented their stories about the week – and were met by a cold wall of silence. I have tried to find an explanation for this, but without success. Enlightenment, please?
Jan Lethbridge
Quakers and spirituality
I found Madeleine Kay’s article on Quakers and spirituality (5 January) very interesting, especially the inclusion of Experiment with Light and Focusing as being important methods. Yet I could not accept the conclusion that most Friends today do not experience something deeply moving, and that for many the profoundly spiritual is unavailable to them because of a secularisation of the Society.
Those Friends who I see and read about today seem to me to have ‘extraordinary commitment, enthusiasm and energy’ – like early Quakers had, but in a different way. To me everything is sacred – for example, a poem is prayer-like if read with a sense of presence and bearing witness to the divinity within us all.
The article I found very informative and worthwhile, but conclusions, I find, can sometimes be too definitive.
Miriam Ryan
‘Go Beyond’
Some Friends know Quakerism as an internal mystical experience, while others take a more rationalist approach.
Perhaps, following the teaching of the great last-century mystic Bede Griffiths, all we need to do is to go beyond these dualities of human concepts towards ‘the non-dual mystery which embraces and transcends all; otherwise we are going to destroy one another’ (Bede Griffiths, The Mystery Beyond, 1997). And perhaps Quakers are best placed to ‘Go Beyond’.
Harry Underhill
Brexit
Friends who are angered or dismayed by Brexit should please be reassured that we are not withdrawing from the Council of Europe, which is explicitly founded on the essay of William Penn in 1693 and includes Russia as a member.
The primary purpose of leaving the EU – being, in the view of many, simply to regain national sovereignty – should not of itself harm our relationships with all Europeans.
John Arnold
