Letters - 22 May 2015
From equality to Australia
Some are more equal than others
At one of the special interest groups of the recent Yearly Meeting (YM) a politician’s name was mentioned and elicited both boos and hisses. This upset a friend of mine so much that she may not come to YM again. It seems inappropriate behaviour for Quakers, who are expected to regard each human being as ‘unique, precious, a child of God’.
I am afraid that this is an example of what I see quite often: people justifiably angry at a situation or action making a vehement attack on the person or persons involved, rather than treating those people as precious human beings and trying to remember that they may be innocent of malevolent intentions.
In my conversations I have also found out that there are many Quakers who are afraid to be open about what they think in case they get vilified for having different views from what others see as being the only acceptable Quaker response. There are Quakers who hide the fact that they read The Times newspaper from Friends. Others dare not say that they think the grammar school system has its merits.
Let us be angry about things but let us not become angry Quakers who fail to love those who think differently from us. Let us listen calmly and openly to other people’s ideas and realise that there may be more than one way of thinking about an issue.
Mary Meeks
Yearly Meeting epistle
While I commend our Yearly Meeting clerk for the Britain Yearly Meeting 2015 epistle, am I the only Friend who feels not a little regret that the word ‘God’ does not appear once in it?
We are a religious society. We are a community of faith – a very broad one, yes, and may it always be so, but a community of faith nevertheless. We are not simply a community of shared political and social philosophies, ever so worthy though they may be (and I share many of them).
If ‘deep faith is our source of courage’ then deep faith in what?
Ian Barnett
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