Letters - 27 May 2016
From love and truth to peace on the streets
Where love and truth cohere
I am grateful to Rachel Britton for her article (20 May).
It is right that we should struggle with words in order to broaden our understanding, but too often words divide, sometimes because we make assumptions about what others mean by a word rather than a fundamental difference of experience. This is especially true of the word ‘God’.
After many years struggle I found I couldn’t do without it as a word, but I am very conscious that when I use it my meaning is different from that of others. I use it because I believe that my glimpses of a power of love that seems beyond myself, but at the same time is to be found deep within myself, are part of the same human experience that is encompassed by the more formal understanding of God held by most ‘religious people’. I understand why many Friends reject it; I did so for many years because it is so closely associated with the formal meaning. The experience is paramount, for me as it was for early Quakers, even if I can only dimly understand what its source might be.
George Fox warned against notions. Friends meet together in silence and find the experience sufficiently nurturing, empowering or life-changing that we continue to do it. Can we celebrate that experience, and live out its imperatives, without getting too hung up on how each of us tries to use words to explain it? Don’t let the words divide us; let them be a means of learning from one another.
Roger Sturge
Membership
David Fish (20 May) suggests that we should do as early Quakers and have no formal membership. I have some sympathy with the view that membership is unQuakerly. But we’re in a different world from that of the early Quakers.
Most members, I suggest, greatly value their formal association with like-minded Friends. But we are also constrained by current legal obligations. There are huge consequences to abandoning our current legal structures: our constitution is constrained by Charity Commission requirements. Our representatives at national level have negotiated with the Commission and achieved substantial modifications to cater for our Quaker peculiarities, but we have to live with the remaining discomforting aspects, just as we compromise by adhering to restricted forms of wording in Quaker marriages, as decreed in law.
If we did not comply with the requirements of charity law, charitable status would be removed. My understanding is that our assets – finances and property – cannot be taken out of the charity sector, and so could not be retained and would be passed to other charities.
Without formal membership, isn’t it the case – however unlikely it may seem – that finances and property could be diverted to other, dubious, purposes by the attendance of people with ulterior motives?
Mike Brayshaw
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