My life, my faith
Rachel Rees reports on an initiative in Leicester Meeting that combines conversations, publications and outreach to other faith communities.
Like many other Meetings, we wonder how we can get to know one another better. Every week after Meeting we drink tea together and talk. But there are lots of us and many things to attend to: meetings, rotas, you know the sort of thing. Then there is the important task of making sure newcomers are welcomed.
So, often we go home none the wiser about each other’s journeys, what brought us to Leicester Meeting in the first place or what keeps bringing us back. There is highfalutin language and lots written about it: a desire to share our spiritual lives together and our reticence to get down to it. There is no one solution. Things move on. We will never have it sorted.
Trying something new
One thing we are doing in Leicester is arranging a series of public, intimate, conversations. Started by Marilyn Ricci, a Leicester Quaker, playwright and poet, they take place in our library and are open to all.
‘I came from a smaller Meeting,’ Marilyn says. ‘When I first attended Leicester I wondered how on earth I’d come to know people. In Milton Keynes I had cherished the talks people gave about their own spiritual journeys. I thought it might work in Leicester, too.’
Leicester took up Marilyn’s challenge. We began with people preparing and delivering their own talks. Marilyn recalls, ‘they were held in the evenings and some of them were rather long, I wanted the children to be able to come, to want to come.’
We started with older Friends – perhaps wanting to make sure we had heard from them before going wider.
‘I thought we should ask a cross-section – young, old, men, women – those who had been Quakers for a long time and those who had come from other places’.
The talks turned into interviews or conversations when one brave soul who had offered to be a guinea pig for Marilyn’s new approach asked her to help out. ‘She was nervous, wanted me to be there with her.’
Heart and mind prepared
The format stuck. But Marilyn is keen to emphasise that these are not confessionals, or interviews in which people come unstuck or unwittingly exposed. ‘I always work with participants beforehand to make sure they feel prepared. This is a very important part of the process.’ She starts this preparation with a questionnaire and spends a good few hours in advance helping people to think through what it is they want to say. ‘It’s interesting. Once they feel ready, they are more able to be spontaneous and to enjoy the experience.’
The audience response is always warm and appreciative. It has helped us feel closer to one another: in hearing about others’ joys and struggles we have each felt affirmed in our Quaker community of faithful doubters. ‘It’s particularly moving to hear about doubt, and how we all seem to live with it right alongside us. It’s such a joy to be allowed to doubt,’ Marilyn says.
Leicester Quaker Press
Not all can come along so, inevitably (what is it about Quakers and books?), we have produced publications to record what gets asked and said. We’ve even created an imprint – Leicester Quaker Press.
These records of the conversations are valuable too: to us as a Meeting; to those whose words are written; and to their friends and families. How often in our celebrity-obsessed culture does the inner life of a housing officer get twelve pages all of its own in a well-produced book?
Our second collection, just published, includes conversations with Quakers who have raised children, lost parents, struggled to find meaning and gloried in big and small things. They are not about eminence, but humanity. As ever, when you scratch beneath the surface of ordinary lives, there are extraordinary happenings, too: the man who was brought up by his neighbour after his mother’s death; the woman who was imprisoned for her socialist ideals. But the emphasis is on faith journeys, as Marilyn says, ‘The focus was always to be on spiritual paths, not “I did this and then I did that.”’
From Marilyn’s original concern about our busyness after Meetings has come a rich wealth of personal reflections. The conversations have helped to strengthen us as a Meeting while their record in our publications now makes them more widely available.
Reaching out
Alive to the possibility that we may become too inward-looking if we focus only on our own community, we are now working with Somali women living in Leicester on a book about the lives and journeys of people who have had to flee the civil war in Somalia.
‘If the first project has been about our Quaker faith, this next one is at least in part about our interfaith work,’ Marilyn says. ‘Leicester is such a diverse place. We are trying to understand and talk with other communities. We hope the stories in the new book will help to spread this understanding more widely.’
***
In My Life, My Faith volume 2 is an interview given by Alice Beer. She died in March 2011. A poet, potter, peace campaigner and Quaker, during her interview Alice read some of her poems, including:
So you want to be a potter
Here are some rules:
nose above the centre of the wheel
to find the centre of your pot.
The wholeness of your pot
depends on being centred.
Shape your pot from the inside.
It’s not what people see
but it’s what matters.
Once you have got it right inside
the rest sees to itself. Well, more or less.
Balance your hands, make them a team,
one inside, one outside your pot.
While one hand pushes up,
the other gives support,
one as important as the other.
And keep a steady pace,
although your speed must vary.
There should be nothing sudden
to upset the growth.
I wish you joy!
Alice Beer
My Life, My Faith volume 2 is available from LQP, c/o 16 Queens Road Leicester, LE2 1WP. Cheques (£4.00 inc. postage and packaging) should be made out to M Ricci.
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