The Pendle Hill study centre in Philadelphia. Photo: Jenny Firth Cozens.
Six weeks at Pendle Hill
Jenny Firth Cozens describes her time at the Quaker study centre in Philadelphia
I recognized immediately in Pendle Hill a kind of oasis in the wasteland of the spirit… I went there again and again not only to join in the dialogue between the confused modern soul and the ultimate meaning of life, but to be encouraged by the conviction that in Pendle Hill one already had, as it were, a small pilot scheme of the essential community to come.
- Laurens van der Post
Pendle Hill is a Quaker study centre on the outskirts of Philadelphia, started in 1930 to prepare students for service around the world and especially in Europe after the second world war. Nowadays people stay there as Friends-in-residence (FiRs), or to study (Pendle Hill and Swarthmore College nearby have exceptional libraries), or just as sojourners – coming for a few days to rest, think or soak up the knowledge and experience of life there. Outside groups come for meetings and courses, or just for bed and breakfast.
FiRs usually go for three months at least, but I went with a Friend, Fenwick Kirton-Darling, and could only manage six weeks, which still seemed substantial. We’d had little notice of the trip and hadn’t planned what we might do there or know what was involved. Now it’s at an end, I still sometimes say to friends how nice it was to do ‘nothing’. But then I remember what I’ve actually experienced.
Unlike Woodbrooke, Pendle Hill runs more simply as a community and there is a low-key expectation that FiRs will join in the running of what is a substantial acreage. I had few fixed tasks: a little washing-up, some gardening until winter struck, while Fenwick had the Sisyphean task of raking leaves. What we enjoyed most – and what we eventually realised was our primary role – was talking with those who came to stay for a few nights and for a wide variety of reasons. We were ‘the mortar between staff and sojourners’.
Having time for long conversations with people from all faiths and backgrounds – men and women who came for time to think – was a wonderful novelty and provided very rich experiences, helped, too, by the daily half-hour Meeting for Worship after breakfast.
Amazingly deep conversations took place with sojourners as well as with the staff members, with the American FiRs, and with Maddy Ward, the student-in-residence from England, whose knowledge considerably helped my own. Visitors brought different viewpoints that I found novel and valuable, such as:
- How to start the battle for gun control (with a member of Moms Against Guns). Despite two mass shootings and one terrorist attack while we were there, no one spoke about them and the helplessness was clear. It’s wonderful that this has now changed so much.
- Liberalism and the far-right.
- Why Quakers in western programmed Meetings voted for Donald Trump.
- The good and bad aspects of a diagnosis (Asperger’s and dyslexia).
- The Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the experience of introversion/extroversion.
- Israel and hate, with Jewish visitors.
- What makes a poem?
- Whether someone with a calling to dress as father Christmas should keep his hat on when we sang a Jewish song at the Christmas concert.
- The splits in US Quakerism.
I learnt a lot about American Quakerism, but it was still hard to understand the many splits that have occurred: mapping them looks like a river delta. Primarily, this involves more evangelical and programmed Meetings (eighty per cent overall) taking place the further west you go, but these have then split into smaller groups. This is in contrast to the UK, where we seem to have managed to keep ourselves together. The primary reason for a split in Britain might be over theism and nontheism, but this seemed less of an issue in the US, where most people I talked to couldn’t imagine being a Quaker without God. In fact, unlike in the UK, God was spoken of freely in conversations.
So, what were the splits about? I was told that they are always seen as theological – evangelical or not, plain dress or not, the role of God and Jesus – but power and personality were often at their core. Certainly, most of the groups (Gurneyites, Hicksites and so on) had a man’s name for their title. But I wondered, too, how it was for Quakers in the US in the 1700-1800s, pushing west, needing pastors to provide stable Meetings. These travellers mixed with others from all over Europe and so their worship perhaps became more diverse. Cultural evolution is a strong force. Perhaps there were also more emotionally loaded splits.
Many Quakers owned slaves and the push to end slavery sorely upset some. For example, Benjamin Lay, from Colchester, was an early anti-slavery advocate after visiting Barbados and witnessing what was happening. After his ministry on the subject he was formally disowned by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1738, and later expelled from the Society all together. British Quakers also owned slaves, but managed to avoid this division. However, when I spoke about this, a US Friend told me: ‘Well, you just disowned any dissenting voices.’
Pendle Hill Pamphlets are a marvellous resource for us all – informative but also incorporating the author’s experience. We went to a lecture on Lucretia Mott and I read about this woman with the amazing name (Pendle Hill Pamphlet number 234) who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a leader in equality and human rights including, but not only, for women. I loved the image of her knitting in the anti-slavery meeting of liberal Quakers where women were not allowed to speak. In true form, she ignored this and rose (all four feet eleven inches of her), saying what needed to be done.
I became interested in John Yungblut (Pendle Hill Pamphlet number 417 by Charles C Finn) and his links to Carl Jung, and another on The Unconscious (number 325 by Robert C Murphy), again using Carl Jung to describe how: ‘The unconscious, and God who infuses it like a spring at its deepest reaches, make up the paired One that Quakers call “the Inner Light”.’ Nancy Alexander’s Practicing Compassion for the Stranger (number 271 in this series) led me to think more broadly about: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ In this age of Brexit and Donald Trump, it seems like many countries are no longer our neighbours and I need to think (belatedly) of ways to talk to people who now feel like strangers.
Living at Pendle Hill as an FiR takes away most of the everyday tasks of life, and it was wonderful to have the space to write. I started a writers’ group with about five others, including Israa, a young Iraqi woman working there and seeking refugee status while writing about the things that drove her from Iraq. There was also a monthly poetry group around the idea of transformation. Some wonderful new poems emerged from this.
A fascinatingly diverse number of visitors have spent time at Pendle Hill over the decades. I wasn’t surprised to see that Mohandas Ghandi has visited, but past guests also include Felix Greene, the socialist brother of Graham, and Jean-Paul Sartre. They, too, spent time there thinking, talking and writing. And why not? It’s a place that lends itself to widening horizons, thoughts and knowledge, and I’ve valued the experience more than anything I’ve written here can possibly describe.
