Small but perfectly formed

Judy Kirby reviews Ben Pink Dandelion's new book

Celebrating the Quaker Way by Ben Pink Dandelion. Quaker Books. ISBN 978 1 90712302 3 £2.50. Quakers like their theology pocket sized. I’m sure that’s why Advices & queries is so special. There’s something very Quakerly about a mobile text. In this tiny book Ben starts immediately to praise the riches of the liberal tradition in Britain. He says he has written the booklet for Quakers themselves.  ‘I write as a Quaker who came to meeting as an atheist/agnostic, drawn in by the peace testimony’, he writes, ‘an ex-anarchist, happy to find another place without leaders and without votes’.

Ben’s ‘Damascus’ moment came aboard a Greyhound bus in America. He felt God’s presence and he changed from being a political Quaker to one connected to a ‘grace-filled sense of being watched over, guarded and guided.’ Surely this is what Fox meant by the direct inner experience.

In this personal account we hear a Quaker who owns up to feeling different. ‘My faith impels me to live a different life from the one the secular world tells me I should.’ As he walks along a street, or takes a bus or train, drives or shops – ‘I am not following society’s norms, but those alternative ones hewn out by Quakers over three and a half centuries of discerning what is called from us as a people of God.’

But that difference isn’t about hats or sober clothing, but a sense of the gap between Quakers and those whose behaviour needs challenging.

A lot of ground is covered in this book explaining the Quaker way, and it contains the best reason I’ve yet heard for going to Meeting regardless of how you feel. ‘It’s not just for our own welfare, but for whosoever we may meet that day.’ The ministry we may give will be for somebody. For instance: a startling ministry about a video (with price and ordering instructions thrown in) released a flow of powerful ministry, ‘all springing from the video being about bereavement, and the word having found life in the silence of Meeting’.

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