Special interest groups
Special interest groups at Yearly Meeting Gathering in Bath
Disability group concerns
The Quaker Disability Equality Group (QDEG) held its annual general meeting (AGM) on Sunday 3 August. Afterwards, participants were asked what they wanted from their group.
Some two dozen people were present. Suggestions were wide-ranging, but the key message was that QDEG and its work need to be better known, in order to help more people. Several of those present mentioned that they had not heard of the group before attending Yearly Meeting Gathering.
One Friend, a QDEG committee member, suggested that the group work with children and young people. This could involve engaging those dealing with illness or disability. It could also include raising awareness of disability issues among others, she said.
Other Friends highlighted the need to improve existing communications with Meetings. One example was the importance of being able to broach personal, potentially embarrassing, subjects with members of Meetings, to help them host Friends with illnesses or disabilities.
QDEG members were also keen to see something done about making Meetings aware that not all conditions are visible. Several of those at the AGM welcomed the news that QDEG is to work more closely with the Quaker Life Mental Health Cluster.
Concerns were also voiced for Friends with speech-related disabilities and how they would cope in an organisation so focused on self-expression.
Building on existing work elsewhere, QDEG committee members have met with staff at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. The two groups agreed to make disability awareness integral to courses for all Quaker roles, rather than develop separate courses. Roles involved will include elders, overseers and trustees.
Faces
At Yearly Meeting Friends have come together annually, for centuries, to ‘see one another’s faces.’
An interesting session early in Yearly Meeting Gathering at Bath was introduced by Alison Breadon of Chilterns Area Meeting. She spoke about the importance of the faces and, through her talk, images of the faces of a range of people were projected on screens at the front of the Big Top.
She asked: ‘Why are faces important?’ Her answers were framed, initially, in terms of her personal experience. She also spoke of seeing that of God, the infinite, in every face. A mother’s face, she suggested, represents continuity and warmth. In Genesis, she reminded Friends, we read that God made human beings in his own image.
She also reflected on the words of the poet Rumi, who wrote: ‘All a human being wants, when you look into their eyes, is that you should love them.’
Several Friends made thoughtful and moving contributions on the subject and talked from personal experience. A Friend suggested that even with animals some of the same emotions can be seen in their faces and their eyes as in humans: ‘even glimmerings of a soul’.
Crime, community and justice
The QPSW Crime, Community and Justice Programme launched its latest publication at Yearly Meeting Gathering. Help for Families & Friends of Someone in Prison is part of a series of publications arising from the group’s Learning Experience: personal narratives from the criminal justice system project.
Friends attending the launch were confronted with a series of printed statements, pinned to the walls of the tent. Each of these was part of a real story collected for the project from someone who had either been in prison or was dealing with the consequences of a friend or relative’s incarceration.
Participants were also given a slip of paper with a statement on it. They were asked to imagine that the statement was true and to discuss in groups how they felt. The slips included comments such as ‘worried about the person in prison’, ‘can he come home afterwards?’ and ‘bedwetting’. The exercise prompted lively conversation and helped demonstrate how wide-ranging the problems faced by prisoners’ families and friends can be.
Friends spoke of their own experiences, both as former prisoners and as friends of those currently in prison. They recounted the difficulties of maintaining family ties, of visiting prisoners who might have been imprisoned far from home and of challenges faced as parents grew old and died whilst their children were serving time.
The new publication included a number of comments from affected families, alongside key sources of information and contact details for organisations able to offer support.
Moving images in Bath
The medium of film was used very effectively in the opening of days of Yearly Meeting Gathering to inform, illuminate and inspire.
In the opening session, on Saturday evening, a film showed how some Quakers from the South-West were putting their faith into action in their lives.
Friends in the Big Top were also shown a short film made at Moyallen in County Armagh in Northern Ireland. Quakers had gathered there from different parts of the world earlier this year for a Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) event. Friends from Rwanda, Cuba, Kenya, El Salvador and the United States talked about their personal faith and being part of a wider Quaker community.
On Tuesday morning Jennifer Barraclough talked about the work of Britain Yearly Meeting trustees. She introduced a film that conveyed how Friends in one area, the North-East of England, engaged with centrally managed work and the staff at Friends House. In the film individual Friends talked about their personal experiences of witnessing in areas such as peace and social justice.
Money and inequality
by Roland Carn
Many of us find it difficult to grapple with the whole area of money, banking and business. This is not a new difficulty for Friends. The Gurney family bailed out Martin’s Bank when Joseph Fry was disowned for bankruptcy. Most of us are more comfortable with spiritual language than with statistics.
The event, ‘How our money system contributes to inequality’, was a presentation interrupted by, often challenging, questions. The exposition gave clear insight into the ideas that underlie our difficulties with the money system. Money, politics and power are closely intertwined. Our economic models and measures of money require constant growth to be valid. The rich and powerful always benefit more, usually at the expense of the poor. This whole area is fraught with complexity and difficulty. Action to remedy one thing only seems to cause more difficulty somewhere else.
My conclusion was that if we want a fairer, more just, more equal, happier society we have to change the very fundamentals. The dilemma and challenge is that the new system must still deliver food, jobs and personal satisfaction. Nothing less than a radical shift in values, principles and practices, that run counter to and are resisted by the rich and powerful, are likely to work. Our witness on slavery and homosexuality are two success stories. Friends, we have changed a culture before. We can do it again – if we treat the difficult people as Friends and colleagues.
With a Tender Hand
by Roland Carn
I was hoping for a practical handbook of guidance to elders, how to be a spiritual coach to a Meeting and how to spiritually mentor individuals. With a Tender Hand, published by Quaker Books, is not that. A resource to read alongside Quaker faith & practice, it will have a new take on the traditional roles of elders and overseers.
There will be a section that is absent from Quaker faith & practice: leadership. Traditionally we have rejected hierarchical structures to work in leader-less groups. A Quaker leader is the person who has the special knowledge, skills and insights that are needed to do a particular part of a job, perhaps that is a knowledge of money, of buildings, of computers, of people, of clerking or of children. With words like ‘management’, ‘money’ and ‘organisation’ it opens an area that Friends often find difficult.
Under pastoral care we will find our structures are varied and that they differ from Meeting to Meeting. There are no patterns or rules – just care for one another. We pride ourselves on our listening and speaking. We will find some ideas to challenge that assumption.
I was surprised and heartened to learn that even our patterns of worship are changing, as Meetings experiment and try out new ways to worship. This book provides a learning structure and access to traditional and online sources for building a broadly conceived spiritual community.
Storytelling
by Roland Carn
It was a delightful surprise to find myself on Sunday evening with a group of staid and quirky Quakers behaving like five-year-olds making the sound effects and making up the silliest story I have ever heard.
The stories we acted out, at an interest group on storytelling, weren’t just silly fun. They taught about kindness and difference and coping with vein different. Thank you Friends. Britain Yearly Meeting has come a long way since I attended my first Yearly Meeting in the 1960s.
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