Thought for the Week: Martha and Mary
T Roger S Wilson considers the need for perspective and balance
If our beloved Society was ever divided into two parts, a charitable trust (to look after Quaker buildings and administer Quaker charitable funds) and a second non-charitable entity (which would be religious, hold Meetings for Worship and be involved with social action, including action that might be political), which would you join and support? Would it be one, both or neither?
What is the minimum organisation that the non-charitable Quaker entity would need? How effective could it be with only non-charitable funding? Could it dispense with membership and any form of local organisation or national liaison? I don’t know, but speaking as an Area Meeting trustee it does have one wonderfully attractive feature: not being a charity it could operate without trustees. I’d go for that.
When I wrote to my Monthly Meeting clerk to seek membership over forty years ago, I certainly wasn’t looking for a religious version of the National Trust. I did not envisage myself as an Area Meeting trustee, one who would spend time worrying about charity law and the conservation of listed buildings. Sometimes, in a quiet way, I vaguely resent the time it takes up.
I do want the Religious Society of Friends to survive and prosper and I accept that everyone has to do what he or she can do. I do it because my Meeting needs it and I can do it. But doing things because you can do them may not always be right or wise.
Because of our unique structure of governance, Quaker trustees in the United Kingdom must operate in a permanent state of mild cognitive dissonance. The Charity Commission assumes we have ultimate authority within the charity. We ‘render unto Caesar’ by behaving externally as if that were true. Yet, to accept that as true internally we would have to discard 350 years of the tradition in which the whole worshipping community makes its decisions in unity and in worship.
Formerly, Area Meeting (AM) would have had a Finance and Property Committee, and its subordinate relationship to AM was thus clear. It is still the case that in strictly Quaker terms, if not in law, AM trustees exercise an executive function only as long and as far as AM chooses to delegate that function. Beyond that, trustees are like canaries in a coal mine: canaries don’t run the mine, but if they drop off their perch the whole thing shuts down immediately because it has become illegal to continue.
Like the poor, the need for housekeeping is always with us. Martha probably always wants to be Mary, but never finds quite the right time. I must try to centre on why I joined the Society of Friends, and why that makes the other stuff, the many forms of service we give to our Meetings, not only worthwhile but also actually mandatory. We have to be both Martha and Mary, sometimes simultaneously.
Perspective and balance are, as always, the key to serenity, and if Friends have any useful suggestions for achieving either it is never the wrong time to share that sort of wisdom.
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