'Presentation on peace and reconciliation in the work of perhaps the best-loved Welsh-language poet of the twentieth century, the Quaker Waldo Williams.' Photo: Photo from Llywelyn2000 at Wikimedia Commons
Waldo’s commitment to peace: Stevie Krayer reports from Meeting of Friends in Wales.
‘A pilgrimage through a poem may sound like an intimidating and rather dry process. No! It was absolutely thrilling.’
This was a well-prepared, well-organised and smoothly-clerked Meeting, full of interest – and very long! The simultaneous translation service, given by Steffan Wiliam, deserves special mention. It was impeccable, an astonishing feat given the complexity of much of the content and the hours of concentration required.
The highlight of the meeting for the fifty-seven Friends attending was an enthralling presentation by Mererid Hopwood on peace and reconciliation in the work of perhaps the best-loved Welsh-language poet of the twentieth century, the Quaker Waldo Williams.
Mererid, who is a professor at Aberystwyth University, is not only a prominent peace activist (she is the secretary of the Peace Academy of Wales and the honorary president of the Movement for the Abolition of War) but an eminent poet. She won the National Eisteddfod Chair for strict-metre poetry, the first woman ever to do so. On screen she looked every inch a bard, but what really made an impression was the warmth and passion with which she spoke of Waldo’s (it is the rather endearing custom in Wales to refer to this poet by his first name) life and work, and of her own concern about the militarisation of Wales.
Mererid began by talking about Waldo’s life and influences. Like Mererid, Waldo was both a major poet and a peace campaigner. A conscientious objector in the second world war, he was imprisoned during the Korean war for refusing to pay his taxes, and was prominent in the campaign to stop the Preseli Mountains being requisitioned by the army and emptied of the inhabitants who had been there for generations.
Mererid quoted several poems that expressed Waldo’s commitment to peace, springing from a conviction in which (in the gendered language of his day) he believed ‘all men to be brothers’. Mererid then took us on a kind of pilgrimage through the poem ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ (‘Between Two Fields’), which can be found in Quaker faith & practice at 21.33. To those who are nervous of poetry, that may sound like an intimidating and rather dry process. No! It was absolutely thrilling. Somehow, through Mererid’s own passionate response to the poem, and Rowan Williams’ powerful translation, the ecstatic voice of the poet sang out:
… So near,
we came so near then to each other, the quiet huntsman
spreading his net around us.
Listen! you can
just catch his whistling, hear it?
Mererid showed us some telling pictures. Among the most striking of these was a map of Wales, with all the military sites marked with the symbol of a bomb. It looked like a black rain, falling all over the country. But, following Waldo’s example, she ended on a note of hope, speaking of the oneness of humanity and the faith that we will some day escape from the human propensity to hostility and violence:
Daw’r wennol yn ôl i’w nyth
(The swallow will return to its nest).
It seemed appropriate that the later business included the announcement that the door was now open at Britain Yearly Meeting for Friends whose mother-tongue and spiritual language is not English. We are to be properly catered for at last, especially in the new book of discipline. Friends in Wales have been encouraged to submit writings in Welsh, and to hold a special interest meeting during the online Yearly Meeting Gathering 2021. We noted that there are many more than two languages in use among British Quakers; one Friend commented that her spiritual language was music. But we thought the experience at Meeting of Friends in Wales (MFW) of embracing speakers of two languages could be of help beyond Wales.
After the meeting, I received this comment from an English-speaking Friend: ‘I have only experienced this sort of bewilderment once before and that was when I visited a mosque in Tower Hamlets when everyone was speaking Bengali and all the signposts were in Arabic. This was a similarly disorientating experience… a number of Friends expressed the fact that they think and worship in Welsh and that translation decreases the spiritual experience. Through this ministry I learnt something new which I feel that those of us who have English as our first language do not normally have opportunity to experience. It made me aware of yet another way in which our Society, which claims equality as one of its testimonies, is not inclusive. We were also reminded that the people of Wales are not the only ones who do not have English as their first language. This is another challenge for us to face.’
In a related item, Laura Karadog, the new MFW administrator, reported that Friends in Wales have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts but currently make little use of these. We agreed that it is an important part of our witness to be ‘out there’ on social media, where anyone can find and connect with us. Friends were encouraged to feed in their ideas.
Further items of interest included preparation for the twenty-sixth UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). We also heard a report on work that Friends in west Wales, along with other local residents, are doing to support asylum seekers currently housed in the disused military camp at Penally, near Tenby. Conditions there are unfit for human habitation. The camp will reportedly close in September. We also received an update on the work of the Moving Forward/Symud Ymlaen Group, which was created to find a way of simplifying and easing the burden of trusteeship on MFW and its four associated Area Meetings. Among other changes in train, the group will prepare a possible model for a single united charity, which will come to all the Meetings involved, including Local Meetings, for detailed consideration. Clearly the proposal cannot be implemented unless Friends are willing to take ownership of it.
