Working with Greenbelt
Abigail Maxwell recounts her personal experience of the Greenbelt Festival
This year, Quakers were ‘Partners and associates’ with Greenbelt, the liberal Christian festival. My Area Meeting paid for my ticket on the basis that I volunteered at the Quaker tent. The festival was held in the grounds of Boughton House, near Kettering in Northamptonshire. I got to hear Carol Ann Duffy perform her poetry, and an acrobat sing while spinning in a Cyr wheel. (If you don’t know what that is, Google it – the YouTube videos are amazing.)
I also heard the theologian Paula Gooder talk of entering imaginatively into biblical stories, to empathise with the characters, led by the Spirit. She said she believes in truths rather than one Truth, with fuzzy edges needing discussion and exploration. I am with her. Grace Petrie was on the main stage again. I weep at the vision of hell in ‘Black Tie’ and love her triumphant chorus, overcoming that hell.
In the Quaker tent I had a chance to tell my story of how I came to Friends, as part of a panel on the stage before an audience of about thirty people. ‘I was a stranger, and you took me in.’ People found it moving. Before I transitioned, male to female, I told my Anglican vicar that I could no longer bear to worship God disguised as a man, and because he reacted so negatively I did not want to worship at his church again. Then I told my story again, in the queue to see Flo and Joan, musical comedy duo and sisters, who you may well have seen on television in adverts for the Nationwide Building Society.
Symon Hill spoke in a panel on the Quaker stage, and said Greenbelt was insufficiently radical – having a Eucharist last year led by disabled people without mentioning the scandal of cuts to support and benefits rule changes.
We had three Meetings for Worship, reaching over 150 people despite the cold and rain on Sunday. We feared ‘pop-up ministry’. In the event there was little spoken ministry, but people spoke in ‘afterwords’ of deep experiences.
The site’s beauty has helped me reach non-dual stillness, spontaneously, more and more easily over the last five years. Greenbelt shares many of our concerns. They are for equality, and there was a packed crowd in the pagoda to hear people from the Poverty Truth Commissions.
Like us, they are overwhelmingly white, and they chose to invite people of colour to lead sessions, including one on ‘Intersectionality’. Only when everyone can come to the place of meeting can all of me be permitted. I loved the assertion:
God looks like me
God sounds like me
If God didn’t love me
God wouldn’t have made me
In my Sunday school God and Jesus were white.
Black people also led the Sunday morning Eucharist, saying the ‘hostile environment’ was there when the Windrush docked. I owe, in a sense, my own liberation to the Windrush.
A versicle and response:
The world is broken and we are broken too. What shall we do?
Let’s party!
Before the festival began I wandered the site with Peterson Toscano, the writer and performance artist who describes himself as ‘Quirky Queer Quaker’. I saw something of how sensitive and courageous he is. He is a Greenbelt regular, speaking from several venues as well as the Quaker tent. So, I wonder whether Britain Yearly Meeting should pay to sponsor the festival. We, as Friends, have a great deal of talent, which the festival might book. Greenbelt welcomes a Meeting for Worship.
The festival offers the chance of outreach to people who might work with Quakers in local interfaith groups, or even join us. This is the church in England at its liveliest, and the joy in Spirit as well as the variety of perspectives can enrich us. In the Quaker tent we served the festival – with children’s sessions and Death Cafés, where people welcomed the chance to talk of our experiences and imaginings of death.
I delighted in the chance to serve.
