Yearly Meeting 2022: Session 5 - Action: Learning uncomfortable lessons & taking forward our witness
‘Friends needed to adjust their individual behaviours, but also contend with the structures that enable racism.'
Appropriately, after the tough last session, Session Five looked at Action: Learning uncomfortable lessons and taking forward our witness. With elders again calling for ministry, one Friend said he had gone for a walk after the last session, to Tavistock Square, where there is a statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was a person of faith, said the Friend, and a ‘person who collected community around him’. It was a good thing he was nearby, ‘a memorial of how things can be changed’.
Previous ministry had talked about Friends being able to change the world. But, said one Friend, ‘the only thing we can really change is ourselves… In changing ourselves we may then influence other things’.
Adwoa Burnley welcomed more interfaith visitors, including Kamran Shezad, a Sufi Muslim who said that his branch of Islam was the most like Quakerism.
After a reading from the Testimony to the Grace of God in the Life of John Bowers, who had first come to Britain on the Kindertransport, the Meeting heard from Ann Morgan, who offered prepared ministry on how Lancaster Meeting decided to investigate its historical links to the international slave trade.
When George Fox visited Barbados in 1676, he didn’t speak out about enslavement, said Ann. And after London Yearly Meeting finally wrote a minute condemning enslavement, in 1727, there were Quaker merchants who continued to be directly involved in slave economies in Lancaster until 1833. At that time Lancaster Meeting did have reasons to disown members – for stealing, not attending, marrying outside Quakerism, or getting into debt – but those involved in the slave trade were not disowned. ‘Why did Lancaster Monthly Meeting not engage with London Yearly Meeting minutes?’ asked Ann.
Lancaster Friends, along with most of the country, saw enslavement as necessary for profit ‘and so morally justifiable.’
London Yearly Meeting was ahead of society, said Ann, and it showed her that ‘bringing about significant change, especially where economic factors are involved, really takes time. We have to be ready to engage in the long haul’.
Switching to contemporary times, Ann talked of rare metals necessary for phones and tablets, which are mined in appalling conditions. We’re not going to stop using our phones, she said, so we have to change those conditions. Similarly, cotton production still uses economic slavery and pollutes waterways.
The Lancaster research was ‘an opportunity to hold our hands up, and an opportunity to be truthful about our history… Discerning how to grow is a process we’re only just embarking on… we must ask what does love and justice require of us?’
With the matter before the Meeting, one Friend noted how Friends at table had struggled with pronouncing the names of black and brown interfaith visitors, and how the transcription technology also struggled because it was based on ‘our colonial language’. She spoke of the room Friends were in as a ‘crucible’, where ‘we can burn it all away’ and ‘leave us with the truth’.
Another Friend said that gathering information was a first step. ‘Reality is not just a slice of time’, she said, it is ‘given flesh by the ghosts of the past’. Friends had to decide what path was right for them, but ‘What is right for us might not be right for all… How do we speak to somebody else’s condition?… [Are we engaging] in the ways we find easiest in which to engage?’ As Quakers, we needed to ‘widen our group, widen the ways in which we think… move away from there being one way to do things’.
Online, one friend feared for how we would be judged ‘thirty years hence’.
After a shuffle break, a French Friend spoke of how Quakerism had arrived in France. A British Quaker, during war with France, had offered to repay French merchants for boats that had been stolen from them. ‘Today’, she said ‘we learned about Friends owning boats and using them for wrong … what do we do to repair [that]?’
One Young Friend wanted to remind the Meeting that some decisions, such as buying ethical clothes, required significant privilege, either financially or in the time needed to go searching charity shops. ‘It’s really important that we understand that everyone’s living their faith as well and as far as they can.’
Another Friend referred to one of Jesus’ parables, where a man offered to remove the speck from a friend’s eye, not recognising the plank in his own. He talked of a conference on racism at Woodbrooke, where one of the invited speakers, a university professor, told of how on his first day in post he was mistaken for a cleaner because of the colour of his skin. Subsequently, said the Friend, someone at that gathering was heard to say: ‘Of course, he’s making it up.’ ‘This was a Quaker, Friends, who was denying someone else’s truth.’
One more Friend appreciated the Lancaster research and thought ‘there’s much, much more to do’, hoping that other Meetings would be ‘encouraged by their example to do their own work’, and that ‘we might be able to do that in an internationally collaborative way… That will help us, to tell the story as truthfully as possible, answering questions like how much money came from those sources into Quaker communities and projects’.
Another Friend spoke to the fact that London Yearly Meeting had to repeat its discernment. ‘People have competing priorities’, he said, and it can be easy for the question of race to ‘become just another concern’. He had two calls: Friends needed to adjust their individual behaviours, but also contend with the structures that enable racism. The answer to this was out there, he said: ‘It’s literally on sale in the bookshop!’
A Friend in Scotland spoke of a seminary in the US that was tracing descendants of the people it had enslaved, and was making reparations to their ancestors. ‘I don’t know where we would start’ with that, she said, but would love us to ‘be having the conversation’.
The minute reflected the ministry: ‘Love and justice requires us to consider how we might make reparation for the wrongs of the transatlantic slave trade.’
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