Yearly Meeting 2023: Special interest groups

‘Anyone has the potential to offer a mystical revelation.’

In the week before Yearly Meeting began in earnest, various Quaker Recognised Bodies and special interest groups ran sessions online for interested Friends. Staff from the Friend managed to get to many of them, but if we missed yours please let us know and we’ll try to catch up another way.

Parables not preaching, stories not sermons

Rosemary Brown, of The Kindlers, led a session on 21 April to look at storytelling. Sixty Friends gathered to consider ‘how and why mystics use the power of metaphor’ and why story can have a profound impact.

To illustrate, Rosemary took on the role of storyteller and asked those present to share and reflect on the messages each tale conveyed.

They included the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and the parable of the vineyard workers (Matthew 20:1-16), but also included: ‘The blind men and the elephant’ from India, ‘The conference of the birds’ from the Islamic tradition, and another from the Dervish tradition.

Rosemary also asked Friends to consider A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and The Other Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke, explaining that, as there is that of God in everyone, ‘anyone has the potential to offer a mystical revelation’.

Of ‘The blind men and the elephant’, one Friend said that it was ‘a very good advert for Quakerism… no one of us has the whole picture, the more we listen to each other the more we see the whole picture’.