Letters - 24 January 2025

Our testimony to truth

The Religious Society of Friends (RSoF) is not a mere movement or tendency. As an organisation it has purpose and has a structure and agreed methods or practices for implementing its purpose.  

As an organisation we must have members, by definition. In the RSoF only members are entitled to certain benefits. They also have responsibilities and liabilities. Non-members at Meetings for Worship are in effect observers, and at Business Meetings, consultants. The Society’s authority over them is almost non-existent. If a non-member trustee or elder acting on behalf of the Society were to commit some great wrong, there would be no accountability. 

A model which has been proposed is that only a few Friends would be members and only they would hold responsible positions such as trustees and elders. The rest of us would in effect be attenders, similar to members of lay orders. I see no merit in this model. 

As a faith group we accept as members of the Society individuals who did not fully share our faith, but surely only if it was clear that they were willing to do so. William Penn was accepted, sword and all, because George Fox could see he wanted to become a true Friend. 

It seems a defiance of our testimony to truth that we announce as members people who actively deny the basis of our faith and even argue publicly against it. I recollect one who said: ‘If you believe in God you might as well believe in Harry Potter’. Shame on him, and shame on the Meeting which accepted him into membership though fully aware of his opinion.

Stephen Petter

Closing Meeting house

Esher Meeting (in Kingston & Wandsworth Area Meeting) vacated its Meeting house six months ago and moved to rented premises. 

We minuted all the discernment and decisions, and subsequently wrote a fairly detailed account of the process and the emotional impact. 

If any other Meetings are undertaking this change and looking for insights, our account is available on the Esher Meeting website.

Christine Cannon

Centering Prayer

Richard Eddleston (3 January 2025) suggests that Centering Prayer can, over time, lead to transformation and provide the grounding for our being in the world. The practice is simple, using a single word to centre down, for twenty minutes twice a day.  

At a time when many of us may be entering the new year with a sense of foreboding, Centering Prayer is one way of delving into what lies deep within and beyond. From this place we can acknowledge the fear, the grief, the suffering, and, at the same time, let go into that wider power, freer to remain hopeful and engage with the world.

For Friends who may like to explore this practice, there are two upcoming courses on Centering Prayer – February Woodbrooke online and September at Glenthorne in person. We also have two Zoom groups to support our practice. Please contact me for details.

Rosemary Field

rosemary.field@greennet.org.uk

Still silent?

Will Quakers stay silent on the gangs that have raped young girls in our own country? In parliament Jess Phillips has read out the names of urban areas that are involved. And Scotland is not immune, as investigations continue and the press has identified Dundee.   

What are the recommendations that Alexis Jay’s investigations made that have not been implemented? Will our Quaker community/Criminal Justice Network step aside from its work on abolition of prisons to espouse this issue, or to pay attention to the changes in legal aid where cuts affect justice for survivors of domestic abuse? Will Gisèle Pericot’s brave stance raise the profile of misogyny in our own society?

Where do we stand? What can we do? Is this just another issue to grab our attention and scatter blast with our guilt, from our armchair?

Where is our coherent Quaker approach to relationship in our society?

All is not well and has not been since Tony Blair took philosophy/vision out of politics, no more socialism. Certainly not as would be recognised down at the miners’ institute of my youth. Now it is about power and votes. And, as for Quakers, are we now so diverse there is no coherency? I heard a definition of discernment that did not involve listening for the Spirit moving. God save us from egos flapping their wings.

I would close, not mentioning a certain nationality. I was once told that it was not Islam but culture that dictates. How do we contain such violence and abuse within our society?

Margaret Roy

Walk in the Light

Paul Seed’s letter (3 January 2025) spoke to my condition in a number of ways. I tend to refer to the ‘divine’ myself so as not to constrain ‘God’ to human limits. How beautifully he puts it. ‘In our silent worship there is a method for experimental morality for the generating and testing of new and better answers.’  

Despite Towards a Quaker View of Sex, I was an early member of FHF (Friends Homosexual Fellowship) as we spoke our truth in the late 1980s and 1990s, suffering as patiently and as lovingly as we knew how the viciously homophobic correspondence we received via the PO Box, so that Friends as a whole were broadly in the right kind of place to be useful in subsequent public discussions on civil partnerships and then same-sex marriage.

As he rightly points out, in every generation we revise our book of discipline, trying to keep what we cherish but update relevantly. Consider the many references to violence and non-violence, not to mention the vicissitudes of life, yet there is a gaping hole when it comes to rape and sexual offending from which Friends are certainly not immune. 

Paul quotes Margaret Fell. Her words ‘Protection of the Light’ were the title of my account in the Friend (15 April 2016) of life-threatening sexual violence, which almost cost me my life but by some miracle very Quaker instincts kicked in with less negative outcomes achieved. 

There was a cost of discipleship for an eighteen-year-old Quaker arriving at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp trying to do right by the Peace Witness in 1984. This account has been given loving and patiently to those in the revision process over many years. 

As the resignation of Justin Welby shows, other spiritual traditions are not handling rape and other sexual offending, including child sexual abuse, well. We are rightly proud of Towards a Quaker View of Sex in 1967, but it is far from complete until it contains a ‘Quaker view of rape’. Surely finding that of God in the man who has without intention raped you and almost killed you is worthy of the Light?

‘Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’ Yes, I am. Yes, I have walked in the Light despite appalling darkness. Is it inwardly of God? Well, maybe only God can answer that.

Clare B Dimyon 

Skit on nativity plays 

Margaret Cook’s letter of 10 January 2025 made me think there’s still a place for my skit on nativity plays, You’ve Got It Wrong Again, Gabriel.   

This was published by Church House in the 1980s and performed in schools and community groups all over the country; the last I heard of it was in Hawaii. It features a blundering Gabriel who can’t fix his wings on properly and a teenager in jeans whose job is to question everything that’s going on. (‘What if it’s a girl?’) A scattering of elderly Friends may recall having performed in it.

I still have a copy of the text and would be happy to send it to Friends as an attached document – no copyright, no royalties – if they think it might suit their Meeting or local school. There’s plenty of time to ponder putting it on stage for Christmas 2025.

Alison Leonard