Letters - 10 January 2025

Communion

In her letter about Meeting for Worship in the Friend of 6 December 2024, Shanthini Cawson wrote about the importance of connection. First of all, how modern life takes us into complexity, then how Meeting for Worship together can help us find our centre. 

At our pre-Christmas meal in Congénies, we shared our experience of ‘communion’ which means ‘finding unity together’. 

We saw three levels of communion: our interior life, often crazy but with the possibility of finding simplicity and depth; our life with others – again, there can be difficulties and differences but silence together, for instance, before a meal together, brings us to a new depth; and in Meeting for Worship, we are open to connection with the source of life.

I enjoy three different Zoom groups of Experiment with Light: a UK one led by Shanthini, once a month on a Tuesday afternoon; one very small weekly group from 10am till 11am every Friday; and one monthly meeting in French on the first Tuesday evening from 8pm till 9pm (French time). 

If you are interested in joining the second or third groups, write to me at richardthompson1@gmail.com.

Richard Thompson

Unduly sensitive?

Are we in danger of becoming an unduly sensitive bunch (20/27 December 2024)? 1970s’ racism may not have been the first thing to come to mind on reading Linda Ewles’ poem, ‘God’s Biscuits’ (6 December 2024). Our subjective interpretations of any poem are our own; should we impose them on the poet? Does this smack of the dreaded cancel culture?

Similarly, Peter Bolwell’s response to an Aramaic Lord’s Prayer struck me as strange. The phrase ‘this Neil Douglas-Klotz (whoever he is)’ seems ill-chosen. 

In his poetic, and deeply meditative, Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz explains his sources clearly; he does not claim to have discovered a new Aramaic text of the scriptures, still less to have found the original words of Jesus.

The website to which Peter Bolwell helpfully directs us, asserts that Neil Douglas-Klotz’s rendering is not the Lord’s Prayer. Agreed, and given the many decades that elapsed between the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew’s Gospel, who can say what is?

Peter Hart

Meeting for Sufferings 

I went to Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) earlier last month, thinking about MfS and its origins – namely coming to the support of early Quakers as they were imprisoned, exiled and made destitute.   

I was disappointed that so little of what we might call sufferings today was on the agenda except thankfully for Quaker prisoners.

Here’s hoping future MfS will focus on present sufferings among Friends like disability discrimination, age discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, race discrimination, mental illness discrimination, class discrimination, sexual discrimination, isolation, poverty, addictions, conscientious objection to military service and so on.

Perhaps it is beholden to those of us in MfS roles to promote and address these everyday sufferings experienced by Friends.

Gerard Bane

Membership matters

In recommending that Area Meetings should be able to appoint non-members to certain Area Meeting roles, December’s Meeting for Sufferings minuted that further work is needed on the spiritual meaning of membership. 

This followed an earlier decision that central role holders need not be members of Britain Yearly Meeting.  

I suggest further work should consider the following. 

Should we abolish membership, given that Quakers managed without it until 1737, or does such a question ignore early Friends’ robust system of disownment through which they discerned who was within the fold and who was without?  

Could it be that we need a robust system of membership to prevent non-members defining Quakerism in their own image, without their understanding of Quakerism being subject to discernment at Area Meetings, which would normally follow any membership application? 

Why should the rights of non-members be almost identical to members, given that members (unlike non-members) will normally have been deemed to understand and be committed to the fundamentals of Quakerism, as set out in Quaker faith & practice (11.01), following discernment by their Area Meetings in considering their membership applications? 

Are nominations committees able to consider non-members’ understanding of Quakerism as deeply as Area Meetings when considering membership applications? 

If not, do nominations involving non-members result in Friends being appointed whose understanding of Quakerism has been insufficiently tested? 

Does the erosion of the boundary between members and non-members reflect a misunderstanding of our Testimony to Equality, which surely means treating everyone fairly, not identically?  

Richard Pashley

An apology

Humble apologies to readers who attempted to get in touch with FriendsinChrist@gmx.com, following the advert in the Christmas issue of the Friend (20/27 December 2024).  

For some reason gmx.com (who apparently do not track usage, which is why we chose them as the hosting platform), almost immediately blocked the account because, we were told, it infringed their terms of use policy! 

Unfortunately, we discovered this too late to change the email address in the advert – to QuakersinChrist@gmail.com (interestingly, the FriendsinChrist version was already taken). 

Apologies again.

Mark Dibben and Matt Rosen

Giving Mary a voice

The recent correspondence in the Friend on the ‘silencing’ of the figure of Mary in nativity settings reminded me of my sister’s experience with a class of primary school children in the East End of London many years ago. 

My sister had specialised in drama and encouraged the children to improvise the nativity story in their own words. 

So the scene was set with the shepherds, the wise men, toy sheep, gifts, and with Mary and the baby. 

Joseph entered stage left whereupon Mary said loudly: ‘Where the hell have you been – he’s been a right little bugger all day long.’ 

Margaret Cook

Wise women

When she was quite small my daughter’s best friend Sally used to make Christmas decorations from felt. 

I asked her if she would make me some people for my crib and she agreed. 

I had recently returned from Israel-Palestine where one day we had passed a Bedouin encampment on the road to Bethlehem. 

A woman asked our guide why there were only men moving around in the camp. 

She replied that it was the responsibility of the men to offer hospitality to passing travellers. ‘So where are the women?’ she asked. ‘They will be in the hills, looking after the sheep’ was the reply. 

It was one of those moments that leave you dizzy. What if the first people to hear of the birth of Jesus were women? So when I came home I told Sally and she made me some shepherdesses. 

Then one day she and my daughter commented that I wasn’t using the three wise men. ‘I think your mother would prefer three wise women instead,’ said Sally. I jumped at it. 

We chose Greta Thunberg, Rosa Parks and a Greenham woman – working to save the earth, to end racial discrimination, to stop weapons of mass destruction. Each year as we place them on the shelf they fill me with hope.

Marion McNaughton