Letters - 19 April 2024

Our Quaker testimony

I have been a subscriber of the Friend for many years and have been on many occasions deeply grateful for the reach and inclusion of your diverse editorial decisions.

In the current edition (5 April) there is an article by Paul Hodgkin ‘Economy drive’. In it I believe he has nailed with precision, clarity and a profound understanding, the truth of our situation and the lies that underpin it, and all in less than two pages!

Placing it within the Quaker context brings it home in ways that these insights could begin to form, as he says, a Quaker testimony against capitalism. A radical call that has renewed my faith in the potential of our Quaker testimony.
Barbara Robinson

Anarchism

I am very much taken by Paul Hodgkin’s call for a testimony against capitalism. But I don’t think a testimony is enough. My first question to Paul is to ask whether he’s read Das Kapital. I hope so, because Karl Marx’s analysis and description of the root of capitalism is still stunningly accurate. Unfortunately, the solution, communism, turned out to be a disaster because both capitalism and socialism depend on the same premise: they are merely shadows of each other. Without a doubt, consumerism, the protestant work ethic, the inevitability of unemployment, climate crisis, plundering of world resources, utterly gross inequality and the arms race are all based in capitalism.

So, capitalism has to go. But how, and especially how without a wholesale massacre of billions of people? I was stumped. Until I heard Carne Ross interviewed on BBC Radio 4. I had heard him years ago speaking at the Quaker Council for European Affairs after he had resigned as a diplomat. The interview led me to watch his Ted talk ‘The Accidental Anarchist’.

Here we are: anarchism. I think we Quakers are very well suited to anarchism because it is essentially how we manage our affairs. I think it matches the fundamental commandment, ‘To love our neighbour as ourselves’. Described in Exodus, repeated in Leviticus, called for consistently by Jesus, reminded by Paul to the Galatians. Denied by capitalism. Anarchism will be more than a testimony, it will be action in faith, faith in action.

Anthony Gimpel

March for peace

I cannot thank you enough, Jon Heal, for speaking to my condition in the way you did (March 29).

Nothing but a total ceasefire, and in the meantime being part of ‘the mob calling out evil and marching for peace’, can assuage my horror and anger at the genocidal, beyond evil atrocities the world is witnessing and to a large extent supporting, against the Palestinian people.

Maris Vigar

Loving friendship

‘What is it that needs to be done?’ asks Gerard Bane (29 March) re Quakers in decline. Advices & queries 26 sprang to mind for me. ‘Try to make your home a place of loving friendship and enjoyment…’

I grew up in a Quaker Meeting where we were often welcomed into each other’s homes (See Christine’s Story, a story of a Quaker childhood which is in the library at Friends House). My parents welcomed German prisoners of war, refugees, and students, through the East-West Friendship Council, to our home. Any visitors or new attenders to our Meeting were invited to tea, and these invitations became reciprocal. It’s how we got to know each other.

We ourselves have followed suit, and I remember our children learning about other lifestyles when we invited the Ugandan Asian refugees to our home in the 1970s.

I have noticed this appears to be less common in our Meetings today. Which of you have been to the Friends’ homes in your Meeting? Or have we invited visitors to our homes, or just hoped they would turn up to one of our social events?

Perhaps we should revisit Advices & queries 26 so that we can make connections through the joyful celebration of our Quaker faith.

Christine Hayes

Trans awareness

Recently I attended a Meeting on a visit to London, a beautiful newly-built Meeting house that was very welcoming. After the Meeting, when having a coffee in the kitchen, the topic of gender identity came up with someone who had come to a Quaker Meeting for the first time.

After a few transphobic remarks, she said to me ‘If you were wearing a dress and told me you were a woman I wouldn’t call or accept you as one’. She then proceeded to lecture me about how misogynistic and dangerous ‘gender ideology’ nowadays is, barely letting me speak or share my opinion.

I am a cisgender man and felt deeply offended by this woman’s presence and what she said. I wondered how awful it would’ve been if I was a trans person having the same conversation with this woman. What if it was a trans person’s first time at a Meeting? Would they then be put off and think Quakers were not allies and did not accept trans people?

If you are new at a Meeting, it is not always easy to distinguish others who are new as well. The question I want to ask is: how can we make it clearer that we have a supportive, accepting and open stance towards LGBTQ+ people?

While Meeting should be open for everyone, are there not some types of people that should not be allowed in?

Gabriel Lester

Boarding schools

Thank you for publishing Henry Lawson’s letter (5 April) about the harm done when children are sent away to boarding school. I spent nine years at such an institution – not a Quaker school, but a Methodist one. Like Henry, I regard myself as a survivor of this experience, and it’s not easy to discuss calmly.

Personally, I think that Henry is right in seeing a degree of denial among Friends on the subject. But the shocking revelations of Charles Spencer and Justin Webb on their boarding school experiences may be the stimulus for a re-think among Friends.

Here are a few reasons why I think a boarding school education is harmful.

It breaks up the family.

It seeks privilege for certain children over others.

It seems to provide safety for children, but no institution can monitor children all the time, and safeguarding practices may often be breached.

It is wasteful of resources, as the child has two homes.

It deprives local communities of contact with local children and their parents.

Because of the lack of daily contact, relationships between children and their parents can be irreversibly damaged.

I’d like to ask those who send their children to Quaker boarding schools, and their teachers and carers, to read through this list and say honestly whether any apply to them.

Alison Leonard

Daffodil ministry

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of George Fox’s birth this year led me to reread John Lampen’s excellent, but sadly out of print, book Wait in the Light: The spirituality of George Fox.

On the front cover is a reproduction of The Valley Thick with Corn, a painting by Samuel Palmer. It pictures a man laid down comfortably in a ripe corn field reading a book and surrounded by nature in all its glory. John makes the following comment: ‘the picture (while not a likeness of George Fox) expresses a number of things I feel about Fox: his early experiences in the countryside, his naive and visionary qualities, his insistence that the Garden of Eden can be recovered, and his imagery so often drawn from rural life.’

Many years ago I remember a number of weeks in this journal’s letters pages of a quite fierce debate about the rights and wrongs of what became known a ‘daffodil ministry’. We can learn and be inspired so much from nature, as did Fox, so if the daffodils on the table at Meeting inspire ministry, good. I am also reminded of Margaret Fell’s words when complaining of the trend towards plain dress saying it was ‘a silly poor gospel’ and we should ‘consider the lilies how they grow’.

So thanks to Jacinta White (29 March) for her timely reminder of ‘the language of daffodils’ and to make ‘one feel grateful to be part of this amazing creation’.

David G Bower