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It’s going to be a wonderful Quaker summer.
It begins here with the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of our founders, George Fox. We Friends can be wary of celebrating special days, but we know that Fox believed that ‘times and seasons’ were appointed by the ‘Lord of heaven’, so we rightly set aside a moment to remember him. Following shortly after this will be Yearly Meeting, accompanied again this year by a wide range of workshops and sessions from special interest groups. These look rich and fascinating, covering topics we need to get to grips with as a Society. So many of them! In August comes the World Plenary, when Quakers across the world will be able to gather together to experience our particular kind of Friendship. For the first time there will be an online component, which means Friends everywhere will feel a call to attend. As I say, a wonderful Quaker summer.
He believed he should ‘be as a stranger unto all’, but there are a lot of people who have tried to get to know George Fox. Given the wide range of conclusions they’ve reached about him, however, it seems that he was probably successful. Was his messaging, as Henry Cadbury had it, ‘often dull and repetitious’; or was Rufus Jones right to call it ‘powerful’? Was he the ‘graceful’ and ‘courteous’ man described by Thomas Ellwood – ‘civil beyond all forms of breeding’ according to William Penn? Those on the receiving end of one of his many ‘denunciations’ may not have thought so. Was he a practical man of action, after earthly change, or more concerned with the heavenly realm and the Inner Light? All these things can be true, of course, looked at from a particular angle. Context always matters. We might recoil from a man shouting down his opponents in an argument, until we learn he was doing it in defence of the view that a woman had a soul of her own.
George Fox was a truly great man. I know this because his spiritual discoveries have transformed my life. But it is only now, after many years, that I have discovered how profound these changes are. Let me explain.
Of George Fox it cannot be said, to use his own words, that ‘the dead make dead ways for the dead to walk in.’ His spirit is alive today, perhaps more alive than at any time since his death. His immortal message is as greatly needed all through the world now as it was in the tumultuous days of the seventeenth century; ten generations have passed since he first uttered it, but their experience has only confirmed its validity, proved its vitality, and enhanced the depth and reality of its truth. With all his limitations, his poverty, his lack of learning, with all his faults and miscalculations, persecuted as he was through the length and breadth of the land, imprisoned eight times and summoned before courts of justice some sixty times, despised, solitary and rejected – this man nevertheless has become part of the history of England. He belongs to the grand race of the reformers who have extended the bounds of freedom, and to the school of the prophets who have seen that which is invisible.
London Quakers were involved in an interfaith hustings last week just nine days before the general election.
How do your Quaker testimonies and Quaker faith inform your political work?
Carl Von Clausewitz, a Prussian general and military theorist, once stated, ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means.’ For me politics is the continuation of my faith by other means.
The key testimony for me is that of Equality. The Quaker website puts it far better than I can, where it says ‘Quakers believe everyone is equal. This inspires us to try to change the systems that cause injustice and that stop us being genuine communities.’
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