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Many Friends will recall Silence, a leaflet that captured well our experience in Meeting. Memorable despite its age, and with more Godly language than we are recently used to, it describes struggling to listen for an inner voice, and the importance of making space to do that. ‘We cannot go through life strong and fresh on constant express trains, with ten minutes for lunch… we must have quiet hours.’
Church and state
In 2023, Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) received a minute from Young Friends General
Meeting (YFGM) relating to the loyal address given by Quakers at the time of the coronation of Charles Mountbatten-Windsor. Young Friends had declined to join the delegation, saying that ‘participating legitimises an institution at odds with Quaker values… making a “loyal” address would not be truthful’. Pendle Hill Area Meeting also sent MfS a minute, which expressed ‘unity with the vigour and passion of Young Friends’. YFGM asked MfS to discuss the matter further, prompting MfS itself to raise the following question: ‘Can our participation in civic
ceremonies of this sort be a faithful witness to the alternate Gospel Order to which we are committed, or is it rather an expression of complicity with the domination system of worldly powers?’ It was to this matter that Friends turned on Saturday evening.
Anxieties over one’s identity and status, one’s human rights and freedom, and sense of belonging, are, at root, fears of human destructiveness. We more or less know that this is true, and that no amount of legislation, police protection and military deterrence is going to get the better of that destructiveness, this streak of cruelty and self-harm, what we might call species-malfunction. But many of us keep trying. We uphold democratic freedoms, draw attention to injustice and abuse, stand with the victim, and pity the inanity of the powerful. We tell ourselves that liberal democracy is faulty, but that it is reasonably successful in reassuring citizens that they may be safe, and may have recourse to justice in the face of arbitrary violence. But as one’s nation state turns increasingly authoritarian, well, one’s confidence recedes. It all thins out our blitheness of spirit, our buoyancy, our self-delighting joie de vivre.
This is not the article about Friends House Moscow (FHM) that I wanted to write. It could have been a happy one, about FHM as a globally recognised publisher, and its growing effectiveness as an outreach tool for Russian speakers in the former Soviet Union – readers are now finding the books first and then wanting to learn about Quakers rather than vice versa. Instead, FHM British Committee believes it needs to report on the critical point – well nigh a knife edge – that we have reached.
She had been writing for a full two hours,
periodically I’d interrupt by
quoting the madness of killing fields from
around the world, both of
us rinsing spilt ink until eventually she put
down her journal and pen,
looked me straight in the eyes and replied:
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