Sheffield Quakers

The Rule Of The House

2012-02-10T13:26:00.002Z

Economy: from the Greek 'rule of the house':

Customers want banks to lend them money at a competitive rate of interest, and support them in their business activities.
Shareholders just want banks to make fat profits so that they get big dividends and increased share value and the executives just want fat bonuses for making the most money.

Meanwhile..

The wife and kids want the man of the house to go out and earn a good wage to get food and warmth and clothing.
The man of the house just wants to get as much money as possible for as little work as possible.

No wonder gambling is so tempting........

So the customers get better rates of interest and the wife and kids get the odd present from the winnings. And then they want a bit more, and a bit more, and a bit more......

And then the bubble bursts, for, as we all should know, the house always wins.

BUT: the banks get bailed out by the taxpayer, while the gambler gets slung in the debtors prison. Meanwhile in both cases the foolish ordinary people left behind loose everything.

Richard Sennett:Together

2012-02-06T10:45:00.005Z

There is a new book out by Richard Sennett, an American sociologist who rose to prominence with a book called The Fall of Public Man (1977). In this new book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (2012) he writes about (from the blurb):

Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate.

Sounds very much like a description of Quaker practice wouldn't you say?
Might be worth a look.

Truro Vean Meeting, Cornwall

2012-01-22T21:52:00.009Z

I was at Truro meeting this morning. I would like to share a few photos of the meeting house. It is very beautiful, from the early 1800s. It is close to the town and looks out across towards the Cathedral. When I was sitting in meeting I was wondering what the early Quakers in Truro made of the Cathedral and whether they bridled at the church bells ringing so stridently. I was speaking to one of the members, a historian of early Quakers in Cornwall. She told me that the early meetings had women and men sitting separately, not to keep them apart she said hastily, but so that the men could react if they were attacked and keep the women and children safe.

The building is quite large. Today’s meeting and most of them unless it is very warm, are held in a smaller meeting room just across the corridor. The large meeting room is cold. It was heated in living memory by a tortoise stove they called it with coal brought up in two buckets from the cellar.

There is a top bench, well above the main room that was the Minister’s Gallery. I’d not heard about this but apparently, even as late as the 1920s there were Ministers, recognised for their skill at Ministry I presume. I was told that they were often travelling and this Gallery was reserved for them.

The lower bench in front, still set above the main room was the Elder’s bench and very cold and hard too I was told!

The back wall of the main room is made up of wooden paneling. This can be raised on pulleys if needs be, allowing more to see the goings-on inside. There is a Quaker library in the building too but I didn’t get the chance to go inside this time.

Thanks to and Greetings from Truro Meeting, a lovely place to share silent worship if you are here or roundabout.

African Haiku II

2012-01-16T13:55:00.000Z

On the stony path
a girl is walking barefoot
school shoes on her head

The endless road South
driving through pale butterflies
for a hundred miles

Some more African haiku here

Tell your story

2012-01-13T11:33:00.003Z

In a community, truth is communicated through story.

However, we are so used to truth as statements and propositions that we think that we have to explain everything. This is all well and good in the practical world of getting and doing. But if we try and explain the story of our life, we impose our own beliefs on that story, and so exclude others who do not share those beliefs. We destroy the potential for sharing and growing, through which community emerges.

Just tell your story plainly and simply – those who have ears will hear.

famous last words

2012-01-12T21:37:00.002Z

In a parish church in Sheffield, a barn of a building, so spacious inside, looking at a stained glass window my eyes are drawn to a dedication and not the image. The size of the building and an imagined small congregation brings to me how short a time has elapsed between the grand schemes of founders and today. It seems arrogant in one way yet a last exhalation in another; famous last words. And that's where I was drawn, to dedication, words in stained glass, a text of pride, a practice of pathos outlasting the gospel it frames.

in permanance

2012-01-10T15:27:00.002Z

Sitting in a café on the high street, looking out across the road I suddenly notice a young woman standing in a telephone kiosk; still while people on the street pass by.

I realise she runs the stall selling hats and scarves. Her stillness surprises me, emphasising how busy I am, how busy we often are.

Someone stops to look at the hats. Or I assume they do as she disappears from view, her permanence animated by someone joining in.

Occupy, Punch and Judy

2012-01-02T22:17:00.002Z

The occupation has been in front of the Cathedral for a couple of months now. At meeting we know several friends have been supportive in one way or another and the general sense of conversation has been in favour of giving assistance to the movement. The model of general assemblies appeals to Quaker sensibilities as does the absence of leadership. Something is going on which is in a way nothing: meaning that it is difficult to disagree with Occupy, it is a bit like disagreeing with the Sermon on the Mount. As if the meek shouldn’t inherit the earth.

I’ve had a number of disagreements with people I know and respect over the past few days about Occupy Sheffield. I was very moved by their occupation of the Salvation Army Citadel (The Citadel of Hope) in the town centre before the New Year. In fact I was positively jealous! I’ve been watching that place for a few years now fantasising about what could be done with it. I follow what is going on through twitter and have seen a few photos of the inside and I’m looking forward to looking inside.

I was discussing this all over a meal the other evening and I and friend, an anthropologist, decided we wanted stay the night at the occupation together sometime later in January. We want to support it but also, it is true, to see inside a little more, to register our interest in what is happening, to have more sense of the mechanics place, to be part of the socialisation. This is a fairly bland aim but when we discussed it with the others at dinner we found that there was a fair amount of negativity towards the occupation from some quarters.

The objections were about the value of a movement that had no base in a broad based struggle within the city. The occupation was accused of being at once too middle class, peopled by those with the option to return to comfort, and marginal. It was viewed as somehow pointless, what could it achieve? It alienated people by being seated in an profoundly alternative world that set it irrevocably apart from the experiences and desires of normal people, of that broad swathe of the 99% whose (op)position it aims to voice.

One friend present, whose daughter had visited the camp, was cross because those present at the time of her visit had alienated her, not been able to accommodate her concerns about the utility of the camp. Here was my main area of agreement with them, I too, despite knowing several people who have been there regularly from the earliest days and nights, do not feel comfortable walking up and speaking to them. It feels a bit like wandering up to a sound system at a festival when you aren’t really aware of what music they play, if they want you there and a whole host of other inadequacies.

However, to return to my point: by and large I disagreed with the detractors. Why I asked did it concern you so much? What was the issue with Occupy? You do not complain so severely of the presence and practices of the banks opposite? Nor even of the commercial practices of the cafes or department stores on Fargate? All those brand names, those chain stores. Why object to Occupy which feels almost like a brand name, not for a product, but for a way to organise, a way to discuss, a way to keep issues of inequality in a public arena? There lies, if nowhere else, its profound value: it keeps questions open, it attracts discussion and maintains a set of effective punch and judiesque figures around which an audience, in debt to so much offered by inequality, can gather, laugh or ridicule.

Take the motion put forward by Jillian Creasy, the Green Party councillor, earlier in December. However toned down was the eventual motion passed by the Council, it forced a debate on issues of principal which is, I suspect, comparatively rare in pragmatic political arenas, the very fields where it matters.

Good luck to them and I’ll go to the performance some time soon.

Power distorts

2011-12-29T07:37:00.001Z

Physics tells us that a black hole distorts space and time in its vicinity, rather like a lead weight on a rubber sheet. To be honest, I don’t really understand that.

But I do consider that a concentration of too much money in one place distorts human economies (capitalism gone wrong) in the same way as a concentration of too much power in one place distorts human emotion (the funeral of Kim Jong Il), spiritual awareness (the Vatican) and truth (the Murdoch press).

1 Timothy 6:10: “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils,” is regarded as the more accurate translation of the original Greek. If for money, one reads power, because the two are broadly synonymous, then St Paul’s observation stands.

The Raft

2011-12-05T23:17:00.001Z

If what we know is surrounded by a sea of unknowing, I suspect our ancestors felt that knowledge was an island which had been explored by their ancestors. You had only to read the right maps, that is the ancient texts, from Aristotle to the Bible, and all would be revealed.

With the Enlightenment and scientific method, people discovered more and more, and they may have reframed knowledge as a vast continent, still surrounded by the sea of unknowing but waiting to be discovered by intrepid teams of explorers (with or without teams of native bearers who never got a mention).

I regard our knowledge as a sea-going vessel plying the ocean of unknowing, but not a battleship, not an ocean liner or even an ice-breaker. I see knowledge as a raft, and a leaky raft at that. We are all still in the sea of unknowing, and we all have wet feet.

When Bankers Were Good – and were very often Quakers

2011-11-23T18:43:00.002Z

“When Bankers Were Good”, an excellent programme by Ian Hislop, which was on BBC2 Tuesday 22nd at 9.00pm, looks at Victorian financiers and how their morality informed there attitude to their wealth and what they did with it.

Ian starts off with the Quaker Gurney family from Norwich, amongst the most important and wealthiest bankers in the early 19th century. Quaker integrity shines through in Ian Hislop's analysis of Samuel Gurney who even visits Norwich Friends Meeting House and films us at worship. “The Gurneys were not just Christians – they were Quakers”, although the phrase 'as rich as the Gurneys' entered the language of the day to denote huge wealth.

Watch it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b017nf4k/Ian_Hislop_When_Bankers_Were_Good/

Samuel Gurney, was the brother of Elizabeth Fry, whose husband Joseph Fry was also a banker. In the credit crunch following the stock market crash of 1825, his bank failed along with many others. Although Samuel Gurney helped many banks through the crisis, later on he did not rescue his own brother in law's bank, judging it not worthy. About as far removed from crony capitalism as you can possibly get.

What is more:
“The Quakers judged failure to pay back debt an unforgivable betrayal of trust . The bankrupt Joseph [Fry] was thrown out of the Society Of Friends, and Elizabeth's reputation suffered too. This may seem harsh, but perhaps there is something to be said for a morality that valued personal integrity and prudence with other people's money, and considered financial recklessness at the least something to be embarrassed about. These days when bankers mess up the economy they seem to get off scot-free. Perhaps a bit of stern Quaker shame would not go amiss.”

So why does hardly anyone know about what was the greatest discounting house in the world at the time? Sadly, after the death of Samuel Gurney, the bank over extended itself rather like many banks recently, and failed in the 1866 stock market crash, creating the last run on a British bank before Northern Rock in 2008. And Ian Hislop does not flinch from letting us know that the later Gurneys and many other Victorian financiers were no better than those of today.

The remains of Gurney's bank, still in Quaker hands in Norwich, finally merged with Barclay's. But then Barclay's started as a Quaker bank as well – as did Lloyds.

Sitting on a Goldmine

2011-11-23T13:35:00.001Z

On Friday I waved goodbye to two busloads of small farmers from rural Matabeleland, who were here for a week doing training in ‘seed multiplication’, ie growing their own crop seeds, so they don’t have to buy them from the monopoly seed company Seedco every year. The farmers gave us a presentation on Thursday morning, saying they had never known they could produce their own seed ‘because Seedco doesn’t want us to know we can do it ourselves’. They concluded with a Ndebele song and dance routine (including some impressive dance moves by the older ladies), with lyrics roughly like this – ‘The donors are leaving, if you hold onto aid dependency, you will be left behind’.

Zimbabwean society is going through a huge shift as international aid organizations withdraw from famine relief. In arid Matabeleland, rural communities have depended for years on food aid and handouts of hybrid seeds (that don’t reproduce reliably) planted in fields that are almost pure sand, without anything done to restore the soil. At an Oxfam workshop recently a Zimbabwean professor described this as ‘the aid industry giving out fertilizer and seeds to continue the cycle of poverty’. With the withdrawal of much international aid, rural people are being forced to make a transition to more sustainable livelihoods just to survive. Groups like last week’s are a reminder to me of how important Hlekweni’s work is in helping this process.

Our end-of-year graduation ceremony is coming up in December, unless the police order us to move it - Zanu-PF are holding their national conference just up the road in Bulawayo in the same week and public events that ‘clash’ with Zanu rallies (even family events such as weddings) are often banned. We have also been training a group of older rural women who came through a Zanu-PF funded scheme, and I have been making efforts to discourage our staff from referring to them as ‘that Zanu lot’…

I was out with other staff and trainees fighting a bush fire on the farm again last week, when we stumbled on (but luckily not into) a crude mine-shaft dug by squatters on Hlekweni land. Gold digging is a widespread illegal activity among Zimbabwe’s desperate poor – extracting tonnes of rock with pick-axes in the hope of finding tiny quantities of ore. I don’t know whether ‘our’ miners have ever found anything, but it would be ironic if with all our financial woes Hlekweni turns out to be literally sitting on a gold-mine...

Occupiers and Quakers

2011-11-15T09:24:00.004Z

The Occupy movement is in nearly 1000 cities around the world, including Sheffield (https://occupysheffield.org/), outside the cathedral.

Occupy is a "leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. This movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society." (Occupy Wall Street statement)

In the 17th century, England was in turmoil as a bloody civil war tore the nation apart. Many people lost faith in the government of the time, and in the church, in those days a central pillar of society. No longer knowing what to do or who to trust, many groups of people started looking for new ways of living together – ranters, diggers, levellers, and others. Some groups simply waited in silence for inspiration as to what to do. These groups, known as Seekers, formed a loose network across the country, and one such group met around Doncaster - then much bigger than Sheffield.

It is from such groups that Quakers sprang in the 1640s and 50s. George Fox realised "that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers".
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The Occupy movement is telling us that being educated at Eton or the Chicago Business School does not make you fit to run the world.

The Occupy movement has no leaders and practices consensual decision making (http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/)

Quakers also have no 'leaders' and have been practising consensual decision making for over 350 years.

As I write this, Occupy Wall Street is being violently evicted in the middle of the night by heavily armed police.

In the 1660's Quakers meetings were often violently broken up and Quakers thrown in prison.

Occupy is our sort of movement – or are we now too comfortable and complacent enjoying the material luxuries of the status quo?

Grace

2011-10-18T12:07:00.001+01:00

“It isn’t easy,” said Pooh to himself. “Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”

Grace is not an easy concept to understand. It has connotations of favour, the free (gratis, from the Latin gratia, grace) gift of mercy and forgiveness which comes to us from God. As with most Godly things, it is essentially impossible to define it very precisely or to know its attributes. It seems to me that the really difficult part for us is to be able to accept it. So, receiving grace – is it accepting that you are forgiven? Or daring to love God with a full and open heart? Daring to know that you are loved? All of the above?

How can we get from here to there – from not knowing grace to knowing grace?

Some people seem to believe (or seem to act as if) one must earn grace: believing the right beliefs, doing the right deeds, acts of piety (and filial obedience, especially to the Church) but avoiding any hint of spiritual pride, avoiding all the multitude of sins that have been specified by the experts over the centuries, including those that very few people have ever heard of. For a select few, through an extensive course of applied piety and passing various detailed checking procedures after death, it is possible to achieve veneration, beatification, ultimately sainthood. It is said that any US citizen can aspire to become President. Perhaps any of God’s children can aspire to saint-hood, depending on what they do to earn it. The necessity is (in the ancient formula beloved of teachers) Must Try Harder. From this point of view, grace seems to be seen as a medal awarded for outstanding spiritual achievement, and posthumously.

Others would disagree: grace can not be earned, only accepted by the enlightened, but here is how you can bring about that enlightenment. Perform the following spiritual exercises so many times daily (after your macrobiotic breakfast) – yogurt and yoga; meditate the right meditations, chant the right mantras. A sort of spiritual health diet. I am not comfortable with the thought that one can manufacture acceptance of grace, any more than one can make a horse drink or explain a joke. I recall an episode in The Good Life, in which Margo, who appeared to have no sense of humour, pleaded with Tom, Barbara and Gerry, “But why is it funny?” That is a question which can not be answered. I don’t have much respect for painting by numbers, either.

It seems to me that grace is a favour, endlessly extended. All we have to do is take it, as a gift. That isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most of us, most of the time, are suspicious and imagine that there must be some catch, or some condition to fulfil. “Me? How can God love me? What have I done to deserve that? Looking at my track record, I can’t see that I deserve God’s love. Surely other people are worthy of this gift, long before I am. I’m not a very Good person.”

Such thinking introduces the notion of competition. Some people will tell you that grace, or salvation, are not for everyone, but only for the Chosen Few. Which you have to be born into, or brought up in, or in some other way most people are not allowed it – it is an exclusive offer. Us and Them, the sheep and the goats.
That might be the case if grace were a strictly limited commodity. If there are twenty chimpanzees and only twelve bananas, there is likely to be trouble. On the other hand, if there are lots of chimpanzees but bananas for all, there need be no fighting but only the sound of peaceful munching. If God’s love is infinite, as we are advised, then all may share in it. If it is only for a few, then it isn’t infinite at all, but limited, in short supply, and conditional. I believe that we each have a unique pathway through life. I do not see this as a CV submitted as part of our application for the top position, no. I see spirituality as a learning experience, but without a set curriculum.

'Becoming, once again, native to this place, Earth.'

2011-10-16T14:09:00.004+01:00

About 18 months ago I attended a talk given by one of the key players in the transformation of the West Yorkshire town of Todmorden into 'Incredible Edible Todmorden'.

Paul Clarke shared how the people of Todmorden had embraced the ideas of a few willful locals to 'reinvent our place, in mad times', by initiating a wide range of food-growing and self-sufficiency projects, from planting herb beds on the train station platforms, to a major land development and management project on the edge of town, 'for growing, study and learning'.

Todmorden has, in Clarke's words, turned from 'ego-centric to eco-centric'. The former industry town is now flourishing once more. Check out http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/ for much more insight!

Last Saturday (8th Oct), a dozen or so friends from our Meeting spent a fruitful day exploring Britain Yearly Meeting's commitment to becoming a low-carbon sustainable community. What emerged out of this day of digging and sifting was a handful of healthy-looking seeds for our Meeting to consider planting, together.

Food is a unifying element of life - 'a universal connector', as Paul Clarke said in his talk of a year and a half ago. The visioning exercises friends embraced last Saturday led us to see food - growing it, cooking it, learning about it and eating it - as a means of helping tend our community toward becoming low-carbon and sustainable; toward 'the conviviality of self-reliance'.

Over the coming weeks, the Living Witness Project Sheffield Support Group will conduct a brief survey to help our Meeting at large to discern what actions we all might like to take in order to build on the strong and exciting visions that emerged from Saturday's session.

We've thought of 3 simple questions: Who in our Meeting grows food? Who would like to learn how to? And who would support a Sheffield Quakers food growing and trading project (by whatever means appropriate to each individual and family in our Meeting)?

So, look out for the questionnaire, as well as the next LWP Sheffield update in next month's SQN, which will give more details of many of the seeds that are sprouting in our Meeting.

Already Growing

2011-10-03T09:32:00.005+01:00

Dave Edmonds and I have just spent the weekend in Bamford, at the Quaker Community, sharing and connecting with friends from around the country who are already active in fostering our fresh aim as Quakers to evolve into a low-carbon, sustainable community.

This is an exciting time to be a Quaker. A radical root has taken hold in Britain Yearly Meeting and we in Sheffield are gifted with many good conditions to nourish this new growth. What I've discovered over the course of a relaxing, energising and forward-viewing weekend spent in the company of friends is that, as a community, we have all the elements we need in order to grow together.

It seems that many people in our society miss out on belonging to a group, a self-sustaining, active community, based on deep principles and beliefs. As friends, we come together in meetings for worship, or reflection, or for worship sharing and an energy - a witness - greater than our individual parts leads us in dynamic ways to new discoveries, to fresh ground; to fertile soil. Being together makes this happen.

For me, the most exciting word in 'low-carbon, sustainable community' is the final word, 'community'. It really is the first word, and where we, as a circle of friends, can easily begin from. Lucky us!

On Saturday 8th October (10am-4pm), there's a chance to get together for a few hours and look a little deeper, as a group, at what 'low-carbon sustainable community' means to us, who live and worship in Sheffield. Sunniva Taylor, of QPSW, will be helping us with this. Following lunch, we'll have a chance to discern a collective action that we, as a Meeting, wish to work toward over the next 12-18 months.

Personally, I'm looking forward to growing in the spirit of community, to enjoying the great benefits to be unearthed in working shoulder to shoulder with friends as we work and walk in our living witness. In this vision there already lies the seed of sustainability. Working together, we'll water that seed wonderfully and the 'low-carbon' bit will follow!

Chess

2011-09-29T08:33:00.001+01:00

It is said that there are so many possible games of chess that if a game were to be completed every second, there have not been enough seconds since the Universe began to complete all of the possible games. That is how variable chess is.

On the other hand, the rules of chess are absolutely fixed. A bishop moves like this, not like that; a knight does something of its own – it’s not allowed to move like a castle. If you play by any other rules, you are not playing chess. That is how fixed chess is.

Some people think that the rules of life are as strict and laid-down as the rules of chess. Wouldn’t that make our decisions simple?

In real life, there are not necessarily sixty-four squares on the board. Some of them are black and some white, but lots of them are grey. Some of the pieces are of different colours and play on loan to Black or White, and change sides without notice. Some change shape over night and decide to move differently, or wander off for a beer. Some gang up against their own side, or refuse to play with one another because they’ve fallen out.

That’s how variable real life is.

Fire and Fury in Zimbabwe

2011-09-15T15:44:00.001+01:00

We’ve had plenty of drama here over the last month. Two weeks ago there was a huge bush fire that burned across our farm and several neighbours’ over a whole day. I was out with a group of local women and trainees trying to beat out the flames, and narrowly avoiding getting trapped by walls of fire as we clambered between thickets of thorn trees. We did manage to stop the fire, but not before it had consumed most of our remaining pasture, which we need for cattle grazing until new grass grows in the rainy season.

There have also been tensions for some time between our two groups of trainees, who arrived in June and July. The June intake are all Shona-speakers from outside Matabeleland, while the July group are local Ndebele people. There is an appalling history of ethnic violence in Zimbabwe, included the massacre of tens of thousands of Ndebele people in the 1980s by government troops. Part of the legacy of this is that relations between Shona and Ndebele people can be strained, and last weekend this erupted in a serious fight between a large group of our trainees, which had to be broken up by staff. Luckily there were only fairly minor injuries, but it has revealed a very destructive faultline in the community. We are working on ways to build shared understanding between the two groups, including using AVP (Alternatives to Violence Project) and bringing in outside facilitators. This is a very important issue for Zimbabwe as a whole, with very sensitive political as well as ethnic roots. I hope that we can help at least some of our trainees to learn from this experience and develop a better understanding of how to avoid destructive conflict in future.

Hlekweni’s finances continue to be in a desperate condition. The cost of living is going through the roof, following big increases in electricity tariffs and huge import duties of up to 90%, which affect everyone since Zimbabwe has to import almost all its manufactured goods. Like most organisations in the country we haven’t been able to increase our income enough to keep up with growing costs, and at the end of this month we won’t have funds to meet our payroll. People at Hlekweni have been here before, and Zimbabweans in general have a lot to teach us about adapting and persevering through times of crisis. For Kate and I, it still feels pretty much like disaster and we both feel very uncertain about the future here (although this is starting to seem a fairly permanent condition when living in Zimbabwe). We are not taking it lying down though - the only way through this is to make the farm productive, so we are starting an irrigation project to grow vegetables commercially on 5 hectares, and are clearing land for sorghum growing during the rainy season. If nothing else, I am learning about agriculture here, and it has got me interested in studying it in more depth in the future.

As always, we appreciate and rely on all your support, letters, phone calls, emails and chocolate parcels.

With much love and in Friendship,

Craig

Hlekweni, PO Box 708, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

Recent (good) news and photos from Hlekweni at: www.hlekweni.org

The Cowboy

2011-08-27T16:57:00.002+01:00

Dawn breaks at the cattle ranch. First out of the bunk-house is the cook, who prepares breakfast for the men. Next out is a cow-hand, dressed in a plaid shirt, hard-wearing Levis, and a pair of boots with heels which will not slip out of the stirrups. Later he will don a neckerchief with which to wipe his brow, a wide-brimmed hat to shield him from the sun, and wide leather chaps, if he’s going to be branding cattle. On his belt he carries a wooden-handled knife which he keeps sharp and clean, as well as a wooden-handled .45, essentially a humane killer in case a beast breaks a leg out on the range and has to be put down. Everything he wears and carries is serviceable and well looked-after, the tools of his trade. He is a cow-hand.

Much later in the morning, from the main house steps the Dude, a visitor from out East. He makes quite a picture: matching shirt and pants all embroidered and fringed, a huge, white, pristine ten-gallon hat, a fancy tooled gun belt with matching, pearl-handled .45s, as well as a pair of fancy high boots. He is going to have a ride on a carefully chosen, mild-tempered mare. He thinks he is a cow-hand.

It’s funny: some people say cowboy to mean not to be taken seriously, doesn’t know what he’s doing. Here, you can see the picture, can’t you? Who is the serious person, who the poser? When it comes to needing a guide through the sagebrush, or through life, would you rather trust the cow-hand or the Dude, the experienced person or the man in the fancy clothes and silly hat?

Do You Believe in Air?

2011-08-04T18:37:00.001+01:00

The writer Thomas Harris (not the author of The Silence of the Lambs) wrote a book called I’m OK, You’re OK, an exposition of Transactional Analysis (TA) which was founded by Eric Berne. The title represents a positive and trusting outlook towards oneself and other people, which TA says is the only really healthy position to occupy in life.

One of Harris’s friends asked him, “If I’m OK and you’re OK, why do you lock your car?” A searching question. I think the answer must be, “There is good in everyone, but some people have had such a painful start in life that they don’t know that they have this good inside them, and so they act as if they were bad, not knowing any different.” By extension, you do according to what you feel you are.

If God is universal and eternal, then he has all space and all time covered. He always was, he is everywhere, and he will always be. Quakers believe that he is in everyone too, everywhere in the inner space of people as well as existing everywhere even in the empty outer space of the universe.

How then is it that we think of some people as being without God? To begin with, we simply do not know for a fact what goes on in someone else’s heart and mind, since we can have no direct experience of it. We think we can infer, from what they say and do, how they feel and what they believe, but inference is unreliable at best. Even well-chosen words are limited and ambiguous when it comes to trying to express the inexpressible, as we try to do, and the meaning of someone’s actions can always be misinterpreted. Hence the wisdom of, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matt 7:1). It is foolish and presumptuous to think that they are not with God, and even more presumptuous to think that God is with us and not with them.

We may be able, very cautiously, to consider that some people don’t seem to be aware that they have God in them. Then the question arises, “Is it crucial to know that you have God in you? Is it crucial what you consciously believe?” (Compare, “What must I do to be saved?” “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Acts 16:30-31) Well, your awareness makes some difference, it’s bound to, but I am not at all sure that it’s the whole answer, by any means. My thinking goes like this:

Some people declare, “I only believe in the facts, me. I only believe in what I can see with my own eyes.” Really? Do you believe in air? No one can see air. You can feel a breeze against your cheek, or the wind blowing your hair, but you can’t see it. We know about air by observing air’s effects, through experience. We certainly know the effects of lack of air, within seconds. But the existence of air, or certainly the existence of oxygen, the bit we need, was only discovered in the scientific age. It is not necessary to know about air or to believe in air, to gain its benefits. It is only necessary to breathe; you don’t need belief, only lungs.

I would say, likewise with the spirit. All the animals and most of the people have always breathed, without knowing what they breathed. I will say that people who do not know that they have God in them, have God in them. They live, without knowing how they live. There is to my knowledge no instrument or scientific method that can prove (or disprove) God’s existence. Only the promptings in our hearts and minds can lead us to awareness of God’s presence and love for us, but our hearts and minds need to be tuned to that awareness, which doesn’t come easily.

I also believe that it is a good thing to effect some sort of introduction between God and the people in whom he dwells, if at all possible. There is doubtless no need to say, “God, this is Man.” He knows. But there is every need to say, “Man, this is God.” Gently, always very gently.

News from Hlekweni

2011-08-03T15:22:00.003+01:00

I’m sitting at my desk with a hot water bottle inside my jumper, enduring the unexpectedly cold Zimbabwean mid-winter. The sun is shining as always, but there is a biting wind and of course no heating in the buildings so everyone is suffering and waiting for summer.

Hlekweni is completely full at last, with 107 trainees, including a group of 54 Shona-speakers from rural Masvingo Province who arrived in June. So we have become a tri-lingual community overnight (English, Ndebele and Shona). Needless to say, we had no idea that the June arrivals were all Shona-speaking until they arrived. For all of them this is their first experience of Matabeleland - for some the trip here was their first time on a bus. It feels quite significant that we are able to welcome young people from Zimbabwe’s different ethnic groups, which have a history of conflict, and that (so far) they are getting on well together and seem to be having a great time. They have started their own clubs for singing, drama, art and debating (!), with help from our new volunteer Jessica, a young Quaker from New Zealand, who is with us until December.

Our mid-week Quaker Meeting for Worship is becoming quite extraordinary. About 30 young trainees came last week. After about 15 minutes of silent worship a young woman started singing and everyone joined in. Then we had a flow of beautiful songs, interspersed with Bible readings in different languages, that went on until dinner time. All of it was unplanned and unorganized – the young people had got the message that Quaker worship is Spirit-led and just run with it.

The local children were delighted with all the new books donated by friends in the UK (there are some lovely photos on the website at: www.hlekweni.org). The school holidays are just starting here, and Kate and Jessica will be running another holiday club with games and crafts in the library.

Trying to manage Hlekweni continues to be a struggle - I generally feel like the ant that thinks it’s riding an elephant (ie the elephant has its own opinion… ). Half the farm has been burnt by wild fires over the last few weeks. It’s an eerie sight in the evening to see the horizon lit up by bushfires and palls of smoke drifting for miles. Jonathan has been quite worried that we are going to get burnt up, but no one else here seems too alarmed, which I’m hoping means it’s not dangerous. There certainly isn’t enough water to put out any fires - our water supply has been intermittent again, as the water table seems to be dropping steadily, and there’s no rain now until at least November.

Sending our love and do stay in touch – we really appreciate your emails, letters (and parcels!)

In Friendship,

Craig

Sustaining the Future

2011-07-21T10:38:00.002+01:00

Small groups of friends have been gathering in the Meeting House over the past few months to explore, reflect and initiate action on how to sustain ourselves within - and as - a Quaker community, here in Sheffield.

'Growing in the Spirit - changing the way we live to sustain the world we live in' has been a series of four worship-sharing sessions designed as preparation for Britain Yearly Meeting Gathering, which this year has taken 'sustainability' as its theme.

The opening session gave space for reflecting on what we need as individuals in order to sustain our spiritual lives; then each subsequent session expanded the question to include first our Quaker community, then our local community, and finally the natural world as a whole.

All good stuff. But, what is 'sustainability'? Is it a subjective idea (I think it is when I use the word!) or is it something more calculable, scientific? I therefore wonder if 'nourishment' is a more useful word...

What nourishes us as humans, as part of an ecological reality? What feeds our spiritual existence? What acts of nurturing can move me toward loving action in the place I live, connecting me with others who are different from me?

For my part, I've come to realise that I must put my hands in the soil - to get on my knees , to dig, to plant, to tend and to harvest. (I have NO experience of how to grow a crop, so I really am a beginner.) It was most interesting to me that the final of these four sessions - which invited us to reflect on ways to sustain our natural world - re-animated my reflections from each previous session. Other friends seemed to concur: a vision emerged...

What if, as a Quaker community, we return to the soil?

Sheffield Quakers source a patch of land on which to grow food and, there, we come together. Here's communal worship. In my action, I foster good health and a felt connection with that of God in all things. Here's a spiritual life. Others are invited to come, to learn new skills and to share in the fruits of community. Here's local resilience.

This vision seems to satisfy both the whole (Earth) and the particular (the here and now). Is that 'sustainability'?

So, as a jumping off point, I'm keen to know - do any friends wish to join me on this adventure? Is there a patch of land, in or near Sheffield, that we could take care of, as a 'growing concern'? I'm up for digging down...

In Praise of Uncertainty

2011-07-06T08:32:00.001+01:00

On 19th June, our Friend, Chrissie Hinde, citing the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, and her book When Things Fall Apart, ministered that to have our lives sorted out and secure would be sort of dead, and that we are often closer to spiritual discovery when we keep falling out of the nest.

I can understand that we can all feel a need for certainty, probably as much in settled times of peace and prosperity (when were they, exactly?) as in these days, which we regard as troubled. “May you live in interesting times,” is said to be a Chinese curse, not a blessing. We can easily feel the need for a bit more security.

Or at least we would like things to be a bit clearer than they usually are. It seems to me the more aware you are, the more aware you become of how complex everything is. Quakers, given a choice, prefer simplicity, and we sometimes convene a Meeting for Clearness when the cloud of unknowing gets a bit too much. I can appreciate that. Too much security makes for lack of freedom, but too much freedom can be scary.

I suppose the one profession that strives for as much clearness as possible is the law. Our elected legislators rely on law-drafters to get their Acts of Parliament phrased as precisely as possible. Lawyers try to build every contingency into contracts and wills, so that if push comes to shove, anything that can happen is covered. Lawyers like to pin down the exact meanings of words, so that they do not shift.

Of course, pinning down a butterfly kills it. Poets like their words to take wing and fly.

Some people are very uncomfortable with the thought that meaning can be personal and dependent on context. They prefer the facts. It seems to me that facts are good, in their proper context, as long as they don’t get above themselves. Take Michel-angelo’s David. It would be possible to ascertain the facts: the volume of the statue, its weight, hence its density; the place of origin of the marble, its chemical properties, etc. All scientists would pretty much agree on these facts. But none of this conveys the meaning of the sculpture. You feel it, in your own way, or you don’t feel it – some people are probably sculpture-blind, just as some people are tone-deaf.

I have the feeling that if the importance of facts gets out of hand, or if law becomes involved in faith, there is likely to be trouble. I think Jesus had the same difficulty with the lawyers and book-men of his day. To me, the right way to live is not about the precise and scholarly interpretation of the minute detail of an antique text in an ancient language, but about spiritual awareness. Which is fresh and new, and is nice work when you can get it, on a good day.

What worries me rather is what happens if, having experienced what they feel is a spiritual revelation, people feel that they have arrived at the facts, once and for all time. They tend to call it The Truth, not ‘my take’ or ‘our version,’ and they tend to start trying to impose it on other people: ‘You must see everything our way, or your immortal soul has got no chance, you’re headed for eternal damnation, and Serve You Right.’ It may be that they do this out of genuine love for other people, wanting only what is best for them which, they are convinced, their message is.
The problem I have with this is not that I wouldn’t want to preach and proselytise unless I was really sure of my message. These preachers are sure of their message. They know that they are right, without a doubt. The problem I have is that I don’t feel comfortable about pushing someone else in a matter which I regard as deeply personal and which needs to be spontaneous to be authentic, even if I were sure that it would be good for them.

If you are absolutely certain that your beliefs are correct, you may cease to listen to any other point of view, cease to search and to discover anything more, and cease to learn. My experience tells me that you need to receive spiritual revelation again and again. Some may say, ‘I don’t need to learn any more. I’ve got it all.’ My belief in the importance of humility doesn’t allow me to be very comfortable with this position.
As Chrissie ministered, if certainty involves coming to a halt, then in a way one’s spiritual awareness is no longer growing. Like a tree, if it is not growing, it is dying.

So there are problems associated with certainty, especially absolute certainty, just as there are the problems of success. People who have the mixed fortune to receive huge amounts of money from the Lottery have the opportunity to know that. It will totally alter their lives, not always for the good. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.

My take on spiritual awareness tells me it is better to make friends with uncertainty than to try and get it all under control, cut and dried. I hope that this does not sound pessimistic or cynical, as in, ‘You’ll never sort it out, so there’s no point trying,’ but rather more encouraging: ‘If you don’t know it for a fact, that’s fine – stay with it.’

To stay alive, we need to keep growing, and to keep growing, we need a vision – not a vision of certainty, but a vision of hope. This involves an apparent paradox: we need to entrust ourselves to a journey which is of its nature unpredictable and therefore seems untrustworthy. To entrust ourselves to the intrinsically doubtful is where faith comes in.

Paul Hunt

a beginning...

2011-06-27T11:39:00.005+01:00

Sunday 18th June was Sheffield Central Meeting's Living Witness Project Sheffield Launch Day. If you weren't able to join us, here's what happened:

Meeting for Worship was well-attended and it was the time of the month for a reading from Quaker F&P. The LWP Sheffield support group offered to the Meeting 25.12 (http://qfp.quakerweb.org.uk/qfp25-12.html) and the 2nd half of 25.14 (http://qfp.quakerweb.org.uk/qfp25-14.html), from the chapter Unity of Creation.

Both the Children and Young People's Meetings were themed, with Huw leading the children in games that explored resources and recycling and the young people had a chance to get hands on with me as I gave an introduction to Deep Ecology, which, the more I get into it, seems to be a science-based way of seeing 'that of God in everyone'
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology).

After Meeting, there was a chance for friends to find out about some aspects of the support group's own 'living witness' to sustainability. Anne presented her tapestry made from recycled materials; Gordon brought in a rich garden compost, with instruction on how to cultivate your own; Rosalie offered info sheets on where to buy locally grown food and organic box delivery schemes; and I presented Dave's low-carbon travel schedule, as he was on holiday in Vienna at the time (having travelled there by train, he cut his carbon travel footprint by well over 3/4s). Meanwhile, Huw led a group of about 20 friends on a tour of the Meeting House, showing recent changes that have made to the building as part of a long-term project to improve the efficiency of the building. Last I saw the tour group they were ascending into the loft...!

The Meeting's first attempt at a low-carbon lunch yielded much more variety than I expected - a great spread! With an emphasis on regionally-grown organic produce, home-harvested salad and vegan-friendly recipes, the vast majority of ingredients were reliably 'low-carbon' alternatives to imported foods. However, it was clear from some shop-bought foods just how many ingredients in processed products come from untraceable sources.

The Launch Day was capped off with an informal session, the 3rd of 4 sessions on concentric circles of sustainability (from Quaker Meeting to planet). Over 20 friends attended, giving a chance to reflect on and share concerns and ideas in relation to sustainable community. So many seeds were sown by the group; some may germinate, in time.

A positive 'first day' for Living Witness Project Sheffield.
More events to follow!

Busyness

2011-06-18T13:46:00.003+01:00

Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.............

To Friends In Amersham, Isaac Penington, 4th of Third Month,1667. Also Quaker Faith and Practice 10.01

All Motherhood and Apple Pie, isn't it? Should we not be out there working to make the world a better place, ministering in meeting, working “on our many committees, hospitality and childcare, the care of finance and premises......teaching, counselling, listening, praying, enabling the service of others or other service in the meeting or the world.' (London Yearly Meeting, 1986, Quaker Faith and Practice 10.05)?

No. If we start with service, we will court guilt at not being good enough, or at getting tired or feeling burdened. We will 'burn out' and become depressed or worse. We will compare ourselves with others and either be puffed up with pride at our success or downhearted when we see others do better.

Our life is love, and peace and tenderness. We do not need to be good to give or receive love, we do not need to feed people to feel loved. Love does not need an object – love is. Unless what we do comes out of love and peace and tenderness, it will just be so much busyness.

Seek first love and peace and tenderness and all these things that need doing will sort themselves out.

Chinese Whispers

2011-05-15T18:04:00.001+01:00

The children’s game known in the UK as Chinese Whispers (in the USA as Telephone or Grapevine) starts with a message that is whispered to the first person, then passed around the group, each whispering what they heard to the next. Mistakes are inevitably made and accumulate, prompting innocent merriment.

Let us say someone once heard a message from the Spirit and wrote it down years later. It was translated and commented on, then the commentaries were freely incorporated into the translated text. Later for political reasons, someone edited the text in a big way, and then that was translated. Chinese Whispers or what?

However it seems to me that probably the Spirit always comes into the world through Chinese Whispers, even if there is only one whisperer.

Thinking and Doing

2011-05-05T14:52:00.000+01:00

If you live inside your head, Science, Art and Religion will appear to contradict one-another. This is because, inside our heads, we build systems of knowledge, and in the name of reason, we demand consistency.

If you stay inside your head, only science and logic ultimately make sense. Art becomes nice things to look at to make us feel happy, and religion becomes wishful thinking to calm us when we are afraid – especially afraid of death.

Get outside your head, and Science Art and Religion are thing that we do. And we do things differently. Science tells us how best to use the world to meet our needs. Art tells us how best to view the world to find value in it. And religion tells us how best to relate to the world, including and especially to one-another.

More news from Hlekweni: how to hit the nail on the head

2011-04-21T09:37:00.002+01:00

After all these months of waiting, I finally have my Zimbabwean work permit and officially started as Director of Hlekweni in April. It was quite a shock to hear that the permit had been approved – I had almost given up on it and we were starting to think of making plans to come back to the UK for good this summer. Instead, we have shifted into a new gear of preparing to be here for the next two years (thepermit is until Feb 2013), and being totally responsible for Hlekweni with all its rather pressing challenges.

The absolute poverty here is a constant source of frustration, and I am still struggling to adapt to a situation of absolute scarcity of all resources. As just one example; Moya and Jonathan's school has
been waiting for months to have a dangerously hanging classroom roof fixed – on investigation I discovered it was because there weren't any nails. I finally bought a bag of nails, but the work seems to be stalled again, pending the availability of something – perhaps we are out of hammers too...

Despite the general air of desperation about the place, there are also encouraging 'signs of hope' to help keep us going. The micro-credit scheme we have set up for the local community is working well, and focusing local people's energies on a renewed sense of possibility and self-reliance. The first loan we made was $160 to a group of women who are making Ndebele bead jewellery, and as well as selling to overseas visitors they are starting to become a fashion item around Hlekweni
too. I have designed a business plan template which lots of other groups are using to develop their small business proposals, and our farm manager Lungisani has led a workshop on business planning for the community. One local man told me how important it was to him that Hlekweni is now doing something to help the community who live here, as well as the people from rural areas who we provide training to. Moya and Jonathan are still having a great time, now just starting their month-long Easter holiday. Jonathan has introduced the local boys to the joy of home-made bows and arrows – there was a little band of them playing Robin Hood the other day. Moya has been helping sometimes at the Hlekweni library, reading stories to younger children as well as joining in with the new games club for local children (pictured).

Things in Zimbabwe generally are quite worrying. On the positive side, the economy is continuing to recover, with more foodstuffs available in the shops and businesses re-opening. Politically, the situation is deteriorating, as the security services and youth militias are being used intimidate the population in advance of elections. Hlekweni is still an oasis of peacefulness, and we haven't encountered any trouble ourselves – in fact this is probably the safest place to be in the
whole country. It is dispiriting to see the hopes of Zimbabwean people being crushed out of them though, as they feel totally powerless to change their situation. Despite their envy of the revolutions in North Africa, no-one I have spoken to sees any prospect of something similar here, where the army is so solidly and ruthlessly behind the current regime.

We are all looking forward to our holiday in the UK in June, where we are all being put up by some of our wonderfully hospitable friends. I have got a few speaking/fundraising events lined up, including a talk on 29th June at Friends House in central London, 6-8pm.

Thanks so much to everyone who has emailed, written letters and sent wonderful parcels. It is a highlight of our week to visit the Post Office where there is almost always something waiting for us as a reminder of all the love and support that keeps us going. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers and stay in touch – there are more photos and news articles on our new website at: www.hlekweni.org and we are also on Facebook at: www.tinyurl.com/hlekweni

In Friendship,

Craig

Present and Prevented

2011-04-13T10:32:00.002+01:00

Sheffield Friends might remember that in May last year (and two years earlier, and I guess two years before that?) we took part in a national survey of attendance at Meeting for Worship and other numbers relating to our Meeting.

Nayler, a newish Quaker blog, has published a summary of the survey's results. I found them interesting: you might too.

Exclusive! While stocks last!

2011-04-03T20:07:00.002+01:00

The other day I was in a department store which made me an ‘exclusive’ offer. This meant, ‘You are allowed to buy this, but those other people are kept out – it’s too good for them. There, that appeals to you, doesn’t it?’

Well, I’m not sure. It’s nice to be given a good offer by someone, as long as it’s something you genuinely need or want. But why is it better for me if it is denied to other people? I don’t think I want to be included in something from which other people have to be excluded. The best offers are free to everyone, if they can only pick up on them. If they can not see them or can not take them, more’s the pity.

Again, I saw an article in a glossy magazine, ‘The ten best-kept-secret British beaches.’ So, that’s not going to last long, is it? If the article is successful, obviously the secret is out. I don’t know – is that in the spirit of inclusiveness? Secret beaches for all?

It seems to me that the Kingdom, or Grace, or Enlightenment – whatever one wants to call it – may be ‘hidden in plain sight,’ but it is free for everyone, and there is enough for everyone. ‘While stocks last’ doesn’t come into it. These stocks will last.

Paradoxically, if we are to love our enemies, we must be willing to include those who would exclude us, or who don’t want us to include them.

A jolly and murderous life

2011-04-02T19:52:00.003+01:00

Henry Williamson wrote 'Tarka The Otter' in the 1920s, living hermit-like in a remote Devon cottage among semi-wild dogs, cats, buzzards, gulls, magpies, and a rescued otter cub. His experiences in the First World War affected him deeply and permanently, and it is thought that he turned to nature in response. Tarka The Otter is known as a children's classic, but what the book group also saw in it this week was the expression of an adult's anguished experience, and an attempt to make sense of a world of killing. There is so much necessary, innocent killing in the book; every time Tarka is hungry he kills. Then he plays or sleeps till he is hungry again. Then kills again; sometimes for fun. Eventually he is killed. Full stop.

Somehow this doesn't make it a bleak book. Every page is packed with the huge gusto of living. For example, how's this for the cycle of life -

'The sickly trout, which had been dying for days with the lamprey fastened to it, floated down the stream; it had been a cannibal trout and had eaten more than fifty times its own weight of smaller trout. Tar from the road, after rain, had poisoned it. A rat ate the body the next day, and Old Nog [the heron] speared and swallowed the rat three nights later. The rat had lived a jolly and murderous life, and died before it could feel fear'.

Where's the goody? Where's the baddy? Who gets their comeuppance/who comes out best? You get the feeling that Henry Williamson earned very hardly the right to present his truths.

Tarka is finally killed by huntsmen after an eight hour chase. During these hours, in the few times when he is not running/swimming for his life, Tarka drifts and plays among the wild dog-rose petals on the water, and basks in the sun. It is like the Tao story (from memory) of the man hanging from a fragile branch over a crumbling precipice edge, tigers below ready to grab him, who is enjoying the scent of a wild flower growing near his head.

The Heart of the Matter

2011-03-20T18:35:00.000Z

Jesus had a way of cutting straight through to the heart of the matter.

He went unto the mount of Olives, and there he saw a group of men rolling up their sleeves and choosing rocks, and he said unto them, “What’s to do, like?”

And they said unto him, “Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act, do you know what I mean? And custom and practice,” citing the Law from Moses onwards, “says that we get to stone her, leading to a pile of stones and no need for a grave as such.”

He said to them, “Oh, I get it. And I expect he who is without sin among you gets to throw the first stone, right?”

And they said, “Um, well, when you say without sin, then perhaps not without all sin as such, per se, not necessarily. . . My goodness, is that the time?” and they all crept away.

Jesus said to the woman, “Are you still here? Where are all the guys. . .? Off you go. Oh, and sin no more, eh?”

(John 8:1–11, somewhat paraphrased)

African haiku

2011-03-15T13:34:00.004Z

A poetic update from Craig and Kate and kids and Hlekweni....

African Haiku

Blossom floats upwards
White butterflies drifting past
Before the rainstorm

Children trailing home
All morning through the tall grass
School fees still unpaid

Frogs croak in the night
Lightning flickers silently
Lighting up the clouds

God speaks for the silent man

2011-03-07T20:28:00.002Z

The Quaker book group is beginning to outgrow its birthplace. The small room upstairs in the Blue Moon cafe was crowded, with more new people along for Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna. We started with a concern from some who felt they were personally not giving enough back to Blue Moon; I know that some months I have turned up and hardly even bought a coffee (if that). We agreed to mention this in our publicity so that we share the concern. Some of us thought about staying on after the group for supper, the advantage of that being you can then have a wine or beer during the group; not too much of a sacrifice.

People commented what a good group discussion we had. What I remember was the comment by someone that Trotsky (who appears in the book) was depicted as rather a bureaucrat, whereas Pasternak in Dr Zhivago painted him as a visionary military genius. There was something there about - what does someone actually do month by month to qualify as a military genius - how, if at all, does that differ from being a militaristic leader - can those capacities ever be put to right use, even by someone fighting for the oppressed?

We talked about the social hierarchy of shades of skin colour in Mexico and Jamaica; about how Kingsolver joyfully throws artistic creativity in with the political mix; about the theme of successful people coming to need help from others to manage their lives so they can go on doing what made them sucessfull.

Someone noted how the structure of the book had similarities with the Gospel of St John, and someone else immediately pointed out the first line of the book ('In the beginning were the howlers'). We sat for a minute taking in this example of the synergy of the group (I think that means the sum being greater than the parts); perhaps Kingsolver had the Gospels in mind, as well as Frieda Kahlo, Trotsky, and the McCarthy hearings, when she wrote the book. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God' (John 1.1)

And God speaks for the silent man.

How far have you got?

2011-03-05T18:02:00.002Z

Each of us sets out on a journey. None of us knows how far we will travel; none of us knows how far there is to travel. None can predict the twists and turns the journey will involve. So none of can say of any other that he or she has (only) got so far (which would imply that we have gone further or know all about it - none of us knows how far along we are. There is no set course to run. The spirit may lead one person further than another, but who can say so? There are no merit badges, or black belts. I may be able to say that I am further along than I was, but further along than someone else? No way. Praise be.

Sing! in Pitsmoor...

2011-03-02T16:36:00.005Z

Good friends here in Pitsmoor are organising a celebration of five years of the Christchurch Singing Group - on the 26th March from 10am til 2pm. I think it will be a lovely event. I'll be going along with Saskia (childcare willing) and thought that there might be a few from meeting interested. Contact Julie (julie@sublime.org) for more details. I can't get the whole image on I'm afraid so just click the picture below or title above to see the flyer.

Tim

He Do The Police In Different Voices (T S Eliot at the book group)

2011-02-13T11:30:00.003Z

Yesterday felt like quite a special meeting of the book group. For one, we met in N’s new house. For another, there were so many of us that N ran out of mugs. For yet another, we welcomed several first time attenders, who had been attracted by our choice of T S Eliot’s Waste Land and Four Quartets. Several people talked with love of how his poetry spoke to them. Eliot originally planned to call The Waste Land 'He Do The Police In Different Voices', and voices became a theme of the meeting.

There was a view that Eliot’s religious sense can run the risk of religiosity, which is off-putting to some readers; this blossomed into a rich exchange. I can’t do justice to it, really (can others who were there help me out in comments?), but it was about the way some ‘religious’ poetry seems written primarily to show off the writer’s religion (or to convince themselves of it), rather than coming more from a place of spiritual searching. The first lines of Burnt Norton were quoted as an example of this hesitant, quite compelling, exploration.

We listened to a recording of Eliot reading his own verse in a booming, rather mannered patrician voice, then to Paul Schofield reading the same extracts. Schofield’s voice was mellifluous and charming, but somehow less engaging than Eliot’s flawed delivery. It reminded me of something David Byrne of Talking Heads said – that he knew his singing voice was poor, but he felt this lack was of use, in that it did not draw attention away from the content of his songs. There is something here about ministry too, perhaps.

Then someone said how Eliot’s fragmented, many-voiced work, covering a wide range of idiosyncratic voices, reminded them of how Meeting can be.

And someone commented that just as Cubism and modernist verse demanded a constant shift in focus in their audience, perhaps this ever-changing focus may be the way we approach spiritual mysteries most rewardingly.

Finally, our Central Meeting has a member who had afternoon tea with Mr Eliot in 1947 or thereabouts; he has a fascinating story to tell. If you are reading this, we would love to hear it!

Khirbet Tana - demolished four times in one year

2011-02-11T16:32:00.002Z

I just returned from being an ecumenical accompanier one month ago. I shall be talking about some of my experiences on Tuesday at the Quaker meeting house. The last month of my stay there was a busy time, visiting the many villages in and near the Jordan Valley demolished by the Israeli army. One such village, Khirbet Tana had already suffered two such demolitions earlier in the year. Sadly I just received an email from the British EA currently in the area. It has happened again. Khirbet Tana is where the shepherds from nearby Beit Furik, near Nablus, go with their flocks for the winter and spring. Like shepherds all over the world they migrate with the flocks to higher ground, more spacious, ready for the birth of hundreds of new lambs. These shepherds have been doing this for centuries. When I was there I spoke to one man whose grandfather had been killed by a Turkish soldier during the period of the Ottoman occupation. There is a mosque in the village, 300 years old.

The village is about 8 kilometres from Beit Furik along a difficult dirt road, past an often burning rubbish tip. So the people built a school for their children, so that they would not have to walk this road there and back each day. Education is very important to Palestinian people. As well as the school there are living units in large tents, and barracks, which are shelters for the sheep. Some people live in very comfortable caves and build a small tin shack as their toilet.

When we arrived at the village we found the headmaster of the school standing by its ruins, little chairs and tables lying around in disarray. A man sat by, head in hands. The mayor of the village was off to speak with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. The Red Cross were beginning to arrive with new tents. Sheep had scattered everywhere. We sat with one family outside their cave, surveying the ruins of their toilet, drinking tea. Even in these terrible cicumstances people will want you to drink tea with them.

I asked them if the Palestinian Authority would help them. "We are waiting for the PA, like we are waiting for the rain" said one man. It hadn't rained for six months. The people feel abandoned. But up on the hillside we saw young men carrying girders and tarpaulins, ready to rebuild. The school had been rebuilt after the last demolition. It took four months.This was December. The children were due to start school in January. Now I hear it is demolished again.

I asked if the soldiers gave a reason for doing this. "They say the area is fo military training, but I have never seen them training here. The only time we see them is when they come to demolish our village, and they don't need training in that", said my companion. These people never lose their sense of humour!

More Photos from Israel and Palestine

2011-02-10T19:28:00.007Z

The two previous photos are from the checkpoint outside Bethlehem where thousands of Palestinian men queue before dawn everyday to go to work in East Jerusalem.

This one is from a checkpoint outside Nablus where these children and their father were trying to go shopping one Saturday morning.

But it would be wrong to think that it is all scenes like these. The next picture shows Palestinian and Israeli children playing together (a very rare event), even more remarkable is that all these children have lost a relative in the conflict. They had the opportunity to meet at the Parents' Circle Summer camp, there is not enough space to fully describe the wonderful work of the Parents' Circle but please read more here.

Photos from the West Bank

2011-02-10T17:43:00.010Z

I can't remember the first time I heard Matt talk about his experiences on the West Bank. All I know is that they were hard for me to visualise. I'm a visual person. He came to our book group in September and we discussed the graphic novel (a book told in drawn photos) Palestine by Joe Sacco which helped some. However, I still had no idea what it looked like or how it might feel or smell to be there. These things matter to me when I think about other people's experiences and am trying to understand and empathise about what they are going through.

When we were talking about Sue Beardon coming to talk at the Quaker Meeting House this Tuesday (Feb 15th at 7:00, please note that I initially made a mistake - oh no! - I posted this incorrectly as 7:15, if you come a whole 15 minutes late you may miss tea and the introduction and crucial opening explanations and all sorts of important stuff and the best seats but still come if that's the best you can do :-) ), I asked him if there were any photos he might recommend. He showed me some photos of graffiti. He lead me into a whole world of Palestinian Flickr graffiti art. He started me off on some great Banksy stuff but if you're interested in looking for yourself, all you have to do is go to Flickr and search (click on this link for a number of groups that have specific photos related to Palestine).

Here were a couple favourites I found that immediately conveyed a great sense of place and space:

Photo Credit: Daniela Galazzo Limbo, Bethlehem (West Bank, Palestinian Occupied Territories), Check Point

Photo Credit: Daniela Galazzo Alba Vaga, Bethlehem (West Bank, Palestinian Occupied Territories), Check Point

Deacon Dave in Hebron

2011-02-09T11:00:00.010Z

Hi,

I have been invited to share some stories of my time in Palestine. I have been going backwards and forwards to Hebron for the last 4 years. Initially I went with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Then I met my wife Arwa under an olive tree. We got married and rented our own house in the Old City. Now when we go back we stay with her family. We were in Hebron last summer for 2 months and plan to be back there this summer again, God willing.

Photo credit: Giuseppe Onori, Handala

I love Hebron and specifically Tel Rumeida. The people there have always made me very welcome. I learn a lot from them about endurance, patience and resistance in very difficult circumstances. I find it easier to be close to God when I am there. Praying in the mosque 5 times a day enbles me to keep my sanity in an insane situation. Jewish settlers continually throw stones at children, attack their neighbours' houses, smash windows, harrass families, burn ancient olive trees and generally try to force Palestinians to move away. Israeli police and soldiers protect them and sometimes help them.

Settlers moved in across the road from Arwa's family in 1984. Soldiers came to protect them and set up their barracks on our family land between her 4 uncles houses. The family cannot use their front entrance or walk up their street at all. No Palestinian can drive in Tel Rumeida, not even ambulances sometimes. To get to shops or school you have to go through 3 checkpoints and carry all shopping by hand through the metal detector and up the steep hill.

For more stories and photos check out my own blog
www.deacondave.burngreave.net

For videos see www.youtube.com
DeaconDave777
or Hebron Voices

Hebron Voices is the project I am currently involved in. The idea is to let local Palestinians tell their own stories. I filmed a lot of interviews last summer and hope to continue this summer. People give me donations and I give out DVD's free to anyone who will watch them. Contact me if you want copies.

Do come along to our Film and Falafel Night on Thursday 24th Feb at 7.30 at Christ Church, Pitsmoor Rd (and Nottingham St.) Arwa, the "Queen of Falafel" will be cooking her wonderful Palestinian food and I will show "Price-Tag Policy", a 22 min film about the setting up af a new illegal settlement near Hebron and all the violence against Palestinians that accompanies that. After the film we will discuss the impact of settlements on the "peace process".

Contact me if you have any questions or if you would like us to come speak to a group or school class.

God bless you. Thanks for your help in listening to Palestinian stories and sharing them with others.

In peace and hope,
Deacon Dave

Six Impossible Things before Breakfast

2011-02-08T18:30:00.010Z

Apologies to Lewis Carroll

I went to Israel/Palestine in 2003 and 2004 with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (www.eappi.org). As a volunteer it can be very difficult to know what one person can do or if your presence makes any difference to such a long running conflict, but on a good day it does feel all worthwhile. This piece was written after a productive morning.

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. ~Betty Reese

Up early this morning, partly because of the mosquitoes, but mainly because I had a job, my first as an Ecumenical Accompanier. I had volunteered to help pick up patients and bring them back to the Augusta Victoria Hospital for dialysis. So at five in the morning I arrive to find the driver, Jalil, preparing himself for morning prayers. And as he kneels down and goes through his ritual I find myself joining him in my own way. The orientation is over this is where it gets serious, I ask God to keep us safe and well whatever happens over the next little while. It is a sobering moment I am not asleep any more, but the dawn chorus, the lightening sky, the world waking up give me some kind of hope and then Jalil brings the ambulance bus round and we are off, no turning back now.

Photo credit: Phil Chetwynd Israeli Democracy in Action

We are going towards Hebron, where a few days earlier a Hamas leader has been killed and dozens of people arrested. It has one of the worst reputations for violence in the country, and thats where we are going as fast as Jalil can manage. He asks if I can drive and says that I can if I want to, fortunately I have left my driving licence behind so we decide it is best not to. He teaches me a few words of Arabic and we laugh at my pronunciation. The sun comes over a hill and everything is bathed in a glorious golden light, it doesn’t seem so scary after all.

We pick up the first patient, a ten or so year old girl, and a few minutes later a younger girl and her mother. Then as we reach the turn off for Hebron we join the end of a queue for the checkpoint. The soldiers don’t seem to have woken up yet and no-one is keen to disturb them. The ambulance edges slowly forward to the front of the queue and we can see our last pick up, three children and their mother, about 20 metres away waving their passes and trying to attract some attention. They could walk over, but without some kind of acknowledgement they are frightened to do anything. A soldier emerges and tells us all to go back. Jalil shouts something, I presume to say we are from the hospital, but he waves us away. A few seconds later two more come out rubbing sleep from their eyes and holding bottles of juice, we have interupted their breakfast. Jalil thinks I should go and talk to them.

Red hat on, open the door, it didn’t feel like THIS in training. But I am not fast enough another man (the children’s father ?) is far more used to this and is already close to the soldiers explaining the situation. I wander closer and when he has finished say that we have come from the hospital to pick them up. The soldier tells me to go back to the car so I turn around and go slowly away. He checks the passes and then the mother and her children can join us. The whole thing has taken about five minutes but it feels like much longer.

As we drive away the tension starts to ease, the children start to chatter and laugh, they teach me my name in Arabic and tell me I am beautiful.

It is all a bit much and I feel a few tears coming. By seven o’clock we are back in Jerusalem and it must be time for breakfast.

palestine,

A special week on Sheffield Quakers' blog

2011-02-07T18:28:00.004Z

This week on Sheffield Quakers’ blog we are hosting a series of writings on the theme of Israel/Palestine. We hope this is a chance to hear something of the everyday lives of Israelis and Palestinians rather than the headline grabbing stories of violent conflict, which is how we often perceive this region. It is also a chance to hear about the work of three people from Sheffield who have been part of the international nonviolent effort to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If you want to know more then Sue Beardon, Friday’s contributor, has just returned from the region and will be sharing her stories and experiences at a public meeting at Sheffield Quaker Meeting House, St James Street, on Tuesday 15^th February at 7pm. More details here

Christmas in Zimbabwe

2011-01-04T17:17:00.005Z

While I was away on holiday (;)) Craig emailed me to say that things are going well except that their computer access is a little too slow for him to upload this himself. It was nice to arrive back to news of Craig and Hlekweni.

It was Graduation last week at Hlekweni and all of our trainees have left, so it feels very quiet with just the permanent community of staff and tenants here until the new intake in January. Moya and Jonathan have been helping the farm staff this week, as they are very short-handed when trainees are away. Moya especially has taken to manual labour in a big way, fetching water and happily plucking and gutting chickens. Today she came home proudly with a bag of chicken offal in return for her labours, which we will be cooking up for our Christmas dinner.

We have just discovered that Hlekweni has a library, which is open twice a week in term-time for trainees. It has a fairly random selection of very old and tattered books, but we were all excited by our find, as books are very scarce and expensive in Zimbabwe. While we were in there, a young teenage girl knocked on the door, asking if she could come in to look at the books. She was delighted to find 'Romeo & Juliet' and she sat poring over it until we had to leave. She is studying the play at school, but they don't have enough copies for the students to take home. There is a great book-hunger here. It is quite heart-breaking when little children come to our house asking 'please a book for reading'. Unfortunately the books we brought for Moya and Jonathan are too difficult for most of them, but we are aiming to build up the library collection if possible and make it more accessible to the community here.

Kate has been getting to know the local families by visiting all the houses with Angeline Ndlovu, our pre-school trainer. They have been discovering that many households here are caring for orphans, and have difficulty paying their school fees of £10 per term, so Kate is planning to set up a small bursary fund to support them. Angeline is also trying to organise the women of the community to help themselves. She has started with a Hlekweni netball team, but has plans for a small income-generating project, and she has asked Kate to help with getting it off the ground.

Through Steve Brooks, who was Interim Co-ordinator here earlier this year, we have also met some local activists from Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ). Gay people experience severe persecution in Zimbabwe, including eviction, violence and arrest, but a small community of activists are openly advocating for their rights with incredible courage. They are celebrating having organised Bulawayo's first ever Gay Pride march for Human Rights Day a couple of weeks ago, which was broken up by the police when they eventually realised what their 'proud to be pink' T-shirts stood for.

It is quite a relief to be in a country which doesn’t have shopping as top priority at this time of year. There is little to buy in the shops at any time and even less money to buy it with. Christmas in Zimbabwe is a time for visiting relatives in the rural areas and working in vegetable gardens. We now have our own vegetable plot in the back garden and are enjoying watching our spinach and tomatoes growing fast in the perpetual sunshine. Thinking of all our Friends in snowy Sheffield and sending our love at Christmas.

As the Spirit moves us

2011-01-02T18:40:00.003Z

On a good day, we may be fortunate enough to be moved by the Spirit. Not 'lucky' enough, or 'good' enough. It's not luck, not a lottery, just that we are in the right place in our hearts and minds, and for once, we listen. We can't earn it. It's not a case of, 'I'll sit here as good as gold. I've done all the right things, so come and get me, God, so I can know that I'm right and all the others are wrong.' It's a case of, 'On a good day, God, I can hear you. Tell me what you want me to do.'

Standing on our Heads

2010-11-23T10:42:00.002Z

We need to spend more time standing on our heads.

Now I like keeping myself well informed. I get lots of emails and feeds from all over the place. I read two quality magazines every month, and Guardian Weekly every week. I watch lots of documentaries on the telly – mainly BBC4. I live in a house full of books.

All this information fills my head and makes me feel bright and light and I feel as though my head has become like a hot air balloon floating serenely through the sky. But then the wind blows and I am thrown this way and that. Should I do this? Should I do that? Should I ignore that? How important is this? Just what ought I to do?

The trouble with information is that it has no purchase on us – it is what we have been told, not what we have felt. We Quakers have a word for this – we call it 'notions'. But we are so caught up in the western enlightenment idea that thinking is the most significant thing we do, that we do not realise that thinking on its own is mere notions. Stuff we have read in books or found using Google. We have been taught that feelings are at best unreliable, and possibly downright dangerous. Stick to the facts and you can't go wrong. Yet until we actually experience anything for ourselves, and thereby engage our feelings first, we cannot effectively act on anything.

When we do engage our feelings, and know we need to act, we Quakers have a word for this as well – we call it having a 'concern'. We are no longer worried about whether we ought to do this or that – we are driven by our deepest emotions to get on with it without question. There is no thought about whether this is the right thing to do or not – you just know, in a place beyond thinking and mere words.

However, our feelings come from our bodies and flow down into the earth that is our home, leaving our heads up in the air.

So stand on your head and be rooted to the earth, and let the passion and drive in your groin and the fire and anger in your belly and the love and pain in your heart flow down into your head and displace all those mere thoughts.

Newcomers

2010-11-21T13:53:00.003Z

Today, in our Meeting for Reflection post-worship, we had the benefit of several recent attenders, who shared with us their feeling of uncertainty: as a newcomer, it is quite easy to feel wrong-footed. 'Everyone else is an experienced and knowledgeable Quaker. Why should I feel that I can offer ministry in this group, where anything I say will probably be seen as naive and trivial? I don't know why I came, and I probably shouldn't have.' Those of us who had been around a bit longer were able to say that we also feel some of that. To be uncertain is very OK. I felt this was a very valuable thing to say and to hear.

Kate & Craig's leaving party

2010-11-08T20:06:00.001Z

Thanks so much to everyone who came to our party on Sunday, and especially to everyone who helped to organise it for us. It was an amazing send-off, and we both feel truly held and supported by the Meeting as we get ready to make our journey to Zimbabwe this Thursday. Gordon even made us this cake - iced by hand, with help from Google Maps...

(Kate claims that the little stick figure at the front is her).

Please continue to hold us in the Light as we make this journey. We really don't know where it is leading us, but the love and encouragement of our Quaker community in Sheffield makes it feel possible for us to take the risk of faithfulness in a way that we couldn't on our own. You are all a great gift to us.

Only being loved makes a man lovable: basic Christianity

2010-10-23T17:29:00.002+01:00

One of my favourite passages to quote is from Harold Loukes (1960) The Discovery of Quakerism. Here are a few selections from a longer piece...
'the Quaker effort for criminals and the insane brings out something of the meaning of their search for "that of God in every man".'
'The problem comes when we meet the unlovable: how is that to be loved? It was because this was to hard that through so many Christian centuries the treatment of criminals and the insane was marked by such bitter cruelty.'
'the Friendly challenge... was to say that whether or not a man was "unlovable" was beside the point: he was made to be loved and only being loved makes man lovable. As a doctrine there is was nothing new in this: it was basic Christianity. The novelty lay simply in the way Friends sought out the two most unlovely groups they could find and set their unsentimental caring to work.'
This seems very apposite as a new project is launched in South Yorkshire, Circles of Support and Accountability, which aims to provide a network of support to sex offenders who would otherwise be lonely, isolated and... all the more likely to re-offend. If criminals in general can be thought of as an 'unlovely group', then surely sex offenders are the most vilified and despised of the lot?
It's a project which started in Canada in 1994 and from the beginning has relied heavily on volunteers being drawn from faith communities.
Volunteers are now being sought to set up 2 or 3 groups in this area. There's more detail in our Sheffield Quaker website. I fervently hope that we will, as a community, being able to get involved in the project.

Zimbabwe latest

2010-10-08T13:24:00.001+01:00

It looks like Morgan Tsvangirai (Prime Minister of Zimbabwe) has finally had enough of trying to work in government with Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF. In a statement yesterday he is calling for civil disobedience and refusal of recognition to illegally appointed State officials. Wonder what happens now...

Extract from a Statement by the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai
7th October 2010

"Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with some sadness that I have to make a statement today about the state of this transitional Government. It relates to the Constitution and Sovereignty of Zimbabwe, and the principles of democracy for which my Party and I stand for. The MDC utterly rejects the notion of one-party or one-man rule. The MDC utterly rejects any suggestion that power is an entitlement through historical legacy, or that power is a God-given right of an individual or individuals.

"The MDC firmly believes that political leaders should only serve and act on the basis of a mandate of the people. Lest we forget. The MDC was given that mandate on March 29, 2008, when the people of Zimbabwe clearly rejected the notion of one-Party and one-man rule. That mandate was to govern on behalf of the people of Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, in September 2008, I signed an agreement, allowing for the formation of a joint transitional government with those Parties which the people had rejected. I did so for several reasons that I outlined at the time. Not least, I did so to try to help end the needless suffering of the people of Zimbabwe which had been inflicted on them by the failed and corrupt policies and abuses of the previous regime..."

"...We are all - citizens, politicians, soldiers, policemen, workers, mothers, fathers and children – subject to the Constitution and laws of this country. None of us own that Constitution and none of us own this country. None of us, whatever our history, are above the law. We are all but caretakers for future generations. Ladies and Gentlemen, The MDC’s National Executive has today resolved that we must make a stand to protect the Constitution of Zimbabwe and to return it to the custodianship of the citizens of Zimbabwe. As a first step, we will refuse to recognise any of the appointments which the President has made illegally and unconstitutionally over the past 18 months.

That includes:

the Governor of the Central Bank, appointed unilaterally by Mr Mugabe on 26 November 2008
the Attorney-General, appointed unilaterally by Mr Mugabe on 17 December 2008
the 5 judges, appointed unilaterally by Mr Mugabe on 20 May 2010
the 6 Ambassadors, appointed unilaterally by Mr Mugabe on 24 July 2010
the Police Service Commission
the 10 Governors, appointed unilaterally and furtively by Mr Mugabe last week

"As Executive Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, I will today be advising the countries to whom these Ambassadors have been posted that these appointments are illegal and therefore null and void. I will be advising the Chief Justice of the improper appointment of the judges concerned, and that they are therefore null and void. I will be advising the President of the Senate of the improper appointment of Governors, and that they should therefore not be considered members of the Senate, which is therefore now unconstitutional. I will be advising the joint Ministers of Home Affairs and the National Security Council of the illegal appointment of the Police Service Commission.

"We now similarly call on the people of Zimbabwe, at whose pleasure we serve, not to recognise these individuals as the legitimate holders of the posts to which they have been unconstitutionally and illegally appointed. In doing so you must all remain peaceful. I now call upon Mr Mugabe to return the country to Constitutional rule by correcting the unlawful appointments. I invite SADC [South African Development Community] to join me in calling on Mr Mugabe to respect the SADC Resolutions, the SADC Charter and Protocols, the AU Charter, and the principles of democracy. I invite SADC to deploy observers before the constitutional referendum to help protect the rights of Zimbabweans to express their views freely and without violence or intimidation. And I invite SADC to urgently intervene to restore Constitutionality in Zimbabwe."

Faith and Money

2010-10-06T17:50:00.000+01:00

Some people choose to dismiss faith, especially faith in the invisible, because they regard it as unreal. “Give me the facts,” they say. “Show me something real. How do we know that God exists, anyway? What proof is there? Man made God in his own image,” and so on. Richard Dawkins assumes that statements about God are meant literally, and concludes that because he can refute the literal meaning of such statements (as if God were just another bit of science, to be proved or disproved) he can therefore ignore the whole domain of faith.

Likewise, some people dismiss the concept of marriage, on the grounds that a marriage certificate is only a piece of paper. Well, so is a cheque for a million pounds only a piece of paper. Each of these pieces of paper is worth how much importance is invested in it. If you believe in marriage and value your own marriage, then you can have a marriage that is believable and valuable. If not . . .

In case anyone should think that it is money, not love, that makes the world go round, let me say that the whole monetary system entirely depends on faith and trust. There was a time when money was coinage, and coins were standard sized pieces of gold or silver, metals regarded as valuable because they had a use in jewellery. Now, people accept as valuable a chunk of brass or a piece of paper, which is useless in practical terms (you could use a £50 note to light the fire, if you had nothing else) or a string of numbers on a screen. Or a string of cowry shells. Money is whatever people believe is money, treat as money and use as money.

The system works as long as the next person also accepts that these things are valuable and treats them as if they were. Money works, as long as people believe in it. When people cease to believe in money, it becomes worthless. This happened in Germany, between the two World Wars. They tell the story of the man who took a wheelbarrow-load of notes to the bakery, to see if he could buy a loaf of bread. He made the mistake of leaving the wheelbarrow outside the shop while he went in and enquired. When he came out, the money was on the ground, but someone had stolen the wheelbarrow.

"Tell them stories"

2010-09-27T11:16:00.002+01:00

My favourite story-line from Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' triology is leading the ghosts to freedom, found in the third book, 'The Amber Spyglass'. Lyra and Will contrive to enter the land of the dead – complete with Stygian boatman – to find Lyra's friend Roger, and Will's father. There they find the ghosts of the dead being tormented by harpies, who feed off their misery. Lyra realises that the fantasy world she has invented to protect herself enrages the harpies and make them attack her even more. Then she shows the harpies that they can get far richer nourishment feeding off true stories, and that if the ghosts tell the true stories of their lives, they will be led to freedom through the door that Will makes with the Subtle Knife. That freedom is to become one with the universe, to dissolve into all that is life, which they discover is a moment of true bliss. This is what Mary Malone witnesses when she finds the door from the land of the dead as the ghosts stream out in their thousands:

'Tell them stories. That's what we didn't know. All this time, and we never knew! But they need the truth. That's what nourishes them. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, everything. Just tell them stories.' (The Amber Spyglass, end of ch 32; Folio 2008, p387)

And so it is in our world. We live lives of pretence and fantasy, thinking we are at the pinnacle of our civilisation, when in fact we are sucking dry the life of our planet, and the lives of one another. We are bombarded, harpy-like, by statistics telling us how bad it will be. But this just drives us more and more into fear and denial, as we sit frozen, rabbit-like, in the awful glare of the future bearing down on us.

This is because statistics and facts can only engage our minds, and the only response available from our minds is either fear or denial. We invent ways of avoiding the truth, thinking we are 'doing our bit' by making trivial changes to our lifestyles, such as recycling more or using the car slightly less.

What we need is motives to drive the necessary change in our lives, and these cannot come from the head, only from the heart, the belly and the groin, - our passion, our anger, our creative action. So where are our stories? Stories of hope and perseverance, of resilience and determination, of heroes and demons, of love and compassion.

Click to see how Fra Angelico saw the freeing of the ghosts from the land of the dead (limbo) (c 1450)

What price a plate of beans?

2010-09-23T11:01:00.002+01:00

Esau and Jacob were twin brothers, sons of Isaac. Esau was born first, and so, in the patriarchal society of the time, Esau would inherit his fathers wealth. Esau grew up to be a hunter, and was much loved by his father, whilst Jacob became a farmer, and was more loved by his mother, Rebecca.
And so one day, Esau had been out hunting and came back to the camp famished, to see Jacob preparing some bean stew. So Esau asked for some stew, but Jacob saw his chance and said to Esau: “You can have your fill if you sell me your birthright”. And Esau was young and impetuous and had no thought for the future, only his hunger, so he gave up his birthright to his twin for a plate of beans.
Jacob became the founder of the Jewish people and Esau was forgotten apart from a couple of stories. (Genesis 25 24-34).

And so it is with us. Our whole society is built around having convenience now, with no thought for the future. All the way from the short term policies of high finance down to popping out in the car rather than using the bus.

We use the supermarket rather than the local market, even although fresh local produce from the greengrocer and butcher is way better, and often even cheaper. We use the car rather than walk, even though we know that we are not fit, and miss the pleasure of the sun and the air and meeting people. We buy bland mass produced bread, when the locally made artisan bread is a joy to the senses. We buy cheap and think we have a bargain when in reality the stuff is often rubbish and people and the environment on the other side of the world have been trashed. We fly rather than use the train, even although St Pancras International train station is way more beautiful than Heathrow, and we can enjoy the journey as well as the destination.

We have squandered our inheritance for a plate of beans.

Websites and networking and communicating, oh my!

2010-09-21T20:26:00.003+01:00

I'm at a Quaker Website Support group right now. We've just been speaking about how we do things and communicate (what we do) to and between each other. How do you think the blog, our website and the Newsletter best interact with each other? We've had an idea about potentially having a repository and online sharing/holding/discussion space for us to post Minutes and other things. But we need ideas and people to help us: inputring data, developing protocols, making connections and being creative so depending on what your talents are, we can use them.

Do you have skills or are you interested in blogging, social networking or websites? If this you, let us know. You don't have to be "super Quaker" to come along. Post a comment or catch one of us after Meeting.

Nadine, Laura and Gordon

...Creating Action

2010-09-21T18:32:00.017+01:00

Yesterday's workshop, 'Creating Action' - the second of two, for the exploration of personal responses to climate change - gave a dozen of us the chance to journey together through themes of hope, interconnectedness and empowerment.

Our point of departure was a simple, yet profound, exercise. We all stood in the empty room and chose, without indicating who, two other people with whom we would seek to maintain an equal distance between, in the configuration of an even-sided triangle. Those two people also each chose two others - any two people - to keep equidistant within their own 'triangle'.

The only rule to this exercise was that we would all try, as best we could, to maintain even distances between us and our partners, even as everybody else tried to do the same with their own chosen partners. In this way, the entire group formed a constantly shifting, self-regulating 'organism', which naturally moved about the room, fast and slow, never quite reaching stasis.

This game provoked many immediate responses; sometimes laughter, often surprise, occasionally frustration and always a feeling of change. With our focus directed outward into the spaces between our bodies, we relinquished our identity as separate beings and found that we were truly moving as one. Like geese flying in formation, we only needed to remain aware of the geese at our beak and at our tail to know we were in our 'true' place: here and now.

After this, we moved into an exercise that gave voice to our future grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They'd come to meet with us, from the future, to ask how we had found the courage to save our planet at this time of crisis. These humans - free, thanks to our efforts today, from the suffering born from a planet in crisis - gave heartfelt thanks and gratitude for the efforts we'd made in our lifetimes; efforts that secured their future.

Finally, we followed a 7-stage process, starting with the question, 'If you knew you could not fail, what would you be doing for the healing of our world?' The 7th and final question brought us right into the present: 'What can you do in the next 24 hours, no matter how small the step, that will move toward this goal?' Within 30 minutes, we'd all created visions for a future to be possible: all that was required was our 'next step'.

'The peace testimony involves thinking and uttering the unthinkable, in the conviction that this may lead to a fundamental shift in attitudes. What is idealistic in one generation becomes a cherished right or precept in the next.' (The Quaker Testimonies)

These two workshops have hopefully served as kindling for sparks of affirmative, compassionate - collective - action. Sheffield Living Witness Project remains a newly opened door through which we're all invited to 'take next steps', to 'find our true place' and to 'hear the call' of future people in this time, now.

Watch this and other Quaker spaces for details of our next meeting...

Taking Stock...

2010-09-15T11:21:00.015+01:00

On Monday evening, 14 of us came together for an opportunity to reflect upon climate change in the context of a workshop offered by Sheffield Living Witness group. 13 of us 14 had little idea what to expect of the 3 hour session, titled 'Taking Stock'. For my part, as the one who'd planned the session, I felt a great generosity of enquiry as this group of friends gathered in the Meeting House.

Feeling that I could respond to my own uncertainty about what was to follow by seeing the same unknowingness in others, we set off in a very collective spirit on what began as a physical journey - through simple, yet dynamic exercises that brought us into new and renewed contact with one another - and culminated in the collective witness of a deep sharing of our individual fears, angers, sorrows and emptiness. We spoke from the heart as we touched within us the reality of the environmental and social degradation that seems to so abound, presently, upon our Earth.

In connecting with our breath and our bodies, we moved deeply into a still space of deep listening - a true state of living witness. In this listening circle, I was reminded that within our Meeting - within us as human beings - we contain the story of what it is to be alive; to commune with both our joy and our suffering. Although we gave voice to our despair, we did so whilst standing on a ground of hope.

Simply, I knew that the air my friend beside me breathed in was the air that I had now breathed out. Perhaps, in an uncertain world, this reality of connectedness can stand as not only an ever-lasting Truth but also a physical, tangible guide to knowing that we are here, right now.

- Thank you to you 13, for making me 14

On Monday 20th Sep. (6:30-9:30pm) you are all invited - 14 and over! - to breathe into the unknown in the second part of this workshop, titled 'Creating Action'. This will be an opportunity to discern creative, practical action(s) that will seek to enable the Meeting to 'engage with others and the natural world as part of a wider spiritual consciousness.' (from The Quaker Testimonies, March 2003) If you would like to come, (but weren't at the 1st workshop) then please don't be shy: come!

My, my

2010-09-10T11:52:00.001+01:00

I am writing this with my pen, in my notebook – I own both. I look out of my window, at my garden. I own both (or I shall do, when I have paid off the mortgage). My city is Sheffield, my country is England.

Well, there are not many people who can say ‘my country’ because they own it, not even Queen Elizabeth. So there are two meanings of ‘my’: the pen which belongs to me, and the country to which I belong. Much grief and difficulty come from people who can not tell the difference between ‘my’ car and ‘my’ wife (or ‘my’ children). Who belongs to whom? As a possession, or as a loyal member?

Is God my God? Or am I God’s Paul? Is my soul my soul? Or am I its?

Quaker Meeting in Battery Park

2010-08-13T02:16:00.003+01:00

I have just come from an outdoor Meeting in Battery Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Seven of us sat in the Labyrinth of Contemplation (a scrubby area between two major roads, near the piers for the Staten Island Ferries) on park benches. No-one knew eachother, but there was a sense of familiarity. A light rain fell steadily through the meeting and there was some business with umbrellas. After a while the flies began to treat us like trees and landed on us freely. The bike hire place down at the waterside started to play tracks by The Rolling Stones, and there was a smell of camomile from the bushes. Somehow the gathered silence in the midst of all this was palpable. We were a few hundred yards from the site of the World Trade Buildings; a war monument to Korean soldiers was in front of us; what a challenge to integrate these things with the presence of God.

Shortly after, I was navigating Broadway after dark with my two kids, looking for somewhere to eat, and a young woman came up to us unbidden and went out of her way to show us a good place; turns out she used to live on Ecclesall Road.

(No moral intended; these two stories are not connected. Except that it felt like grace of some kind.)

God Knows

2010-08-10T10:59:00.000+01:00

I think it’s all about our awareness of the spirit. In 1981 or 1982, I was very concerned about a friend of mine who was quite ill physically and emotionally in a bad way. One night, in that time between lights out and falling asleep, I found myself saying in my mind, “Dear Lord, you know Margaret – you know her better than I do. Please look after her.” Then I realised that I was praying. At that time and for many years, I had thought and believed that, at least for me, God was not real – there was no God. There was no one to pray to. As soon as I realised that I was praying, I stopped.

Too late. I had already said my prayer. What’s more, in an instant, three other things happened that I had never experienced before. My eyes were closed, the room was unlit and the curtains drawn, but I saw a very bright, soft, white light which filled my gaze. At the same time, there was a huge sense of presence: I was in the presence of someone as vast as outer space, but completely kind, not at all unsafe. At the same time, I also received knowledge, a message, though not in words. To tell anyone else about it, I have to translate it into words. Roughly speaking, I was told, “Message received and understood.” Not, “OK, we will do as you ask,” but “Heard you.”

As I said my prayer to “Dear Lord,” I thought (as much as I thought anything) that I was addressing Jesus, but the response I got was so huge that I then thought, and I still think, that for the first time I was aware of the presence of God. Thinking that, I still did nothing about it for the best part of twenty-five years. I told myself, “I have experienced the presence of God,” and yet I did nothing. I don’t know why I dealt with it as I did, but looking back, I assume that I wasn’t ready to handle it any other way at that time. My friends tell me that these things should not be rushed.

I believe that the significance of that first exchange was not that God should be informed that Margaret was in a bad way. As I said at the time, God knew her better than I did. Nor was it necessary for God to be told that I was worried about her – if God knew her, God also knew what was going on in me. Nor was it about asking God to intercede on her behalf – the response was, “Heard you,” not “Roger, Wilco.” I think the significance of that two-way communion was to let me know I believed in God, when I believed I didn’t. Possibly to open my eyes to the reality of God, but definitely to open my eyes to the fact that I was already a believer. If not, why was I praying? “There you go, Paul, you’re praying to the Lord. Now, what does that tell you about yourself?” It seems “Do you believe in God?” and “Do you know whether you believe in God?” are two different questions.

Which is surprising. I was certainly surprised by what I did that night, as well as by the response I got. But I have thought for some time that surprising discoveries and answers to questions you didn’t know you were asking are rather convincing. To find God after years of conscious schooling and diligent ground-work may be scarcely surprising, but to find out that you are already a believer, against your expectation and rather against your will, seems more compelling. Perhaps that is what is meant when the Bible says that there is more rejoicing in Heaven when one lost soul finds his way than when a procession of virtuous people enter the Kingdom, to paraphrase Matthew 15:7. It may be no bad thing if the way to grace is a bit hairy.

Do I believe that God would take the trouble to send me a personal message just to let me know that, against all expectations, I was a believer? Yes, I do. God is like that.

Letter from Zimbabwe

2010-08-08T17:32:00.006+01:00

This is part of a recent letter from Steve Brooks (pictured above with sewing trainees), a Friend from Washington DC Meeting, who is volunteering as acting coordinator at Hlekweni until I go out to relieve him in November. It gives a flavour of some of the challenges facing the community there, and also how busy Steve has been since his arrival in June!

Dear Friends:

I've been in Zimbabwe a little over a month but so much has happened. I feel settled in my "second home". I'm now interim coordinator as the outgoing coordinator, David Jobson, departed to South Africa several weeks ago. We're in the throes of a financial crisis as the training numbers this term are not what we hoped for. We're struggling to find creative solutions to this as we've got some great potential here, it's just a challenge to find a way to make it generate an income, especially in the current environment in Zimbabwe where there is too little money chasing too many goods.

I've made several trips to Harare, the capital and largest city in Zimbabwe, one great thing is that we managed to track down a supplier for drip irrigation parts in Harare, something that we've been looking for about two years. Drip irrigation is a technique that is used in dry areas, you fill up a large trash can sized container with water and then a network of plastic tubing delivers the water right to the roots of the rows of crops, it's a very efficient way to irrigate small to medium sized plots. Hlekweni has been very successful in training rural farmers on the use of drip irrigation, often where others have failed. Drip tubing does have a 3-5 year life-span and our drip irrigation project in Gwanda is older than that. So we need to get those farmers new drip tubing as a part of wrapping up our project. After that, we'll supply farmers with replacements but we'll charge them at cost out of the profits they've made from sales of produce.

I've also visited the small meeting in Harare and stayed with a Hlekweni board member, Richard Knottenbelt, who is also caretaker for the meeting. His wife Pushpa is a wonderful cook and has given me a couple lessons on making Indian curries. I'm enjoying experimenting with that.

Aside from Hlekweni, I've been involved in a couple other projects, one of them support of a couple Primary Schools. The appeal last year for textbooks for Samathonga Primary School was quite successful and the second shipment of textbooks arrived about two months ago. Samathonga is now rated second out of 94 schools in its district, in no small part through the assistance of US Friends. In addition to the benefit of having textbooks in the classroom, it's given a big morale booster to the staff. The other school is Lochview Primary School which is on the outskirts of Bulawayo. I got connected with Lochview because one of the teachers at Samathonga quit and went to work at Lochview. I visited him there and saw that they had many needs. It turns out that Sipho, my buddy and the chair of the Hlekweni board, used to live in that neighborhood, we visited the school together on my last trip and she knew many of the people there. So we conceived the idea of helping the school. The school called a community meeting and they determined that the most urgent need was a lunch program as many of the students are receiving little food at home, many are HIV positive and are therefore especially in need of nutrition, and some are in child-headed households. So we've started a lunch program at Lochview, which has been going on for a couple weeks now. The food is being purchased and delivered with the assistance of Sipho, one of the teachers is heading up the coordination, and parents are helping out with the preparation and serving of food.

We have a deaf person on staff at Hlekweni who has never been around deaf people and is illiterate, can't talk and uses crude sign language to communicate with a few of his coworkers. He works in the garden. There's a school for the disabled called King George the 6th school in Bulawayo (you can google it, they have a nice website) and we've arranged for two deaf graduates from KG6 to come to Hlekweni for training in building. We've asked them to help us learn sign language so that we can in turn teach our deaf employee. It's also giving these young men from KG6 the opportunity to learn a trade which they passionately want to master. It's also a way of mainstreaming them as they've been among the deaf at KG6 their whole lives. The transition to the hearing world can be a daunting challenge but these guys are up to it, they're really quite something.

We've also been working on support for Innocent Muleya, a final year medical student at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Bulawayo, and his classmates. NUST has been undergoing some turmoil because the administration is trying to extract additional funds out of the students. In June, the medical students went to go take their exams and they were informed that if they didn't pay their exam fees beforehand, they couldn't sit the exams. Prior times, they could sit the exams and then when they paid, the university would release the results. People have no money and the students were so fed up with being jerked around that they all quit and arranged a last minute transfer to University of Zambia. So they were looking around for last minute financial support for this decision. There are more layers to this which are too much to go into here, but that's the thumbnail version. So my friend, Dr. Del Meriwether, of the Meriwether Foundation, agreed to pay the tuition and fees for all 10 or 11 medical students and I am assisting him to a small extent in this effort as well as helping Innocent with fees for his application for a study permit and his living expenses.

Finally, I've been liaising with the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), a human rights organization dedicated to providing a safe place for Gay Zimbabweans to socialize, get support for HIV/Aids, and advocating for equal rights for GLBT. A couple months ago, the police raided the Harare office of GALZ and arrested two people, the administrative assistant and the finance person. They are up on charges of harboring pornography and insulting the president and the trials are going on now. The charge of insulting the president is based on their having a copy of a resolution supported by Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco and passed by the San Francisco city council, supporting Gay rights and deploring victimization based on sexual orientation. The GALZ offices were closed for about 6 weeks and although they're reopened, people are just slowly returning. This is a case of political intimidation connected with the constitutional process. One of GALZ's problems is a slow, and often broken website that is impossible to update. With the help of the Friends Meeting of Washington's web guru, Vonn New, we're working on getting an internationally hosted website that can be updated by normal, non-techy people.

Sea, boats, ship wrecks,... water-based metaphors for Quaker meeting

2010-08-04T18:49:00.005+01:00

At our last Sunday meeting for worship we heard ministry from a Friend who had been on a sailing trip, and recently returned. For her, still feeling the motion of the waves, and the unsteadiness of the room (rocking up and down!) set off thoughts of how we each sit there, bringing our own peculiar and immediate experiences. This ministry led to more nautically based ministry, which I could really relate to. Another Friend recalled first coming to Quakers and feeling like a ship-wrecked, nearly drowned soul (possibly escaped from pirates, by walking the plank!) and feeling that finding Quakers was like finding a solid rock to cling to. (She actually believed individual Friends were like rocks.) Later she realised that it's more like finding a life boat and climbing in, with a whole lot of other ship-wrecked souls.
This ministry speaks so well to me. By sheer happy luck yesterday, I heard the end of a BBC radio programme that included a reading of a poem, also very much on the theme of floating or drowning...
Here is the part that I heard, it is the end of 'Buoyancy' by Rumi

Praise, the ocean.
What we say, a little ship.
So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where?
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck we could have.
It's a total waking up!
Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.
We're groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you, the buoyancy.

The whole poem is an exquisite expression of joy, of immediacy, of feeling God in everything around us. How about these lines for describing a 'gathered' meeting...

Let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you, the buoyancy.

Poachers

2010-07-28T19:14:00.001+01:00

I thought of this a while ago, one day when I was wearing a jacket with deep inside pockets.

In the beginning, we human beings hunted game and gathered fruit and veg freely, where we could find them. Then someone developed herding and agriculture, invented fences, and began the notion of ownership of land and hunting rights. Those who partook freely were now called ‘poachers.’

We Quakers hunt and gather spiritual awareness freely, despite the fact that some people like to put a fence round ‘Truth’ and think they own it. In this respect, we are ‘poachers.’

That pleases me.

Who We Are and What We Do

2010-07-23T11:09:00.004+01:00

The Interim Report of the Review Group for Sufferings and Britain Yearly Meeting Trustees has just been presented to Meeting for Sufferings for feedback from Area and Local Meetings. Buried in the linear propositional logic of the 'management speak' of this document is, I believe, an attempt to evolve the relationship between 'Who We Are' and 'What We Do'. However, this way of speaking cannot even begin to capture the dynamic and living mutuality of such a relationship.

It is at the heart of our identity as Quakers. For we are not just a religious group, silently contemplating the nature of reality, nor are we just a society campaigning for peace, justice and equality. No, we are a religious society – What we do is for who we are, and who we are is through what we do. This relationship is at the heart of the nature of our testimonies. They are not ideological statements or political positions, but illustrate the essential nature of that part of the dynamic: Who We Are is through What We Do.

But how do we go about the other half of the dynamic: What We Do is for Who We Are? The great danger of the approach of using 'management speak' is that you can easily lose the dynamic significance of the relationship. We become mere ants in a nest or bees in a hive busying ourselves for some treasured ideal to be achieved in some utopian future.

The full richness of the relationship can only be expressed through poetry and metaphor when using language, or through images and art. I therefore tentatively offer an incomplete diagram of the various groups in BYM and the relationships between them.

I suggest that each pair of relationships, the mutual to-ing and fro-ing between groups, can be illustrated by a single word or a simple image. The word or image does not define the relationship, but rather acts as a pointer to enable us to see the dynamic of the relationship, expressed in body mind and soul as we participate in it. I invite you to fill in the words and images and I have provided a few words to get you started.

The formulation of the relationship between what we do and who we are: 'What we do is for who we are, and who we are is through what we do' is from the work of the Quaker philosopher John Macmurray. He originally stated it as 'The functional life is for the personal life; the personal life is through the functional life.' in 'Persons and Functions', four talks on the interrelation of the religious and the political aspects of social life, delivered on BBC radio in December 1941. He also stated it as 'The state is for the community; the community is through the state' later in the same talks, describing the necessary and proper relationship between the structures of government and people living in communities. Macmurray explored what it is to be a person, especially in relation to the world and other persons. The titles of his major works: “The Self as Agent” - i.e. what we do is more important and prior to what we think, and “Persons in Relation” - we are only truly persons in so far as we are in relationships, in many ways sums up his philosophical position. You can find out more at http://www.johnmacmurray.org.

2010-07-06T20:28:00.003+01:00

The book group met last week to discuss 'Gilead' by Marilynne Robinson. I experienced again that lurch towards new understanding, the sum being greater than the parts, which we sometimes achieve in the group (I think). I arrived having rather dismissed aspects of 'Gilead'. Then discerning friends expressed quiet, deeply held feelings towards the book. Others brought out themes which had passed me by; we weaved a new sense/shape of the book from many strands.

A lot of the talk was 0f fathers and sons and forgiveness and ageing and redemption and The Old Testament. Personally, I ended up saying that I realised the book was beyond me at the moment. I appreciate that clearness, in the Quakerly sense.

And - the cappuchinos are luscious, the carrot cake is exceptional, and we meet in a small private room with new people along every time; you are very welcome. Blue Moon Cafe, 4pm, next meeting 7th August, book is 'The God of Small Things'. See previous post for full program.

Bookclub list 2010-2011

2010-06-22T10:16:00.012+01:00

If the angel

deigns

to come

it will be

because you have

convinced her,

not by tears

but by your humble

resolve to be

always beginning;

to be a beginner.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the poem I read out loud last Saturday. I read this after Laura and Jill had read beautiful poems but before Beryl and Ruth read excerpts (perhaps they will post them here or contribute them to the newsletter). It felt very grounding and was a nice end to what was a session where we talked about books. Many, many books. We've set up books for the upcoming year even though we didn't plan it that way. We just had so many books and it seemed to all come together.

Each month will be facilitated by a different member of the group. People feel free - and are welcome - to drop in to the books/months that only interest them (and a number of people who come along now are non-Quakers). Some even come along if they haven't read the book as the point of this is not just to talk about literary "things" but to get to know each other and more about "life" and other "cultures" and "experiences" (too many quotation marks, sorry) through talking about the themes of the book. Some of us do stay for food afterwards sometimes but not every month. If you feel hungry, invite people to stay afterwards with you though and someone usually will accept your offer.

Themes coming up this year (and continuing on from last year really): can we trust memory, perceptions of "truth", emigration, what is "home," how do our experiences with our parents affect our understandings of spirituality, can we connect to the spiritual or creative through food/nature/others?

Here is a quick list for the upcoming year (so far all planned for Saturdays from 4-5:30 at The Blue Moon but check the Sheffield Quakers website or the Newsletter to confirm times and books beforehand as these rarely but occasionally need to change).

July 3: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Aug 7: God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF DATE FOR SEPTEMBER

Sept 4: Palestine by Joe Sacco

Oct 2: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

Nov 6: When we were orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Dec 4: Away byAmy Bloom

Jan 8: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantell

Feb 5: Poetry (T.S. Eliot audiobook cd reading Wasteland and Four Quartets etc)

March 5: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

April 2: Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

May 14: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert

In June 2011, I suppose if it feels right, we will read bits out again to each other and plan for the future like we've just done.

The local Sheffield bookstore Rhyme and Reason (a fabulous establishment) is very friendly and can certainly order in any of these books for you: 0114 266 1950 or suggest "similar" books (as in "I've liked this book, can you recommend something similar?").

Essay Competition Results

2010-06-08T13:05:00.003+01:00

The Friends Quarterly has recently announced the winners of its essay competition on the theme of 'The Future of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain'.

Three essays were awarded prizes, written by Linda Murgatroyd, Simon Best and Felicity Kaal. You can read the winning essays here.

In all there were 106 entries to the competition, and all of the essays are available to read online or download here. I have only had a chance to read a few of them so far, but it looks like a fascinating collection of perspectives and insights on contemporary Quakerism. It would be interesting to read your responses to any of the entries, if you'd like to comment below.

Canadian Quakers and Raging Grannies

2010-06-07T10:42:00.004+01:00

I've been in Canada for the past couple of weeks and I visited my first Canadian Meeting in Montreal. It was in a community centre in a lovely area of town. They set up the chairs for a certain number of people. Every couple of minutes of so, the door would creak open and someone else would tiptoe in. This went on the whole Meeting until they ended up with twice the number of people they usually have. It was wonderful to be somewhere different that felt so very familiar on so many different levels as well. As I understand it, this year there may be a first Canadian "Faith and Practice" ratified at their Yearly Meeting in August.

In the Notices, one of the women mentioned a protest some were going to in Ottawa in conjunction with the Raging Grannies. Now this is something I'd sort of forgotten about but is a wonderful Canadian way women have found to protest very effectively about 25 years ago, almost the exact same time the Quaker Women's Group here in England were giving their Swarthmore Lecture. Anyway, the Raging Grannies seem to have fun during their protests while mocking stereotypes about older women and getting a fair amount of media attention as well.

Here's an article on the Raging Grannies:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/jan/13/raging-grannies-older-people-activism

Rock on Raging Grannies. I think they're the bees knees.

Exploring Feminine Spirituality

2010-05-22T04:12:00.006+01:00

A fresh idea or experience to Sheffield (although other Quaker groups in this country already have started or travelled their own adventure) is the chance to join others once a month to explore feminine spirituality.

This group's journey starts for the first time on Saturday, June 26

7:00-9:00 Sheffield Central Meeting House Library.

All welcome in the evening (men and women). More details to be announced in Notices and Newsletter and then the initial path(s) to be decided upon and tweaked by the group itself as it evolves. No training or equipment required except your Quaker principles.

We are asking people to bring along an object that represents someting "feminine" to you for discussion on this first evening (next month we'll probably discuss the word "spirituality" or maybe "exploring").

If you have any questions about this evening, feel free to contact us beforehand. Our contact details and more about this are in the June Newsletter.

Ruth Hallam-Jones
Nadine Wills

Moving to Zimbabwe

2010-05-21T20:18:00.007+01:00

As some of you may have heard already, Kate and I have recently decided to move out to Zimbabwe later this year, where I will be taking up the post of Director at Hlekweni Friends Rural Service, near Bulawayo.

Hlekweni is a Zimbabwean Quaker-led charity that provides training in vocational skills, including sustainable agriculture, carpentry and early years education to young people from all over the country. It is doing crucial work to give people the skills to earn a living and support themselves and their families in a country which now has 90% unemployment and massive poverty.

Obviously this is a huge step for us as a family with young children. We have been very encouraged by Sheffield Friends who supported us with making this decision through a Meeting for Clearness. It is very important to us to know that we are going with the support of our Meeting, and with a continuing connection to Friends here. We don't know how long we will be at Hlekweni for, probably for several years, but we intend to return to Sheffield after that.

Hlekweni, and Zimbabwe as a whole, are facing enormous challenges. I was reassured by a recent visit that Matabeleland is a relatively safe and peaceful area of the country (certainly much safer than where we lived in South Africa in '97-8). Hlekweni is also very well known throughout the region. It has been running for over 40 years, with generations of young people graduating from their training programmes, which are highly regarded in the country. This means that it is seen as an asset to the country, and police and local authorities continue to be very supportive of its work.

There is also a primary school for local children on site, which Moya and Jonathan will be able to attend. One of the things that Kate and I most want for our children is the experience of sharing their lives with an African community, and having their consciousness shaped by those friendships and encounters. Moya is especially excited about the chance to live in Africa, learn a new language (Ndebele), make new friends and keep animals...

We very much want to keep in touch with all of our Friends in Sheffield and the rest of the UK while we are in Zimbabwe. Hlekweni now has broadband, and we can phone and even text(!) so we can keep up with each others' news (including this blog). Volunteers and visitors would also be very welcome. There is plenty of guest accommodation (including the house in the picture above), and a canteen for meals. Volunteer help is especially useful in the areas of permaculture, appropriate technology, education and play-work, arts and creative activities, conflict resolution (Hlekweni also runs AVP workshops), computing and finance, amongst others...

Talking of Poetry... Ghazal 3

2010-05-02T15:13:00.005+01:00

I started writing this after meeting with a small group of Quakers last week. I keep using the same form (roughly) - the Ghazal - as I used in the two previous poems I posted. Each couplet is supposed to stand alone as well as forming part of the whole - not sure I've really got this completely but anyway, I'd like to share it. The last couplet has this 'poet's voice' that comes in - I use an alias instead of my name - my 'takhallus' - I use Llew, the nickname of my maternal grandfather, the sort of family uberpoet!

Jane's rug!

Friends. When we sat together pleased to rest,
from listening our hearts pleased to rest.

Between us on the floor a woven rug,
where my eyes did linger seeking rest.

My thoughts wander the patterns on the rug,
unsettled, I find there's no place to rest.

Specular chemistry ignites the rug,
whose threads, fused, smoulder in their place of rest.

Between us, like some ancient test, this rug's
a whirlpool, dizzying the pace of rest.

I read the weaver's cosmic map, the rug
chaotic, helps me fly, to chase off rest.

Llew laughs: Such Grand Plans! laid out on a rug!
The whole universe in the face of rest.

Poetry/cake please

2010-04-27T17:12:00.005+01:00

It strikes me how many Quakers are poetry lovers/writers. Or at least that's how it seems to me. In our newsletters, here on the blog, and now Roger's poem in The Friend.

So, it shouldn't surprise you that I had a lovely conversation about poetry after Meeting this past week. Partially about Roger's poem, but not just and not just really although I liked his poem and could publish a post just on why I like what he wrote down and pulls out of experiences for me (thank you for reminding me of the blue shirt). I like this about Quakers though, this word-and imagery-loving-ness.

I went home smiling about that and then I almost literally tripped over a poem I wrote last summer (well the book it was in) not about Quaker worship but because I had been trying to describe how the sacred occurs at other times.

And I felt inspired by that talk and by Roger to rewrite it...and then share it. I wonder how many of you have poems about Quakers too? How many poems are there in newsletters or in closed pages or whispered on tongues but never spoken aloud? Wouldn't it be nice to publish/re-publish some of them here together?

Anyways, must run...am off to - what else - a talk on poetry :-).

Quaker cakes
by Nadine Wills

It's the sifting together
deliciously layered
that somehow reveals
strawberry smiles.

It's in the brought-ness
this done thing - sharing -
waiting to be undone.
Because it was brought
now a mostly empty space
in place of that sweet offering.

And everyone ate
a daffodil sun
dappled chocolate fingers
sometimes we didn't talk
as children
hopped around us.
And perhaps
in moments
small as fairycakes
nothing matters.

But we ate.
We came together and we ate
what was offered to us
with all those hands and tastes.
All those times,
with all those Friends,
we ate.
We ate Quaker cakes.

Worship as Access

2010-04-06T18:21:00.001+01:00

I very much like and commend Maurice's blog dated 2nd April about the style of worship in our Meeting.

Maybe the whole purpose and function of the Quaker mode of worship is to court access to that wordless place where awareness of the spirit may grow. Genuine access to the spirit may be wordless and unruly, but some people like to take it over and organise it and script it. I prefer my spirit to be subversive.

Ministry in Meeting for Worship

2010-04-02T15:16:00.007+01:00

I enjoyed all the contributions on the blog concerning the size of our Meeting and the issues related to our ‘threshing’ in January. It’s great that many from our Meeting expressed both at our Meeting in February and via the blog their perception of our situation as being a wonderful opportunity rather than as a concern, in the sense of it being a problem! I’m glad too that related issues around ministry and silence, have been ‘threshed’. On Jan. 31st Laura wrote of her “delight that we should be having this discussion via the blog”. I’m happy that the whole topic is being kept alive and before it goes to sleep I would like to offer my perspective on silence and ministry in worship.

At Meeting for Sufferings on March 27th many of these same issues were raised and ‘thrashed’. The topic was taken from priority ‘a)’ of “A framework for Action 2009 – 2014”: ‘Strengthening the spiritual roots in our meetings and in ourselves’. It seamed very clear at Sufferings that whether ‘bums on seats’ are increasing or decreasing, the relationship between silence and ministry in worship is an issue very much alive throughout our YM. I was glad to be able to offer some feedback from our own Meeting, flowing from our February 7th LM and the many reflections offered by Craig, Simon, Laura, Sharon, Rosie and others who have contributed to the blog.

The following insight once came to me in the silence. Suppose a group of hermits decided to meet for an hour each week to pray or to contemplate. Being hermits they agreed that the whole gathering would be in total silence!! The question for me was: whilst the hermits would surely gain a great deal from the experience – would this be what we seek in our Meetings for Worship?

In my view the answer is a very simple ‘no!!’ My perspective is that we meet as a community in which we wish to support one another and to learn from one another. Our community grows in depth not only through what comes to us individually in the silence but also through the sharing of the inner experiences that each individual recognise as spiritual or as being of God. It’s my belief that Quakers should have reason to be concerned if the balance tips too far in one direction or the other i.e. if within our MfW we have too much ministry or too much silence!

I see clearly the problem of too much predictable or ‘heady’ ministry. However, it would be concerning if individuals who join us in Worship were deterred from exercising their gift of ministry because they get the impression that meeting in silence is more valuable than a Meeting with ministry. I know that I’m nourished both by silence and by the ministry that flows from what others experience as coming to them from the same silence.

I believe that the Quaker way of worship brings with it wonderful gifts. We deepen our prayer lives; we learn about the gift of discernment and we learn about active listening. For me, all of this is a part of the Quaker experience and a part that hopefully we will pass on to future generations. We learn in the first instance to sit in silence and in the silence we allow ‘that of God’ to speak to us in our hearts, but we also learn to receive and to offer ministry. Some Quakers seem to believe that we have no priests, but surely the reality is that we are all priests i.e. we are called to minister to one another. Ministry for Quakers is a two-way process. We receive with gratitude and we offer freely.

By participating in Worship we learn to grow and to progress from merely occupying ‘Quaker space’ to discovering the ‘Quaker Way’. This is the way along which: a) we learn to listen to the spirit of God deep within ourselves, b) we learn to listen deeply to the spirit of God as communicated to us by other members of our Meeting, c) we learn to discern the appropriate time in which to offer ministry. Hopefully we also learn to use the gift of discernment further in doing the will of God in our daily living, in today’s complex world.

I now digress to make a point. We learn to speak by speaking. We learn to write by writing. We learn to think by thinking. These are skills that we have developed from earliest childhood. Together with the wider society Quakers share the priority that is placed upon these skills. We all seek to help our children to acquire proficiency in their use and we wish that they practice them on a regular basis. However as Quakers we surely place a high value on ‘discernment’ also. I understand discernment as the ability to know from ‘deep within’ the rights and wrongs of actions. Just as with speech or writing discernment is a gift that we develop not in a vacuum but by exercising it within a community. Where better, I ask, than within the security of a loving community?

Quaker worship teaches us to wait in a deep silence. As the Psalmist wrote, ‘Be still and know that I am God’. In the silence we pay attention to what God may wish to communicate to us from ‘within’. In the silence we also receive ministry from other members of our community i.e. we learn to actively listen and to pay attention to what God may wish to say to us through other members of our community, even some unlikely ones. This is the real gift offered by diversity. However, we can also learn about offering ministry.

We learn to trust our inner knowing or discernment and then we need to do something with it. As with all skills, discernment too needs to be tested out. We test it out by trusting what comes to us in the silence and then when the time seems appropriate and when we feel moved to do so we offer ‘words’ in ministry. Very importantly we can learn still more from the feedback we later receive from caring and honest Friends - be they elders or attenders. Hopefully these Friends will be willing and able to offer us encouragement - or further guidance if this seems appropriate!

So, returning to the overall question of ministry within MfW. I too wish that ministry be deep and spiritually based. We should all be wary of offering predictable ministry or of saying something just because it seems ‘clever’. I wish especially that we would all give adequate time between one ministry and the next and I too would welcome the occasional meeting when no one feels led to offer ministry.

However having said all that - I would also like to encourage all in our Meeting to be brave in trusting the strong insights that come to them in MfW, especially when the insights are accompanied by strong emotions. For me the emotional component that accompanies ideas that come into our awareness is a very significant factor. Surely something of this emotional component was the source of people being called ‘Quakers’.

Holding on to all of this and still knowing that we can get it wrong, I value what St. Paul said: “The spirit of God is not a spirit of timidity”. I believe that we all need to learn a) to trust the insights that come to us; b) to trust the emotions that accompany such insights; c) to trust ourselves in offering ministry; and d) to trust the feedback we receive from others in our community.

In brief, we are a single Quaker community. Within this community we learn to minister by ministering and in ministering we also test out for ourselves and for the Meeting the gifts we share. Discernment and ministry are gifts for the whole Meeting. I would hope that we are all guided by no.13 of Advices & Queries:- “Do not assume that vocal ministry is never to be your part. Faithfulness and sincerity in speaking, even very briefly, may open the way to fuller ministry from others. When prompted to speak, wait patiently to know that the leading and the time are right, but do not let a sense of your own unworthiness hold you back. Pray that your ministry may arise from deep experience, and trust that words will be given to you”.

Let me once again state that like others, I do not want ministry for its own sake and I don’t want ministries coming one after another without adequate time to absorb what has been offered but I do hope that our MfW is a place where we learn from that of God in ourselves and in others. This is something that would never happen in the case of the hermits! I delight especially when a Friend, who rarely ministers, offers a gem that that has come to them from the silence.

I urge a certain caution lest, even with the best will in the world, we make any assumptions about other people ‘airing personal thoughts and reflections’ or ‘offering a ministry that does not arise from a deep spiritual centre’. This could really be a ‘put off’ to a more timid soul. I believe that it would be a disservice to our community if the best efforts of one person were stifled or snuffed just because another person perceived their best effort as being less than adequate. We all need to be very careful about valuing one another within our one community.

In any community valuing another is demonstrated especially by actively listening to what that other person has to say and then by offering that person words of encouragement. I learned a great lesson at the York YM about the need for Friends to be ‘kindlers and not snuffers’ of the spirit, lest we ‘snuff out’ those who are more timid by nature and those who take a great leap in joining us in our Quaker space because they too wish to learn about the Quaker Way.

My hope is that our MfW will always be a place of welcome to those who wish to join us in Quaker space. I hope that our MfW, while being grounded in silence, will also be a place where visitors do not feel intimidated by either words or silence. Please God, no one who worships with us will hold back from offering ministry just because they feel discouraged from so doing or because of a sense of their own unworthiness. Rather, may each one of us feel encouraged to develop our gifts of discernment and when the time seems appropriate may we have the courage to offer in ministry what is discerned as being an appropriate ‘word’ for the Meeting.

Priority a. of our “Framework for Action” starts with the words: ‘We wish to see all our meetings being inclusive worshipping communities, where everyone is welcomed and valued’. This is a wonderful aspiration. May we all learn from our experiences of ‘silence’ and of ‘ministry’ so that our Meeting, with all its diversity, may progress towards being ever more inclusive and welcoming. In this spirit, may we discover an ever-greater discernment of what God’s will is for us within our Meeting and beyond it, in Sheffield and the world? This is our time and place!!!

We are approaching Easter. Grant that each in our community may experience new life and vitality from the spirit of God in our hearts and in our community. Happy Easter.

Leonard Cohen and Bicycles

2010-04-01T17:55:00.002+01:00

I still remember the Meeting when Linda spoke about Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem". She talked about these lines of his:

Ring the bell that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light get in.

As always, she spoke beautifully, and it still comes back to me every once in awhile.

A couple days ago, I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts and a band did a beautiful cover of it (Canada's "The Once"). If you like folk music, you can listen to their cover of "Coming Back to You" here: http://www.theonce.ca/music.htm.

I like this particular podcast (essentially a radio show that you can listen to again online) because in many ways it is about happiness and home and what makes life good. It makes me smile and laugh and trust that light does "get in". It is broadcast from the Canadian version of the BBC (CBC) and is called "The Vinyl Cafe". They travel across Canada and stop/play in towns all across the country telling stories and having local bands play. Then they pass around a bucket to collect money for a special project they choose each year.

They start off each show by telling people in the audience (it is recorded live) what is good about their community. Then people play music. Then stories are told. Stories where things don't always go so well, and people are people, but things turn out okay in the end. I think sometimes we need this. At least, I need this. Stuart McLean is author/storyteller, very much in the tradition of Garrison Keillor I think.

Anyway, thought I'd recommend this particular episode because not only is Cohen's "Anthem" included, but a short story (McLean tells a series of stories about a small community) about cycling and giving testimony: issues many Quakers may be interested in and willing to laugh about.

You can download an MP3 file and listen to the radio show here:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting//pastpodcasts.html?44#ref44

You are looking for the: VC: March 27th, 2010 "Dave and the Bike" episode. Or, alternatively, it is on iTunes (search for "Vinyl Cafe").

Apocalyptic language and climate change

2010-03-16T09:10:00.004Z

Good Morning,

I listened to Beyond Belief this week where there was a very good discussion of the use of apocalyptic language in the context of climate change. If you haven't heard it I recommend taking half an hour to do so.

Click the link in the title above to get to the programme.

Tim

Angels and Palestine

2010-03-10T15:31:00.002Z

As mentioned last week, the Bookgroup is going well. We talk, we drink, we laugh, we share. About 8 or 9 people now every time. Some come for the books, some come for the company.

We decided against reading The Famished Road for the upcoming April 17th meeting. A number people have tried started it numerous times and...the last book promised angels and it didn't really give us angels. Roger suggested Quaker Sally Vicker's novel Miss Garnet's Angelas a wonderful alternative. A couple people oohed and aahed when it was suggested. So it seemed an obvious altenrative. Sorted.

In September Matt Robson and I are making an appeal which touches on Palestine, a topic I would like to know more about, so thought it might make sense to have a themed book club. Asked Matt what his favourite book on Palestine was and he said the graphic novel (which I keep meaning to read more of anyway) Palestineby Joe Sacco (and foreword by Edward Said in some editions I believe). Again, an enthusiastic response by the one person who had read it and nobody seemed to hate the idea so...date still to be set, but that's what is coming up in the bookgroup for September.

Sustainability and Arts in Development: upcoming events at the University of Sheffield

2010-03-10T15:15:00.003Z

Two events that are open to the public and free at the University of Sheffield in the next couple weeks that are of a Quakerly sort of interest and seem to follow on from discussions that are going on at the Meeting.

The first is on sustainability (and city design and free canapes) and the second is on arts and development (and has live music with great musicians and more free food). Both take place in the ICOSS Building which is here: and looks like this:

1) Universities as Catalysts for Sustainable City Design

Are Professors really stuck in their Ivory Tower? Is higher education relevant? Can Universities really catalyze community change?

This talk and discussion will focus on an urgent new role for higher education institutions to be the catalysts for sustainable city design. This event will focus on the Sustainable City Year programme at the University of Oregon (USA), a programme that helps direct expertise of faculty and students toward a single city to help on sustainability issues. In this model of education, students get hands on experience in working with city officials and city officials get a range of new ideas from the next generation of thinkers and practitioners.

This year, the Sustainable City Year program is working with the City of Gresham (Oregon, USA) and is directing 15 faculty, 24 courses, 7 disciplines, and about 100,000 hours of student and faculty effort toward the city's needs. Can this model of higher education work in the UK?

FREE and Open to the Public. Canapes and drinks provided.

Sheffield: March 11 5:30-7:30 Sheffield University, ICOSS Board Room, 219 Portobello (To book a place, please email: judith.eversley@rtpi.org.uk)

Speakers:
Nico Larco, AIA, is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Marc Schlossberg, PhD, is an Associate Professor of City Planning. Both co-Direct the Sustainable Cities Initiative at the University of Oregon (USA). Professor Schlossberg is also currently a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar based at the University of Sheffield's Town and Regional Planning Department.

Talks are supported by the Royal Town Planning Institute, Planning Aid, and the University of Sheffield.

2) Arts in Development (with music!)

This event will feature talks followed by open discussion on arts and development, involving Sheffield academics and artists working in the community, followed by a workshop on Indian and Southern African music. Come experience and participate in the santoor, tabla and vocal music mini fest.

For details see

Date – Thursday, the 18th of March, 2010, 1.30 -3.30 pm

Speakers
Dr. Nadine Wills, LeTS, Univ. of Sheffield - A critical look at arts and development
Dr. Chamu Kuppuswamy, Sheffield Law School - Intellectual property rights and
traditional arts
Dr. Kathleen Van Buren, Department of Music, Univ. of Sheffield - Arts and healthcare
Mr. Philip Weiss, SEMEA, Sheffield and Mr. Mandla Sibanda, Sunduza Dance Theatre,
Sheffield - Traditional arts management and practice

Performances by John Ball, a member of Indus and SOSA-XA! Sounds of Southern Africa.

Venue – ICOSS (The Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (see details below)

Admission is FREE, Please sign up with the event coordinator Chamu Kuppuswamy by emailing her at c.kuppuswamy@shef.ac.uk or leaving a message on 0114 2226877.

This is happening Now

2010-02-24T13:10:00.006Z

You can read Frances Laing's interviews with some of the Yarl's Wood detainees in The Friend (available to read free online here). There is more information on her blog here.

Becoming Friends

2010-02-12T17:04:00.006Z

One of the wonderful unintended consequences of Quaker Quest for British Quakers has been the growing realisation that we need to offer all these newcomers some way of engaging with Quaker spirituality (beyond just gesturing in the direction of the library and saying 'there's lots of books about it in there...')

A new project called Becoming Friends has now been developed by Woodbrooke, which offers a range of ways for people to learn about, explore, and discuss the Quaker Way. The course includes written materials, links to video and audio recordings, online forums and also the opportunity for learners to share and discuss themes and experiences with a trained 'companion' from their local Meeting.

The course is available in paper format (for £10) or online (£5), and is a great resource for all Quakers and attenders (not just the newcomers it has been designed for). More information, including a free demo option here.

about being a Quaker...

2010-02-11T14:15:00.002Z

Before the New Year our Hearts and Minds group met. The final activity of that particular session was where we were each asked to write on pieces of paper terms or phrases that for us encapsulated – in some way – what we felt and/or had learned about being a Quaker. Several of the group are members of the Society of Friends; others are more or less long term attenders. We have all agreed to share this list of understandings as perhaps a window into further reflections about being a Quaker.

Equality
About compassion and listening
Being open and honest (or trying to be)
Committing to the practice of being silent together
Being someone who isn’t afraid of silence
Peace
Possibility
Developing my voice
Being part of a group where everyone’s voice can be heard
Respecting and honouring others
Finding something beyond ‘thought’
Not stealing post-it notes from work – thinking about what I do in the world
Living according to my values and questioning and affirming my values
Having a place to be
Listening deeply
God – living life
God – forgiveness acceptance
Questions and learning
Having somewhere to go and something to do on Sunday morning without having to think about it each time!
Thinking
Something greater than me
Supportive environment for trying to live a positive purposeful life where beliefs, ideals and actions are linked
Doing and being with integrity
Making time/space to let a voice inside be heard – to listen to ‘that of God within me’ and to have this approach to others
Connections with my family
Shaking/stirring the pot and letting it settle
Engagement and ethics
Connectedness with history
Important values, together, peace, equality, simplicity? consensus
Acceptance – non-judging
I love the uncertainty of not knowing where a Meeting for Worship is going to go
The children – and offering them this…
Exploring
Shared and equal responsibility for the voice within us and the community as a whole
Be able to be still and quiet
Being free to believe in god, and to not believe too
Being part of a community
Am I a Quaker?
Listening
Engaging with Quaker tradition/testimonies
No priests!
Being open to the still small voice within
Being part of a community
Greater acceptance of the diversity of individuals
Practice
Making and developing friendships
Living reflectively
Having responsibilities for others in the Meeting – not just ‘taking’
Living actively, rather than reactively
Valuing my own experience of spirituality
Listening, hearing others
Being someone who takes their coat off to worship!

Meeting needs in worship

2010-02-08T08:44:00.002Z

There has been much threshing in our large meeting about our meeting for worship arrangements now that our main Sunday morning meeting is nearly filling the space available. A lot of this threshing has focused on meeting the many and diverse needs of those attending the meeting. Many feel that the big main meeting is too 'busy' with lots of ministry and want a 'quieter' meeting, mainly in silence.

I for one am becoming settled on having two meetings for worship on a Sunday morning. But this is simply to accommodate the numbers. Each meeting would be a full and proper meeting for worship, and whether or not it is 'busy' will depend on the leading of the spirit on that day. After much concern about the 'busyness' of our main meeting, exercising discipline in giving and receiving ministry seems to be paying off, and we have had some much more centred meetings recently. In other words, it is not the size of the meeting that determines its quality, but the extent to which those present are attentive to the leadings of the spirit.

However, I became much moved in our recent business meeting to what might go wrong if our two meetings did evolve into meeting two different sets of needs. I saw myself wondering what it would be like to be the clerk at a business meeting where the two worshipping groups faced each other to the left and right of the table, and the clerk needed to judge the sense of the meeting in coming to a difficult decision. I would not want to be that clerk.

Of course, there is no reason why we cannot have two meetings for worship and still be one community. People can attend either the earlier or later meeting depending on their circumstances on each Sunday. We could still all meet each other, especially in the time between the two meetings, and we would still all share the concerns and work of the community.

But what if the earlier meeting became the 'quiet' meeting? Then what if I was well known and respected for giving regular ministry, and decided to attend the early meeting one Sunday? I can imagine it might be like what I have experienced before, when going into the snug of an avowedly local pub, and noticing that the conversation stops as I go towards the bar to order my drink. I feel distinctly not welcome, a stranger in their midst, and beat a hasty retreat to the tap room next door.

The problem with these scenarios is in seeing the purpose of the meeting for worship as meeting our needs. The actual purpose of a Meeting for Worship is to celebrate the life of the community – to give 'worth' to that community, in its sorrows as well as its joys, in its pain and hardships as well as its rejoicing and successes.

If we bring our needs into the meeting, we will find them amplified and frustrated, but if we leave our needs at the door, we will find them miraculously met. We must put aside the pride that has been bred into us by western individualism and learn the humility of forbearing one another in community. We must come with hearts and minds prepared.

We need to submit to one another in love. Submission does not come easily to us proud westerners who think ourselves masters of the universe because our science and technology has given us so much. We could do worse than learn from our Muslim neighbours: Salam, Islam, Inshallah – Peace, Submission, If God Wishes.

More thoughts on ministry, concern and our meeting

2010-01-31T21:31:00.002Z

I have been wanting for some days to reply to/comment on Craig’s posting and now Simon’s posting. I want to do it as succinctly as I can. This posting is not a coherent quasi-essay, but some random responses, which have been knocking around in my head.
Like Simon declaring his role of current Elder, I need to do the same for any blog readers who aren’t aware of it: I am clerk at Sheffield Central at the moment.
Here are some of my thoughts… this discussion takes me straight back to the very valuable and thought-provoking article by Craig some months back about ‘Quaker space’ and ‘Quaker way’. I think the need to re-organise our meetings is partly about providing more Quaker space. More and more people are finding what a good experience it is, to be in that Quaker space for an hour (or more) a week. Arranging more meetings is in effect increasing the amount of Quaker space available. That’s good.
But Simon has also referred to the difficulty we can have in securing Friends (or attenders… for many positions, it doesn’t matter which) to fulfil roles within the meeting. That’s about taking on the ‘Quaker way’ – ie. Committing yourself to doing something over and above being there on a Sunday morning and enjoying the vibe. We really do need that as well.
As for the quality and quantity of ministry… I have to say, I don’t mind having several pieces of ministry, when they are all pretty short. I find them a great deal easier to digest. And I do believe that it is a spiritual discipline to listen to the spoken ministry and to discern whether it is something helpful for oneself, or not. And if not, to gently and uncritically let it go. I wish I could more easily comply with that word, ‘uncritically’. It is very human and natural to pass judgement on a piece of ministry that may not match up to some ideal standard: too trite, too rambling, too wordy, too obscure… etc.
Simon’s blog has partly been an extended exploration of the word ‘concern’ and its special Quaker meaning. 2 words which are really important for me are ‘commitment’ and ‘service’. Maybe they are more immediately meaningful than concern, to anyone without a Quaker background. I think this is partly what Craig has been getting at when he reminds us that coming to Meeting on Sunday is not just about getting our own needs met – there also has to be an element of being prompted and pushed outwards and onwards, to do something once we leave the meeting.

My over-riding feeling though is of excitement and delight that we should be having this discussion via the blog – which is amongst ourselves and with others out there, who are also taking an interest. And that the dilemma posed for our meeting at the moment results from having increasing numbers joining us to worship on a Sunday morning. What a great ‘problem’ to have!

Threshing and Concern

2010-01-24T20:35:00.005Z

I've finally got my act together to read up on the blog. As I'm on Elders at the minute, I should say that my response here is made in a purely personal capacity. I feel some sense of concern to enter the discussion actively, but what follows is largely my own judgement and I offer it as such.

Firstly, Craig's words in his previous post describe my own experience quite closely and prompt me to put my thoughts in order for a process of discernment which is likely to continue for some time. I think the issue is layered. On the surface we have a number of specific issues such as the size of the meeting, the 'busyness' of ministry, and so forth. Underlying this, clearly, is a shared sense of concern about the life and depth of (spoken and silent) ministry in meeting for worship, and underlying *this* in turn (I think) is an even deeper concern about the life of the meeting as a whole. And here it gets scary, because no-one on earth can order us about and get us out of any messes we get ourselves in. We commit ourselves to the understanding that nobody and nothing stands between us and God (or other favoured term). Individually and corporately, we entitle ourselves to spiritual freedom to the exact extent to which we willingly accept direct responsibility to the Spirit. In this sense, Quaker life is much *less* of a spiritual free-for-all than life lived under the rule of a dogmatic institution, because the Spirit is not a set or finite list of requirements. Scary thought. But that, folks, is what we sign up to. We claim freedom in order to go deeper into the Spirit than we would otherwise go.

In saying this I'm aware that I speak as a highly undisciplined personality, and I've never personally had any problem whatsoever with the idea (and I stress the word "idea") that being a Quaker might involve conforming to some kind of external discipline exercised through the corporate life of the meeting. So if I'm coming across as some sort of disciplinarian that might well be my personal baggage, talking the language of over-compensation. But not entirely. I think the key term here is 'concern' in the Quaker sense. Briefly, Quaker life is life lived under concern (in the Quaker sense); Quaker ministry is utterance given under concern (i.t.Q.s.). Ultimately it's a matter of personal and collective discernment how far we are guided in our ministry by genuine concern, and, without passing comment on any other Friends' spoken ministry, I know for a fact that I have myself given spoken ministry without being under a sense of concern. Once ... the sky didn't fall on my head, and Quakerism in Britain (or even Sheffield) didn't collapse as a result, but nevertheless I know that I made a mistake there (not as painful a mistake as NOT giving ministry when I WAS under concern to do so, but a mistake nonetheless).

As a worshipping Quaker meeting we accept responsibility to know what our concerns are, and to commit ourselves to at least try to respond to them consistently. This is not a once-and-for-all learning experience: it's something I (for one) need to relearn and keep relearning. *If* we as a meeting are not remaining close to our sense of concern in the way we conduct our ongoing affairs, including our meetings for worship, *then,* to be honest, we're in trouble. I stand to correction from wiser Friends than me, but, for what it's worth, I personally think I (and seemingly we) may possibly have let that one slide a bit in recent months. Maybe spoken ministry is the obvious area where it shows, but it also shows in less obvious ways: the difficulty we sometimes encounter in finding Friends to fill posts and committees (too many posts or not enough active Friends?), the failure of scheduled and other donations to meet the meeting's running costs (leading to cross-subsidy from the Meeting House lettings, which plugs the gap but masks the problem), and so forth.

That's my diagnosis; what's my prescription? Well, if I'm right there, we don't need to panic about it - still less fall about in a round of nervous recriminations. We remain a conspicuously successful meeting and the issues we face are symptoms of our success. We're big, we're busy, we're relatively young on average, we have an incredibly lively children's and young people's meeting, and, in a nutshell, we're doing all right. We just need to have a cool, very unsparing, very loving and mutually supportive look at where we are, compared with where we ought now to be.

Firstly, I don't think that it has anything really to do with the surface issues - the size of the meeting, the 'busyness' of ministry, and so forth. These things matter, but they are symptoms, not causes. In the final analysis, we are not *really* going to frighten God (or other favoured term) away with our numbers any more than we are going to bore God (o.o.f.t.) away with our many words. I therefore think concentration on these things in isolation may be an attempt to avoid or sidestep the central point at issue, which is, how to keep the meeting (and its ministry) spiritually alive in conditions of such diversity.
Secondly, however, given that we seek unity (i.t.Q.s.), I think diversity itself is the opposite of a problem; it's uniformity we need to be scared of, and a split meeting for worship would encourage uniformity within each subsidiary meeting, work against unity, and therefore be (in my understanding) a bad thing (unless there was a reason to set up a new, entirely separate meeting, elsewhere in the city).

Thirdly, if it really is true that we need to rediscover our unity in the shared discipline of ministry (and I suspect this is true), this inevitably involves some exercise of authority within the meeting, by someone, at some point, in some capacity, and the acceptance of discipline from within the meeting by individual Friends. This thought frightens a lot of Quakers (me included). But it's unavoidable.

On the matter of discipline within a meeting, the buck ultimately always stops with the current nominated Elders, but I don't personally think it's always sufficient to assume that nominated Elders can easily fulfil this role alone. For one thing, many Friends in the meeting may not accept their authority to do so. In fact, I know that, as things currently stand, some don't. Nor do I think it's a matter of old hands within the meeting generally teaching the ropes to newcomers, because sheer duration of involvement brings its own spiritual risks and does not *automatically* confer the capacity for deeper insight. Sometimes fresh eyes see more clearly, although it's equally possible for a relatively inexperienced Friend to desire forms of change which inadvertently involve chucking the baby out with the bathwater.

What I therefore conclude is that (a) discernment comes through dialogue, and if there is a special role for more seasoned Friends within the meeting, it involves asking hard questions but not giving easy answers; (b) each one of us must accept that, in order to progress spiritually, we have to be changed by our involvement in the meeting, because progress involves change by definition, and such change can be as painful as it is necessary, and may involve the admission that "I'm wrong" and "you're right" (and possibly even that "I'm right" and "you're wrong"); and (c) whatever the outcome of our discernment, it must be grounded in a shared awareness of what the term 'concern' has meant to previous generations of Quakers. It must be (in conventional words - inadequate though all words are) 'what God wants, whether we want it or not.' And in that sense, then, yes, there is absolutely some learning which every Quaker needs to learn. Newcomers need to be learning a sense of concern, and old hands need to be always relearning it - partly, indeed, by sharing it and spreading it around. And what I think it boils down to is this: we all need to grasp what concern is. For me, it's all in that one word. If we (re)learn what concern is, and apply that learning, then (although only a fool makes predictions) I predict that the size of the meeting will cease to trouble or impede us, and the quality of ministry will sort itself naturally out (and maybe the other less obvious symptoms will too - eventually). But, without a living (maybe renewed) sense of concern, nothing we do to change these surface things will necessarily make any real difference.

In terms of a way forward, better for me than a split meeting or similar would be something like a special business meeting running on from meeting for worship, addressing the single issue of concern, as it exists in principle, and as it applies in practice to the life of the meeting as a whole. But that's just a suggestion. I also felt that the threshing meeting was held in right ordering - apple-pie ordering, in fact, if I can use that phrase - and this gives me great hope that we are on the right tracks, or at least facing in the right direction.

Threshing our Meeting

2010-01-14T19:54:00.002Z

I was encouraged by the 'Threshing Meeting' held last Sunday, to discuss possible changes to our Meetings for Worship as a result of the dramatic growth in numbers of attenders at Sheffield Central recently. A couple of people mentioned to me how much they enjoyed the process, especially the respect shown to each other by participants, and the contrast with the kind of decision-making that they often experience in work or other non-Quaker contexts. I came away feeling proud to be a member of a community which practices decision-making in such a healthy and inclusive way. Our Meetings for Worship for Business are one of the main reasons for the survival and continuing relevance of Quakers over the last 350 years, and something we can be justly proud of.

One theme that was raised by several speakers was the desire for a smaller and 'quieter' Meeting for Worship, without so much spoken ministry as we usually have in the main Sunday Meeting. This left me wondering if there is an underlying issue, which isn't being explicitly addressed in this discussion, namely the quality of our worship, and the spoken ministry that arises from it.

My own experience is that I rarely feel nourished by our Meeting for Worship on a Sunday morning. This is not just about having 'too much' ministry, but more importantly the kind of spoken ministry that tends to predominate, which often seems to me quite 'heady', rather than arising from and speaking to the spiritual depths of those present.

In a Quaker Meeting the elders have a particular responsibility for the health of Meeting for Worship, but I must admit that when I was serving as an elder it seemed almost impossible to actually do anything about it, largely due to the absence of a shared understanding of what ministry is. Of course people in a Quaker meeting have very different needs, experiences and perceptions, but without any agreement about the nature of Meeting for Worship, there seems to be a tendency for it to become largely a space for airing personal thoughts and reflections. These are usually unobjectionable, and may well be helpful to some of those present in certain ways, but unless they arise from a deep spiritual centre they will not reach to 'the life' in others, and help them to experience that spiritual reality for themselves.

We are encouraged by our Quaker tradition to 'receive the vocal ministry of others in a tender and creative spirit. Reach for the meaning deep within it, recognising that even if it is not God's word for you, it may be so for others.' (Advices & Queries 12)

There is great wisdom in this, and I have been humbled by the gentleness and patience practised so consistently by many Friends in this spirit. But it does not mean that everything said in Meeting is necessarily 'God's word' for someone.

My experience is that there are 'layers' of depth in vocal ministry, and that the more frequent expression of 'surface' thoughts and opinions can crowd out the space needed for deeper words to arise from a gathered stillness.

Of course it may be that my own perceptions are at fault here, and I simply have quite different needs from most other Friends, so I would be glad to know what your experience of our Meeting is, in the comments below.

Buying secondhand books online

2010-01-13T10:18:00.006Z

I've noticed that Amazon is all out of the book Sepharad by Antonio Molina for February 6th. This is a gorgeous book. This is a bit of miserable winter which means books are a very cosy solution. I use Amazon links because they are usually in stock and offer a baseline. But then, I thought, this is a Quaker thing. Maybe we should talk about alternatives here so I offer you the Amazon baseline and then you can trot off and find yourself a fabulous fairtrade-type deal. So I shall.

Anyway, I would suggest, if you feel like staying at home and reading, Sepharad might be a book to buy for these long winter nights (whether or not you intend to come to the book group). Ordering online might be especailly attractive at the moment. But, you don't have to buy new or from Amazon if you order online.

You can buy books secondhand online very easily. One of the most widely known and probably easiest to order with is AbeBooks. Click here to go to their website. You can also buy secondhand with Amazon and Alibris etc. I have a list at the end of this post. You can choose to buy from the UK (and you will be supporting many secondhand shops in this way by ordering in this way).

I've done a search for you already on Sepharad and have found a wide range of secondhand copies available from 64p. Click here (although the search may no longer be valid when you click).

However, some things to be aware of when buying from a site like AbeBooks etc. secondhand:
-the American sellers are often the cheapest but their books usually take 2-3 weeks to arrive. Order the books for March or otherwise now and this will be fine but not if you want to join us on February 6th.
-you can order your search results by UK sellers, price, bookseller rating (how reliable buyers have found the seller to be, not everyone is equally reliable)
-AbeBooks or Amazon are acting as online middlemen for merchants all over the world, pay some attention to the ratings other people have given the bookseller you choose to buy from (with Amazon, make sure they have at least 85% satisfaction, over 90% is better and with AbeBooks go for 5 stars when possible but I would be very wary of buying from someone with less than 4 stars).

So, where can you buy books online and secondhand? Here's a list:
-Oxfam: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/second-hand-books
-AbeBooks: http://www.abebooks.com/
-Alibris: http://www.alibris.co.uk/
-Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/

Does anyone else have any suggestions? Where do you buy your books? Which are your favourite stores here in Sheffield? Do you have favourite sellers? Names and people that are particularly helpful? Let's make a list to - in effect - reward people for their good service and local knowledge. I personally love bookstores, but am not a huge fan of Waterstone's. So, if I'm going to do a big chain, I prefer Amazon.

I know that we already have established links with "Rhyme and Reason" as they come regularly after Meetings with wonderful displays to tempt us, don't they? They are on the Hunter's Bar roundabout near Endcliffe Park.

Every dealing I have had with them has been brilliant (I've seen them at University events and dropped by their store too): they are knowledgeable and funny and interesting. Everything you'd hope for in a bookstore and everytime I've been in there I've come away with books I never otherwise would have bought but have been so glad I did...but they are much too far away from my house for me to buy regularly and for the amount I need >:-). Okay, I've convinced myself to buy more from them.

I like the "Rare and Racy" secondhand bookstore on Division Street too. An amusing and eclectic books (with a suprisingly fabulous graphic book selection). Their music area is great too. I don't go there enough. If they like some of the books you already have, you might even be able trade. This is dark and dusty - the polar opposite to "Rhyme and Reason" - but there is always great music blaring round corners and it feels like an adventure. Perfect for losing an hour on a lazy afternoon or chortling over bizarre finds with a friend.

Personally, always do a quick squizz through the Oxfam bookstore on West Street every once in awhile. It's good for travel books and holiday reads in my opinion. Some decent science fiction sometimes too.

Any other comments on these or anyone else you would recommend? There is a bookstore that I've only been to once (because Hunter's Bar area is not so close to my house on Saturday mornings), but it was on Ecceshall Road near the Somerfield/Endcliffe Park going towards Greystones. They had some randomly interesting photos/art and a surprisingly good literary selection. Anyone know the name of it?

Anyway, happy local and online book buying!

Bookclub Books and Dates Feb-July 2010

2010-01-11T10:54:00.004Z

To update you on the bookclub and let you know about the books we have chosen for the next 6 months (yes we are getting organised)!

People seem to be picking and choosing which months they attend based on which books they feel like reading. We are getting about 7 each time (although not the same 7 people). It feels cosy to meet on a late Saturday afternoon at The Blue Moon. We all get our cups of tea or whatever and greet each other and then sit down, make our introductions and then begin to discuss the book. It usually goes on until 5:30.

Discussions have ranged from cultural tourism/imperialism, how do/should we separate authors from their semi-autobiographical characters, why does Jewish culture hold such an attraction for so many of us, how do we create ritual in our lives, can literally crucifying your mother in art be a tender image/apology or is it always inherently blasphemous?

Some attend regardless of whether they have read the book or not. This is also fine as our discussions are rarely of a specifically literary nature and touch on broader and more personal themes that the stories bring up. Everyone is invited to come along, to participate in whatever way they feel appropriate and make suggestions for books they would like to read with us. We hope you can join us one day. You are most welcome.

February 6
Sepharad by Antonio Munoz Molina and Margaret Sayers Peden (translator): Considered by some one of the best books in Spanish ever written: a lyrical and “tender and terrible” book. It is a book that weaves fiction and non-fiction together in a most beautiful way. I have just started reading this book and it has me nodding my head and going, "Ah hmm, yes, this is the kind of book you hope for with book groups. A thing of beauty but something I most probably would have never otherwise come across." It is another book about the Jewish diaspora but one that approaches Jewish identity in a very different way than My Name is Asher Lev.

March 6
A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler. Chronicler of “the foibles and frailties of the ordinary human heart” looks here at guardian angels and black sheep. She is sort of like a female Iain Banks in some ways I suppose. I love the tiny details of her writing: she sees and writes in the most wonderful fashion about the almost imperceptible moments that change relationships forever. She is a bit of a "kitchen sink" writer like Alice Munro and Carol Shields. Her subject matter are families and relationships and how people deal with growing up and becoming less than they thought they might be and then what happens when they also become sometimes more as well.

April 17
The Famished Road by Ben Okri. The 1991 Booker Prize winner and magic realist book about spirit child Azaro from Nigeria is not an easy read. It is very abstract and deals with difficult themes, but many promise it is worth reading for the last line alone (supposedly the best ever written, but don’t skip ahead as it supposedly needs to be understood in context). It also proposes that in a difficult world, "It is more difficult to love than to die". An interesting concept.

May 15
The Settler’s Cookbook by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. "Woven around the people, places and dishes that have shaped Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's life, it follows an emotional and culinary journey from childhood in pre-independence Uganda to London in the 21st century. Her own migration is intimately bound up with the fate of other East African Asians." It is a book told through recipes that also includes recipes. Methinks we might need to make some of these recipes for our next meeting....

June 19 Place and time to be decided
Midsummer's Eve Read:Suggestion that we meet with food and drink and bring our favourite poems/books to read to each other on the longest night of the year. To discuss and share what these words have meant to us then and now and perhaps choose some books for the next 6 months.

July 3
Gilead by by Marilynne Robinson
And now for a very Quaker-ly novel..."Notionally, 'Gilead' is a letter from a father to a son, a testament to the hopes and fears that the father, now in the twilight of his life, will never be able to share with his son. It is an account of the troublesome relationship between the narrator's father, a pacifist, and his grandfather, a militant abolitionist who fought (apparently with vigour and with valour) in the American Civil War; it is a deep reflection on the meaning and purpose of faith (the narrator, in common with both his father and grandfather, is the Pastor in the eponymous town of the title); and it is a commentary on the fears evoked within him by the sudden reappearance of the long lost son of a friend, a ne'r-do-well whom he instinctively, yet irrationally fears."

"There is a lot of Christian theology, and yet because of the main focus of the narrative, this is interesting and pertinent, and should not put off those who have no interest in religion - odd to have so much theology at the centre of a novel, but it's a very human take on theology, and the open-mindedness of the narrator gives a richness and thought-provoking depth to ideas about belief in God and practical issues of being human. I found it a very subtle book, and one that slowly enthralled me. There is very little dialogue, because of the nature of the narrative, but it never becomes monotonous. It is like a meditation on the nature of father and son relationships, yet written by a woman - I found it quite extraordinary, and definitely to be recommended to anyone looking for a slower, more thoughtful read."

If you would like to suggest any novels for us to read in the future...you are especially invited to comment on this post or to give suggestions to Nadine at Meeting (if you do not know what she looks like, look at her picture on this on the lefthand side of this blog as a "Follower" of this blog). Or, you are specifically invited to come to the June 19 Midsummer's Read. On that night we will simply read aloud to each other (this is a suggestion that came out of discussions with Linda Hoy about this bookgroup and an idea of reading poetry/Rumi that Craid Barnett made in a reply to one of the earliest posts on this blog). There we could also discuss how we want this to continue and what books we (possibly including you in this "we" as well) would like for the future.

Come and get 'threshed' this Sunday

2010-01-08T17:10:00.003Z

I thought it might be a good idea to post this (below) from elders, in advance of Sunday's 'Threshing Meeting' - hope you can make it. As ever you can also leave your comments below, but anyone who really wants to be part of the final discernment process needs to be at the Meeting for Worship for Business on 7th February.

Numbers of people attending the 10:30am Sunday Meeting has been steadily increasing over the last year, and on several occasions this Autumn numbers of people in the main meeting room have exceeded the capacity it was designed for.

This has led to some discussions amongst Friends. It raises questions- including how the meeting ensures the spiritual needs of all are catered for, as well as practical considerations about health and safety.

Friends are joyously varied group, with differing preference and needs, and discerning the right way to respond to this exciting time of growth needs us all to both contribute and to listen well to each other.

Elders have been giving this much attention, and have been led to the view that if there are changes, that these are considered by the whole Meeting.

We don't feel it is right to bring forward recommendations, but do feel it may still be helpful to lay out some suggestions to start this important process of discernment.
Consideration of these will need to included both practical issues - room sizes, eldering and clerking arrangements, children and young people’s activities, as well as what the changes might mean for the Meeting’s spiritual and community life.

The suggestions are further down.

Special meetings to consider these issues.

1. A ‘Threshing Meeting’ on 10th January 2010. This will be held as part of the Meeting for Worship on that day (starting at around 11.00). It will be an opportunity for open dialogue – sharing views, concerns, and further suggestions but without the Meeting attempting to reach any conclusions.
2. Our Meeting for Worship for Business on 7th February 2010. This will not be an additional business meeting, but this issue will be the main item for consideration.

Some suggestions

1. Should we consider holding a breakfast Meeting for Worship every week. This is currently at 8.15 followed by Meeting for Worship between 9.00 and 10.00 but could be a different time and held with or without ‘breakfast’. Should this include arrangements for additional children and young people Meetings at the same time?
2. Should we consider re-timetabling our larger 10.30 Meeting for Worship to allow for TWO hour long Meetings –perhaps 9.15 to 10.15 and 10.45 to 11.45. Should both include arrangements for children and young people Meetings at the same time?
3. Should we consider re-timetabling our larger 10.30 Meeting for Worship to allow for two Meetings, but for one of these to be for 45 minutes long?
4. Should we consider holding an additional but ‘smaller’ (i.e. limited by room size) Meeting for Worship that finished at the same time as the larger Meeting. This could be either 45 minutes or an hour long.
5. Should we consider re-starting a Sunday evening Meeting for Worship. Should this included arrangements for the children and young people Meetings at the same time.
6. Should we consider whether we could start another Meeting in Sheffield – perhaps in the North of the city.
7. Should we encourage more friends to consider joining Meeting for Worship at Nether Edge Meeting – either regularly or perhaps alternate Sundays.

Sheffield Quakers website

2010-01-06T20:44:00.002Z

You can link direct to it from here, and vice versa. I hope all of our regular bloggers have also taken a look at it. It's new - launched in December 2009 - and fairly lovely. It can grow and grow and become even lovelier - I do hope that any Sheffield Friends who would be interested in helping us look after this website, and maintain it well, will make themselves known ... the usual channels!

Ghazal 2

2010-01-02T22:45:00.004Z

When finally I think I choose somewhere to sit and pray,
out of the late blue of the evening sky appears the moon.

I find myself sitting in an old wooden chair framed by
a doorway - through which I see the garden - where rears
the moon.

There is nothing but surprise – and with a laugh – that I
greet
the sight of myself seen seeing such a grand seeming
moon.

This is beautiful and this beauty also my error;
A quiet nod to perspective rather than screaming “Moon!”

Tim says: he’d be wiser is he’d seen you rising tonight,
not the face of a just rousing foolish and beaming moon.

Ghazal 1

2009-12-31T14:09:00.004Z

Minor organisms are not aware
Of us, they live at an abstract remove.

A lesser consciousness animates them,
They are dependent on instinct to move.

Looking down on smaller creatures they seem
So fast, almost erratically, to move.

Yet gazing up at grander beasts,I feel
Them ponderous, emphatically they move.

Now if I look higher still when do I
Lose sight of those too fantastic to move?

Tim says: it's a first step to imagine
Unseen giants too ecstatic to move.

I was reading Rumi over the late autumn. I enjoyed the way that the author's self referencing voice appeared in certain poems - the form is the Ghazal. It works in various ways - I chose to use ten syllable lines in couplets. Each couplet ending with the same word and the preceeding words being half rhymes/alliteration/or sound sort of similar! The self referencing voice comes in the last couplet.

In Friendship,
Happy New Year,
Tim

Well done

2009-12-24T13:06:00.003Z

Well done Stanley and Rosie. I try to solve this problem by always having the same brand and colour of socks but here's a real problem how do you stop things creeping into duvet covers when you wash them? Even if washed alone there is always something in the duvet cover!
I know that God moves in mystrious(sic) ways but nothing like the manner of duvet covers and other washing.

I must confess that I have not read 'The Book of Discipline' about this matter but I am sure that other Friends have encountered it but daren't speak to the matter through fear, not of the state but the state of their washing.
I am perfectly willing to accept the maxim 'Never trust a man who, alone in a room with a tea cosy, does not try it on!' but are the strange machinations of washing machines not touching such a profound nature but go even deeper?After all when the light the machine we know that things are happening but do they always come out together in an ungathered Q way?
In Friendship
Peter

Lies, damned lies and

2009-12-12T19:00:00.002Z

Tony Blair. What a waste of energy and so leather by so many. So 25+years in Afghanistan to come are probably based on similar veracity.
What damage to democracy Blair has done.
In disgust
Peter

Upcoming Book club dates in December and January

2009-12-07T12:07:00.004Z

I've just realised that I haven't posted the "results" of our last book club meeting and what and when we're meeting next. Big oops and apologies for the delay.

December Meeting:
When: Saturday, December 12 at 4pm
Where: The Blue Moon Cafe (2 doors down from the central Quaker Meeting House beside the Cathedral)
Book: Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faiza Guene

For more about the book, click here. Quick summary: this was written by a 19 year old last year and tells about growing up poor in the Parisian ghettos as a Muslim girl with "no future" and depression. How do you find a way out?

We usually take about 1 one and a half to two hours to talk about the book, to each other and choose future books. It is very casual and you don't even have to have read the book as the process is to talk about themes. However, for December and January we chose especially "easy" quick-reads as these are usually busy months for everyone. Both books fro Dec and Jan are young adult novels that can probably be read in under 2 hours. So if you order it today from Amazon/buy it at your local bookstore, you could still come along having read the book!

January Meeting:
When: Saturday, January 9 at 4pm
Where: The Blue Moon Cafe (2 doors down from the central Quaker Meeting House beside the Cathedral)
Book: My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Some of you may have noticed that there was a Jewish issue recently (November 27) of The Friend and that My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is reviewed in there. That's because this is widely regarded as one of the best books on "Jewishness". It actually is part of a trilogy but can be read as a stand-a-lone. Thanks to Beryl for her recommendation on this. I first read this book at 13 and it had such an impact on me...it made me want to convert to Judaism (or at least celebrate Passover) for a significant portion of my teenage years. Enough said?

Perhaps not. This is about the tension between interpreting "God's Will" in Jewish orthodoxy and doing what you feel is right (in this case a boy's need to express his artistic talent). Click here for more info about the book.

I should point out again that you are welcome to come along even if you haven't read the books. Obviously you wouldn't contribute as much about the book, but we are doing a creative listening process and talking about spititual and activist/international themes as well that come up for us as part of the reading process.

At the December meeting we will be trying to choose a number of books so that we can let people know which books and when much more in advance. However, there is no expectation that people will come every month. Hope to see you there.

Nadine

No Father Christmas for children in detention

2009-12-07T10:59:00.004Z

The police were called on the patron saint of children and the imprisoned today, as he tried to deliver Christmas gifts to children at a detention centre.

The inspiration for the modern day Father Christmas, St Nicholas of Myra, was turned away at the gate of the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire when he tried to deliver presents to the children locked up inside for administrative purposes.

Jolly Old St Nick brought with him £300 worth of gifts donated by several London churches for the estimated 35 children currently detained.

Dressed in a red robe, long white beard, and a bishop’s mitre and crook, and accompanied by the Rev Professor Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, they hoped to spread some St Nicholastide cheer among the children of migrants detained there.

The atmosphere became rather less jolly when the Home Office authorities who run Yarl’s Wood refused permission for St Nicholas to enter the Centre to distribute the gifts to the children.

Despite the authorities having agreed to accept the gifts, St Nicholas was met at the gates by a group of unidentified security guards who barred his entry and ordered him to leave the area.

They later called the police as St Nicholas blessed the gifts. The gifts were loaded into an unmarked van by staff who refused to provide a name, number or receipt for the gifts. St Nicholas asked one "guard" his name and the man said "write down 'Father Christmas'".

St Nick said, "If this is how visitors are treated, I just shudder to imagine what else transpires inside Yarl's Wood." While police questioned the St Nicholas team, taxis and delivery lorries made their way in and out of the place with many smiling and stopping to greet the Saint and his companions.

You can read the full story here

Britain locks up over 1000 children every year in immigration removal centres, with severe impacts on their mental and physical health. The Childrens Society are asking people to send a Christmas card to Phil Woolas (immigration minister) asking him to stop the detention of children - full details here.

2009-12-02T09:58:00.001Z

The Wineglass

A wineglass starts broad at the base, then slims right down to a narrow pinch for quite a way, then swells out again. I have thought of the wineglass as a model of someone’s personal CV, in this way.

From the day you are born, your parents may start to appraise you according to some norm they hold, such as developmental ‘milestones’ or what your siblings or cousins or neighbours’ children were thought to be like at that age. A child should be potty-trained by six months or walking by two years, or composing sonatas by four, or whatever it is. Fortunately, you have no idea whatsoever of what they’re thinking – it goes straight over your head. So as an infant you are still subjectively free (although you don’t know that either).

When you start school, it becomes explicit: tests, SATs, the curriculum. Your performance is measured and compared to that of other children in your age group. There are statistics. You may even have your IQ measured. You can ‘pass’ or ‘fail’. This is a closed system of thinking. It stays like that for many years, the narrowing of options and outlook, the stem of the wineglass. For some, this may last life long as a world view, and they may always want to know, ‘How am I doing?’ For others, there may be a blossoming of freedom in their 20s or 30s, when they realise that they themselves can decide what they are going to do with their lives – the widening out of the wineglass. I think that if you are out into the wider part of the wineglass, you can be curriculum-free, and you don’t have to compare yourself so much to other people.

I don’t believe that life is a closed system. If life is a jigsaw puzzle, not only are we not sure that we have got all the pieces; not only can we not always find the corners or many of the edges; not only has someone hidden the box lid, so we can’t see the picture, I also suspect that some of the pieces are two-sided, front and back; some are three-dimensional. And I suspect that some are quite squidgy or morphic, and change their shape over night.

Since the jigsaw puzzle is so incredibly complex, we owe it to our fellow human beings to be compassionate with everyone’s fumbling attempts to make sense of any of it, don’t we?

How many have...

2009-11-27T14:24:00.001Z

spoken Truth to Meeting recently?
Peter

Running (to standstill)?

2009-11-27T13:43:00.003Z

All times are extra(n)ordinary(sic) if they we not there would be no progress backwards or forwards. To pretend that there is something special about this time is to take away from issues Friends coped with in the past unless what is being said is that Friends are running to standstill. If we are doing so we are so behind the times we must give up now.
We all have the skill base which can be developed in order that we keep pace and/or move ahead - just look at Sheffield Quaker blog or Quaker Faith and Fellowship plus the many other any one who has taught knows that to keep up with computers and developing technologies they have to be autodidacts (in the main). If a Friend, with normal abilities, were to claim they could not change a plug, do a working drawing, phone a specialist I would be scared. The Ammish are far ahead of us in such matters if that is the case.
Life is a learning process but is too much tied to a building called a school or university and we have to demolish such a view. As we are all ministers we are all pupils and teachers and need to maintain that awareness but to say that these times are extra(n)ordinary(sic) is to put yourself and others down. History is made by all people who live throuh such times not simply special people - unless that is the case you wish it to be.
To take Pope slightly out of context (and meaning)
Know then thyself presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is man.

We need to de-school this society in order that it can learn and develop. Know your weaknesses and strengths and learn how to live with both. Learn your insignificance and live with that. In fact simply learn to learn - simply if needs be but do not affect naif ineptitude that is the cop out of the pseudo-intellectual. If you can gather degrees you can mend a fuse - if you can't where did your so-called education let you down?
Peter
(And if you think I have a chip on my shoulder I may have but I also have one on my other shoulder to balance it out! It comes from my experience of life which I have to work hard at times to overcome but I am not alone in that am I?)

Essay completed before deadline shock

2009-11-26T09:23:00.004Z

I have posted my entry for The Friends Quarterly essay competition on 'The Future of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain' on a new blog at:

QuakersinTransition.blogspot.com

Many thanks to everyone who has posted comments on the work in progress, I have found them very helpful.

Especially worth reading is Alan Paxton's insightful comment here.

City of Sanctuary - The Film

2009-11-23T16:59:00.002Z

Hope you enjoy this 9 minute film, which tells the story of the City of Sanctuary movement so far. Many Quaker Meetings around the country are involved in their local City of Sanctuary groups, and we are keen to encourage new initiatives in towns and cities all over the UK. So if you have enjoyed the film, please share it with your friends and contacts by sending them a link to:

www.cityofsanctuary.org/film

Quakers in Transition part 3

2009-11-17T11:38:00.003Z

At the risk of trying your patience, here is the third and final part of my attempt at The Friend competition essay on 'The Future of British Quakerism' (the first part is here and the second here). I've found your comments on previous sections very helpful so please do let me have your criticisms and suggestions (and Peter do pull me up on any 'purple prose'...)

The last half century of rapid economic growth and globalisation was made possible by cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy, which is now entering a period of permanent and irreversible decline. Our economy and society is fundamentally dependent upon cheap energy - especially oil, which enables the long-distance transportation and supply chains that are the basis of our globalised economy.

As rates of oil production start to decline, the energy available to power our society will become increasingly scarce and expensive. Renewable sources of energy will become increasingly important, but they cannot provide enough energy to substitute for declining oil. This is largely because of the sheer volume of energy currently derived from oil, and the much higher costs of energy production from renewable sources. These additional energy costs are even higher for other options such as nuclear power, tar sands, and 'clean coal', along with additional disadvantages of (respectively) nuclear waste, huge carbon emissions, and the absence of working technology.

Declining energy supplies and rising prices put an effective ceiling on global economic activity. Our current economic system depends on the possibility of continuous 'growth'. That is, a constantly increasing rate of consumption of finite resources. As peak oil, climate change, and other physical and ecological constraints progressively constrict global economic activity, we are entering a new era of 'energy descent' that will have widespread consequences for our whole society.

The social effects of long-term decline in energy availability and increasing energy costs will be widespread and very visible. They include the localisation of production and supply for most goods, as long-distance transport networks become prohibitively expensive. As manufactured goods produced in China and foodstuffs from the southern hemisphere become unaffordable, local manufacturers and growers will have a competitive advantage, encouraging UK industry and agriculture.

Expensive transportation will also favour smaller, local businesses over large supermarkets and other retailers which rely on long-distance supply chains.
Commuting long distances to work and school, and frequent travel for holidays and social reasons will also become too expensive for most households. Many people will be forced to move home in order to be closer to their place of work, or to change their children's school so that it can be reached by public transport. Social and family life for most people may come to be focussed far more in their local neighbourhood, as regular long-distance travel becomes a luxury available only to a few.

British society during the phase of energy-descent could look similar in many ways to the Britain of the late 1940s, as widespread scarcity requires most people to 'make do and mend', and to grow their own food wherever possible. Rationing of essential goods may be re-introduced to prevent excessive shortages, as well as 'Tradeable Energy Quotas' to manage reduction of both carbon emissions and energy demand.

The State is also likely to come to play an increasing role in the economy and society, in order to try to manage this series of rapid transitions, as it did in the 1940s.

There may well be some significant gains in human well-being from the decline of our current economic system, especially the rediscovery of non-material goals for human life, and the rebuilding of local communities. There will inevitably also be very significant losses, especially for those with chronic and expensive medical conditions, migrants and ethnic minorities, and those without essential practical skills whose livelihoods are most dependent on the current organisation of society, welfare system and public services.

British Quakers will be among those groups that are especially vulnerable to the social consequences of energy-constrained economic contraction. As Quakers of working age are disproportionately employed in public sector occupations such as teaching, social work and higher education, that are most vulnerable to cuts in public spending resulting from declining revenues.
Relatively few British Quakers are currently employed in areas that are likely to see an increase in numbers and status; such as agriculture, engineering, skilled trades and policing, as the economy is re-geared towards core priorities of food and energy security, economic localisation and domestic security.

There are already signs of a re-ordering of political priorities away from higher education and social welfare, as the main parties have converged on a programme of deep public spending cuts, due to the crippling cost of the recent bank bailouts. As resources available to all governments become ever-more constrained by a shrinking economy, these cuts will affect growing numbers of public service employees.

Prolonged economic recession will also threaten those dependent on retirement pensions, as the value of invested assets will be affected by falling share prices and the potential collapse of vulnerable financial institutions.

Over coming decades most British Quakers will be forced to come to terms with a long-term decline in our standard of living, social prestige and life choices, which will profoundly alter the context of our daily life and religious faith and practice. As with all religious faith and practice, Quakerism is also a reflection of our daily experience of life and work. It is dependent on the economic and social conditions that create patterns of work, leisure, family and community life and political participation.

The profound changes in economic and social life that will be imposed by energy depletion and climate change will create new needs and priorities for Quakers, highlighting different aspects of our history and spiritual tradition.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Quakerism that is likely to have a new relevance during a prolonged period of economic decline and diminishing material security, is the benefit of belonging to a community of mutual aid. This was an extremely important aspect of Quaker Meetings (as of other churches and secular societies) in the period before the welfare state. As many Quakers begin to experience employment insecurity and falling incomes, due to declining public expenditure on social welfare and education, our Meetings will increasingly be needed for mutual support. Sharing of practical help, material necessities and social networks for employment opportunities, will become widespread priorities.

There are great benefits to belonging to a community of mutual aid in a period of severe economic insecurity. Belonging to a Quaker Meeting will provide an important 'safety net' for many people experiencing a rapid dislocation in their work and personal lives. Practical examples of this might include skills-sharing, mutual savings and loan schemes, benefit funds for people in severe financial difficulty, social enterprises to provide employment etc.

In this context membership status will also become more important, as it determines access to scarce community resources, and brings more costly communal responsibilities. This is how formal 'membership' of the Quaker community originated in the 17th Century, in the lists of those entitled to communal support.

Other resources of the Quaker tradition will also become increasingly important over this period. A shared vision of the 'good life', which is not based on material prosperity is likely to be a powerful resource in an energy-constrained society. For many in our society, falling incomes, more limited opportunities for travel and energy-intensive consumption will be experienced as a disaster, which consumer culture has provided no resources for making sense of.

Our Quaker testimony to simplicity will take on a new significance in this context. Over the last half century for many British Quakers the testimony to 'simplicity' in lifestyle and possessions has been increasingly difficult to practice in a hectic consumer society. In our new conditions of life, it may help us to see not just the material hardships, but also the possibilities to live slower lifestyles, more connected with our local communities, and more focused on real social and spiritual values than on material consumption.

This perspective will not come easily to any of us whose life experience has been shaped by the consumer society. But the writings and example of earlier Friends such as John Woolman will acquire a new contemporary relevance in an energy-constrained society, providing a rich resource for collective reflection on those goods of life that are not dependent on material living standards.

In this new society, in which material scarcity is becoming a widespread, bitterly resented and disorientating experience, the testimony to simplicity will take on a profoundly new significance. The Quaker testimony will take the form of an acceptance of scarcity, an equanimity that does not deny the real hardships involved, but also honours the spiritual goods made possible by material simplicity of life. The testimony to simplicity will not consist of a different material standard of living to others, but an alternative perspective, which embraces material simplicity as an opportunity to pursue the true goals of the 'good life' – community, spiritual practice, useful work, and action for justice and peace.

Other Quaker traditions and practices will also offer powerful resources for negotiating the transition to a low-energy society. Any period of rapid social change involves drastic and unforeseen changes in ways of life, and a re-evaluation of expectations and values. For many people, this is likely to be deeply traumatic, as our culture has provided few resources for this kind of fundamental reflection. The Quaker tradition of discernment can offer some powerful and well-tested practices which support new ways of seeing and personal and communal transformation.

Communal discernment in the Meeting for Worship for Business, Meeting for Clearness and Threshing Meetings provide the Quaker community with powerful tools for negotiating change and conflict, which may become increasingly important to Quakers and others experiencing disorientating personal and social change.

Times of social upheaval tend to cause many people to seek new 'certainties', which appear to offer a source of assurance and stability. For this reason we may expect a growth in dogmatic religious and political groups. But many whose world views and personal expectations have been overturned by 'energy descent' will be stimulated to ask new questions, and seeking support in their process of reflection and questioning rather than a pre-packaged set of 'answers'. For them, Quaker Meetings will have some rich resources to offer.

The 'Transition Quakerism' that emerges in response to the needs of a society in energy descent will also need to place a much greater emphasis on the formation of our children and young people. One of the consequences of rapid and largely unforeseen social change is that young people will be coming to adulthood in a society for which their formal education has left them largely unequipped. The current education system reflects the perceived economic needs and social priorities of a high-technology, service-orientated economy. Few of the skills and aptitudes that will be essential to an energy-constrained society such as food production, small-scale manufacture, or maintenance and repair skills, currently receive much emphasis in the school curriculum.

As Quaker communities struggle to support young people through social changes, we may also be challenged to think more deeply about the other skills, practices and traditions that will help them and the wider society through the process of energy descent. In recent decades all aspects of the education of young people have increasingly been delegated to the school system. As we re-examine the usefulness of State-designed curricula for our young people, we may also recognise that fundamental intellectual, social and spiritual needs have often been neglected by the education system. Quaker families and communities may begin to take a greater responsibility for meeting some of these needs, by sharing and teaching conflict resolution skills, centering practices, group facilitation and decision-making, nonviolent direct action, ecological understanding and our Quaker religious tradition.

The challenges of a society in energy-descent may also highlight a new contemporary significance for many of the Quaker testimonies. Some of the potential social consequences of falling living standards include the scapegoating of migrants and minorities, fuelled by anger and resentment over competition for increasingly scarce resources. As climate change puts increasing pressure on food and water resources in climate-sensitive areas of poor countries there is also a likelihood of large-scale forced migration and civil and regional military conflict, leading to growing numbers of refugees seeking sanctuary in relatively ‘stable’ countries in the developed world such as the UK.
As the government attempts to respond to these challenges by taking a greater role in the management of the economy and society there is also greater potential for abuse of State power, corruption and militarism.

All of these challenges will highlight the urgent significance of Quaker testimonies to peace, equality and integrity. We will need to renew our commitment to becoming communities of mutual support in responding faithfully to the leadings of God, in peacebuilding, reconciliation, and speaking Truth to power, as this becomes more urgent and costly than ever. Quakerism may once again be led to become a subversive force within British society – offering refuge to persecuted minorities and publicly challenging scapegoating, violence and propaganda.

As our society gradually learns to adapt to the new era of energy descent it will create new patterns of economic, social and political life that reflect the reality of diminishing energy availability. In the long term, any society must be able to function within its ecological and resource constraints if it is to survive. Our current 'industrial growth' civilisation has failed to do this, has encountered its ecological limits and is beginning the 'long descent' towards a much lower energy and resource-intensive society.

No one can know what the new society that emerges at the end of this process will look like. It may well develop by exploiting another non-renewable energy resource (starting from the much-reduced options left to it by our society), until it passes a depletion threshold and enters a further decline. In the long term, if a sustainable civilisation is ever to emerge it will need to develop a culture that recognises objective limits to levels of production, consumption and waste. In rejecting the goal of endless economic growth, a sustainable society will need to find other goals for human life, not dependent on material 'progress'. Quakerism has much to contribute to this new civilisation, as do other religious traditions that embody understandings of authentic spiritual goods of human life.

As our society enters its long energy descent, Quaker Meetings may come to provide both a refuge for people struggling to adapt to changing social realities, and also a midwife for a gradually emerging culture. British Quakerism could offer long-tested practices of communal support and discernment, and insights into spiritual values for human life that do not rely on material growth. Quakers, in partnership with communities of other faiths and traditions, may help to weave part of the fabric of a new, sustainable civilisation.