Friends

Moya and friends outside our house at Hlekweni Friends Training Centre in Zimbabwe.

The Rule Of The House

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 lose everything.

Richard Sennett:Together

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

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

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

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

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.