(photo - me with the statue of William Penn in Bristol)

I am a youngish Quaker living in London, UK. This blog contains my thoughts about Quaker issues, events and Testimonies and my experiences of them all. Feel free to comment/email/ping me.

Content Warning:: I do Rant occasionally!

*Holds workplace colleagues in the light today*

At this time of year I like to go off somewhere quiet on my own for a few days and so spent the weekend in a little hermitage just outside of London.

The research report I wrote for work got a great write-up in last week's issue of The Friend.

Quakers on the news on Radio 4 again this morning. A rather nice interview with folks at Scott-Bader about working according to Quaker values.
Broadcasting House

Yesterday I made a one-day visit to the Young Friends General Meeting weekend in Brighton. Soon after arriving I wished I'd spent the whole weekend there. Sixty young adult Friends from around the country played games, had business meetings, made nominations, did a 350 demo on the beach, cooked and ate. For the first time there was a special Dinner Extravaganza with fancy dress, and three courses including canapes that meant lots of circulating & chatting. I think for the first time we may have had a YFGM that didn't leave newcomers feeling put off by cliqueyness. The food was good as well.  It's been 10 years since my first ever YFGM, which was at Croydon and which I enjoyed v. much. It's probably time for me to stop going, but there is talk of other Young Friends events in the future so hopefully the socialising will continue.

It's time to move house because we badly need a garden for the dog and I feel we've been here long enough. At the same time I'm looking for a new home I'm also looking for a new job.

Deptford and Blackheath are villages in Southeast London separated by about 2 miles. Working class Deptford has six bookmakers in its High Street, up from two such shops just three years ago. One of these is conveniently next door to a pawn shop. Upper class Blackheath has a very small village centre and ten estate agents. Britain's economy in 2009.

Attended a Good Lives weekend at Woodbrooke last week

Booked an Ecovillage Experience Week at Findhorn - my first ever visit there in June 2010.

This month will be the 10-year anniversary of my first ever Quaker Meeting. It was a beautiful summer day and I bicycled up the hill from New Cross in Southeast London and across Blackheath to what turned out to be a surprising 1970s building made of concrete that looked like a space ship. The meeting room was very plain but let in natural light and was a good size. I liked the Quakers and the Meeting for Worship was perfect.  I knew I would be back. I was certain enough that Quakers were for me that I soon knew I would stick around permanently. One year seemed a sensible time to wait to apply for membership and I've now been a member for over 8.5 years. Today I was doorkeeper at Blackheath Meeting and it felt like very little time had passed. Later it was our annual picnic in Greenwich Park and I brought along my dog for the first time. I suppose this was her welcoming into the meeting.

We had terrific ministry today. A Friend read the whole Epistle from YM. Another Friend spoke about her feelings about same sex marriage changing over the course of YM. Another Friend reflected on how spiritually important the ministry so far had been to him.

When I switched on Radio 4 this morning I was surprised to hear Quakers mentioned in the news. The announcer at the top of the hour provided a very well-written summary of what is happening today at BYM and even mentioning our 'consensus' decision-making. I later listened to Colin Billett's interview on the Today programme which was very well done indeed. I assume he did it as an individual rather than an official representative of anything, although the link from the media page at the BYM website blurs this rather. I thought the coverage was fantastic outreach due to the content of CB's statement and the things said by the broadcasters. I also believe it wasn't in the spirit of our business method and unfair to the Clerks whether or not they were aware of the coverage. I don't mind it terribly, but it should have been clear that the Friend was speaking in a personal capacity on the radio.

I've never felt particularly passionate about marriage, gay or otherwise, but with the tweets that have gone off in the past hour announcing the hoped for result, this is a wonderful day to be a Quaker. I wish I were in York myself to share it all. It's interesting that British Friends are doing something that has clear repercussions outside of the Society. That doesn't happen so often as it used to, and I hope it is the first of many such actions.

I see that Quaker.org.uk has been redesigned in time for Yearly Meeting. I like the fact that it's less cluttered and has a picture of humans on the home page.

A message from Jez Smith of The Friend...

( Read more... )

Couldn't get to the Meeting in Trafalgar Square today, so instead I logged onto the Online Meeting for Worship and  also watched the live stream of the plinth. After days of pouring rain, the plinthers got warm, sunny weather. Peter Davies was ace with his Welsh which made the whole thing more Quakerly somehow. Peter was dressed a bit Plain and from certain angles the microphone strap even looked like braces. It wasn't until the cameras showed a long view with Plain Peter up high and all the Friends below that I realised this was a reenactment of Fox's Pulpit. Then Peter gave George Fox's 'patterns and examples' ministry and it was all rather perfect. Later on, the cameras showed a shadow on the pavement that looked just like that poster with Fox's sillhouette that came out for the 350th anniversary. 

It was a very good turnout as well, with far more Friends present than I've ever seen at a weekly meeting for worship. Good to see some banners & posters as well, and some very nice close ups of them, so it seems the broadcasters don't mind assisting our outreach.

The plinth was always clearly the perfect - ahem - platform for Friends and I expect a few went in for it. I hope more get through as well. I've watched the plinth a few times over the past week, and often people look a bit off-guard up there as if they hadn't expected to have nothing to do but walk & look around and have the odd superficial phone call or chat with a drunken passer-by. After seeing that, it's pretty awesome to see someone deliberately standing and waiting and being in the moment and being supported by dozens of people sharing and doing the same.

Meanwhile in the Online MfW, this morning's ministry was also about 'patterns and examples':

advices from the elders at balby (1656), advice number 14: "That if any be called to serve the Commonwealth in any public service which is for the public wealth and good, that with cheerfulness it be undertaken and in faithfulness discharged unto God, that therein patterns and examples in the thing that is righteous yet may be to those that are without."

That's an apt one for my current job-hunting state.

Monday from 5 to 6 some Friends from Wales will be on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square: http://www.oneandother.co.uk/  so if I can get off from work early I'll be getting up there to join the worship. I see from the live stream that the current dude is getting poured on though we've not had rain here in Deptford since this afternoon. After Westminster Meeting on Wednesday I went down the road to have a look in person and a woman was doing tai chi. My favourite person so far was a dude from Bristol reading 1001 Arabian Nights aloud. Nothing about the project so far has inspired me, but it's all part of the general excitement of living in wonderful London. Pity it's coincided with some of the wettest days I've ever experienced here.

Also at Westminster I gave soundings that were probably not wanted about the darkness of that meeting room - by far the darkest I've ever been in. I've been told that some Friends think there should be less light in that room WTF. I gather the room has 1000 watts going. Pity most of that is wasted by covering up the bulbs so that only a bit of light is cast onto the ceiling. It is the strangest, most impractical lighting system I've ever seen. I doubt anything will be done about it. Maybe I can start a parallel meeting in the library for people who aren't into the gothic.

Just booked onto a course at Woodbrooke that has come highly recommended: http://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/courses.php?action=course&id=4305
I try to get to Woodbrooke once a year, and Autumn is a terrific time to go because they'll be serving up all the yummy root veg at mealtimes.

Last month I visited New York City and saw this advert:

 

Here is my delayed report on February's Meeting for Sufferings, which I believe is my penultimate meeting since my 3 years is up in May. Having only just resubscribed to The Friend, I'm only vaguely aware that at the time a shitestorm was going on about Christocentric vs. Atheist/Universalist/Other or something. Not sure if this was related to the discussion Sufferings was having about the BYM submission to the World Council of Churches on the 'Nature and Mission of the Church'.

It seems that the WCC asks all it's participants* to send similar reports about once a decade. Whether the WCC ever contributes anything to BYM or the world that would justify the trouble it puts us to was never explained. In this case, the Committee for Christian & Interfaith Relations took on the task of drafting this document and clearly worked extremely hard on it. The Nature & Mission report had to follow a strict template that involved some very high church jargon in Greek. The fact that this language didn't speak to our condition seemed to very much bother some Friends, but I found it interesting as well as challenging to get my head around. Having said that though, the CCIR responses to the WCC questions were disingenuous at best. They simply and blatantly did not reflect the actual experience of Quakerism in Britain in 2009.

I felt resentment that the authors clearly had some agenda and persisted with it even after Sufferings asked for a redraft. At the February meeting, we had to make a decision on the report one way or another. The discussion on the redraft was fraught. At one point, we were about to send the report to the WCC without actually endorsing it, which I think made us all feel rather dirty so over an extended period we swung right back to accepting the thing in spite of it giving a picture of British Quakers that we knew to be false. It was all pretty unpleasant.

Ultimately of course, it was also irrelevant since no one in BYM will see the report ever again at least until 100 years from now or whenever the WCC asks us to do an updated one. A couple of folks at Sufferings in the know told me that our response could help other churches with their constitutional problems and will also somehow filter down through local Churches Together work. I can imagine if a member of another church said to me, 'I found your WCC response so helpful when my parish was debating women priests' or something, the most I would want to  say is, 'oh, that's nice'.

Actually, I doubt we are the only WCC participant who had these kinds of problems stating what we believe in that context, and another Sufferings member told me that the WCC knows the truth about BYM anyway - that we are pretty universalist these days and the other folks at the Geneva meetings don't mind and accept us that way. I don't know whether that makes our endorsement of the report better or worse.

* Britain Yearly Meeting isn't a 'member' of the WCC because we don't do creeds, but we are involved through our involvement of Churches Together in Britain & Ireland.

Next weekend's Sufferings looks pretty interesting since we'll be talking about what Quakers are up to around the world and about how BYM is being affected by the recession.

After that, it's my 3 years up on Sufferings on behalf of Young Friends General Meeting. Best of luck to my successor who I'm told will stir things up a bit.

With all those Saturdays I'll have free now, there is the question of will I put that back into Quaker work, spend more time with my dog or make some other contribution to the world? I've been increasingly involved in workers rights stuff, having joined the Wobblies and got involved in Solfed. What with the recession, this sort of thing could keep me rather busy.

I was online this morning subscribing to The Friend online edition when what arrives to my inbox but an emial from the BNP.  I have never before received spam from a political party and rarely receive spam at all so this was suspicious for a start. The content of the email was clearly tailored to a Christian audience, and I have never subscribed to a Christian email list or online forum. I have to conclude that the BNP has got hold of a Quaker email list.

In other news, I didn't see any Quaker banners on yesterday's Put People First march in London. Maybe they were towards the front so I didn't spot them. It seemed to me there was a general lack of social justice organisations beyond unions on the march, and I had expected it to be rather more broad based. I was in the militant workers bloc most of the day. It was a great day out with lots of wit & creativity on show.

The book group that meets in the basement of Westminster meeting house has had our first weekend away in Osmotherley meeting house which is also self catering accommodation. There were walks, games, crossword puzzles around the fire, meeting for worship around the fire, food, pubs and reading aloud. It was pretty brill and I made a video showing how cosy the place is. I imagine the place is under a foot of snow today.

Most of the journey home was spent not just reading my papers for Meeting for Sufferings but specifically reading the controversial paper we're meant to send to the World Council of Churches. I hope it's worth all the fuss. I'm learning ever so much Greek from this thing.

So we're the USA's 'most useful religious minority'.

So last night I booked an Easter trip to visit my family and this morning I found out that means I'll miss the bloody European and Middle East Young Friends gathering in Damascus. It was my idea to go to Damascus in the first place as well. I had a feeling there was something I was forgetting about around that time of year. So damn.

I learned this news from YQ magazine which came in a double bundle including the very late October issue. November included a big article reviewing YFGM. That's something I'd like to see after every YFGM. Perhaps I should write it myself in Feb.

In other Quaker news, last night I presented the 3rd Sunday activity at Peckham Meeting on The Examen which I learned exactly a year ago at Woodbrooke.