Category Archives: Britain Yearly Meeting

Hello all those British Quaker bloggers out there!

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I’ve been talking to Jeremiah and Robin about what other British Quaker blogs exist and Robin suggested that I do a list. So, as a kind of addendum to Martin’s list, here goes.

Martin mentions Simon’s Under the Green Hill and Jez of The Friend‘s Quaker Street. I have a few more favourites including Jeremiah’s Fire in the Bones , Heather’s Still Life and Daniel’s Sitting Down for Something.

More blogs I have just found, added to my Bloglines subscriptions [thanks for the tip Robin!] and am enjoying are A Tentative Quaker, Mister JTA’s Electric Quaker II, Ray’s Quaker-Buddhist Dharmakara’s Prayer, Laura’s Silentblog and M. Willis Monroe.

As Jeremiah notes quite a few British Quaker Meetings have blogs although most use them more as a kind of newsletter than in a personal, reflective way. Two exceptions to this rule which both have several contributors writing thoughtful and often challenging posts are Beeston Quakers and Sheffield Quakers.

So who have I missed? If you are a British Quaker and have a blog of any kind or if you would not give yourself the BQ label but still blog about British Quakerism or Quakers in general I would love to get in touch. Are there more of us out there and if not why not I wonder. Over to you!

Failing to turn inside out?

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Once upon a time, well in 1994 actually, I set out on a journey round Britain Yearly Meeting as a Joseph Rowntree Fellow with a project called ‘What canst thou say?’ I was trying to reintroduce Friends and others to the tradition of spiritual autobiography, not just as an historical exercise but as a way of sharing our different spiritual journeys with one another.

Eventually I wrote a book about the fellowship called Turning inside out, a title that expressed what for me seemed the most important part of the exercise. I was trying to encourage Friends to look inside themselves and think about their spiritual journey, then to write about it and eventually to turn the inside out and share that spiritual autobiography with others in whatever way and at whatever time seemed right for them. I also stressed that it was equally important to listen to others’ stories even if they were very different from our own.

When I started out I was reacting to what I saw as a sense of isolation among British Friends and a lack of opportunity to share our spiritual journeys with one another. More than one person told me that the only time they were given such an opportunity was when they were visited after they applied for membership!

I continued giving the workshops for nearly ten years after the fellowship ended but although what I had to say was generally well received I ended with a sense of failure. It seemed to me that people were happy with the first steps, looking at their spiritual autobiography and even writing it for themselves, but that turning inside out and sharing it with others, as well as listening to others’ different experience was much more difficult.

Certainly over the years the practice of spiritual autobiography has become much more widespread, particularly in America and through blogging, but I still feel that there is a problem with British Friends. Perhaps we really are more reserved and uncomfortable with personal disclosure. Perhaps it is tied up with our increasing individualism and the idea that anything goes. If we are not looking for a way to draw together and discern a way forward as a group, if we are only looking for other like-minded people to feel comfortable with, then we do not have to acknowledge our differences and can dismiss the ‘other’.

When I came across the convergent conversation in the blogosphere I felt an excitement and hope that I had not felt for some time. I thought that what I had tried to do before had failed but that now perhaps what I need to do is to ask the questions of British Friends again, to encourage them to make connections in love with the ‘difficult’ people and beliefs in their own yearly meeting and in the rest of the Quaker world.

British Quakers and convergence

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Reading Robin’s blog started me thinking about where British Quakers stand in relation to the convergent conversation. These are just a few introductory thoughts and I intend to write a bit more about my own ‘convergent’ experience later.

From where we are the whole idea can seem very distant from our day to day reality. After all in our country we do not have different Yearly Meetings with different traditions and so do not need to make an effort to talk to any traditions outside our own – do we? It is all too easy to think that 21st century British Liberal Quakerism is the only way to be a ‘real’ Quaker.

We forget – or more often we never learn – that while American Quakerism in the 19th century reacted to the different claims of Hicksite, Liberal and Evangelical views by splitting into different groups with different traditions, we in Britain changed from one orthodoxy to another. While retaining the unprogrammed tradition of worship, in the 19th and early 20th centuries British Quakerism was Evangelical. The increasingly Liberal Quakerism which we inhabit now took over as the new orthodoxy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

So what does our history have to do with where we are now and does any of it matter? I think it matters a great deal because if we look around us and see only like-minded people then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to listen to other Quakers ‘out there’ who do not agree with us. There is an assumption that we are true Quakers and other yearly meetings who do not share our traditions are somehow second-class. Our very liberalness can make us narrow minded and even make it hard for Friends within our own yearly meeting who want to express their faith through Christian language to do so for fear of hurting others.

I know that it is not always easy to hear strongly-held beliefs that differ from our own. I am not saying that we should not disagree but that we should make an effort to hear ‘where the words come from’. British Friends need to be part of the convergent conversation because in this way we can listen to the voices of other Quakers from different traditions outside our own country and our own comfort zone. We can speak about what Quakerism means to us but also hear the true Quaker faith expressed in other ways. We must not isolate ourselves but try to share the hope that is in us all.