Part Three

Do we seek to be the channels of God’s love and caring? Caring matters most.

Edward H. Milligan

Deeds not Words

There is a big question often asked by people enquiring about Quakers. It comes in subtly different forms and in my experience is frequently accompanied by a twinge of nervousness and expectancy. Do Quakers believe in life after death? Do they believe we’ll be reunited with our loved ones? What is their view of heaven and hell? How about the resurrection?

These are vivid, urgent dilemmas for many of us. I have been asked about them so often and so earnestly that it would be wrong to write a book about the Quaker faith without addressing them directly. Yet, if you’ve read up to this point, you already know the only answer anyone can give: it depends on the individual. Quakers don’t hand down creeds, so they are happy to discover their own views and beliefs about such matters. And, since Quakerism is an experiential faith, most are content to wait patiently until they are able to find out for themselves. As you might expect, the process may be helped by regular attendance at Quaker meetings.

Some of the questioners are disappointed, because it is not the response they were expecting. Maybe they already hold a belief in life after death. Perhaps they want to hear it confirmed as a corporate Quaker view. I am sometimes surprised by that impulse, as if knowing that a lot of people are united in an idea would somehow confirm it as the one to have. But actually, this matter of eternal life is one about which Quakers as a body have nothing to say. While many of them faithfully believe – and some know with certainty – that there is something after death, others prefer not to let it worry them. The important thing is not to permit ‘groupthink’ either to dictate matters of private faith or deny personal experience. Quakers do not believe what they are told.

There are other issues about which people have anxious questions. Some are about Jesus. Did he ascend into heaven? Did he perform miracles? Did he die to save us from our sins? Others explore the most pressing religious uncertainties of all. How can God allow people to suffer? Where was the Divine in the tsunami? In these dilemmas, it is important to be clear that, while it might be possible to hazard an educated guess at a majority response from Quakers in Britain, it would not be helpful. It was William Penn who wrote, ‘Speculative truths are … to be sparingly and tenderly declared, and never to be made the measure and condition of Christian communion.’ Quakers still agree with that: they avoid speculation, conjecture and guesswork in their religious lives. Many of them read extensively – modern biblical scholarship is a feature of the lives of a great number of Quakers – but they use experience and worship as their most reliable guides. George Fox put it succinctly: ‘Every man, every woman then must come to the spirit of God in their own selves’.

Quakers are sometimes criticised for not having a clear theology. It is, by and large, a justified complaint. How could it be otherwise? They are also accused of being a pick-and-mix denomination, of allowing each person to create their own belief system by window-shopping their way around the world’s religions, choosing an idea here and a doctrine there. That seems to me to be mistaken. Quakers have evolved a religious discipline over three and a half centuries, basing their corporate witness on the Inner Light within each individual. And they have evolved a number of shared testimonies – witness statements, in other words – which help them as they put their faith into action. That – the doing as opposed to the saying – is what Part Three is about. And to set it in context, I am going to return briefly to Quaker worship and one or two more frequently asked questions.

Stained Glass Windows and Inner Light

Here are some more comments I have heard from first time visitors to Quaker meetings: Silence is helpful, but I miss the hymns and church music. Why don’t you have decoration or stained glass? And why no communal prayer? What’s wrong with preparing what you’re going to say? Wouldn’t it be good to listen to a sermon once in a while?

Having acknowledged a few lines ago that Quakers don’t have much in the way of theology, I am going to try to address those questions by invoking just a little now. Because, while Quakers have no corporate statement of belief, they are none the less united, all of them, in one great truth: that the human spirit gains resilience, courage and power as a result of direct communion with the spirit of the Divine. It is the experience of Quakers that strength and grace come from guidance which is given when they live in single-minded contact with the force for good that many call God.

‘Strength’ is not a word commonly used in books on religion. Most faiths tend to concentrate on human weakness. Some of them believe that we are all innately guilty and emphasise our need to counter our ungodliness by living blameless lives. Everything possible must be done to avoid eternal punishment. For hundreds of years, churches have done all they can to provide resources to help people struggle against what they see as this natural fragility. They have constructed stunning buildings with glowing windows and gorgeous, vaulted ceilings to create an atmosphere of hushed devotion; commissioned music of soaring brilliance to inspire and comfort their congregations; provided teachers of wisdom and enlightenment to minister to them; created rituals that enable people to worship God in an atmosphere of safety and reverence. All this has been offered in a spirit of open-heartedness in order to support human beings in their frailty. It is a loving gift and I am not disparaging it, but it is not the Quaker way.

Quakers do not deny human weakness, but their tendency is instead to give thanks for human strength. They believe in the essential goodness of people, so they deny the notion that we are by nature ‘miserable sinners’ and reject the habits and customs that go with it. While they appreciate the contribution to civilisation of religious art and culture, they know from experience that those kinds of aid may prove to be a barrier for them if they are used as part of their worship. They do not want religious ritual, symbol or costume to get in the way of their unmediated communion with the Divine. It is in that relationship that they find their energy and spirit. They are not so much staring into the darkness, as standing in the Light.

Quakers do not proclaim what Christian churches call the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – but they talk often, and perhaps a little too vaguely, of ‘living in the Spirit’ and of being ‘led by the Spirit’. So let us explore a little of what they may mean. The theologian H.A. Williams, not a Quaker, put it like this:

The Spirit is ourselves in the depths of who we are. It is me at the profoundest level of my being, the level at which I can no longer distinguish between what is myself and what is greater than me … The Spirit is called God in me.

Responding to the Spirit means opening myself up to possibility, allowing myself to be led, not deciding for myself. To do that, I have to trust that things will be well. That kind of faith only comes from experience: it can be scary not to plan my life. But slowly I learn to notice them, the thoughts that land in my head unbidden, the sudden impulses to do something unexpected. It may be a request from another person or a scheme of my own, but its clearest characteristic is that when it enters my mind I don’t want it there at all. It is the opposite of what I fancy to be my next move. Then gradually, over days or weeks, I realise that what I fancy has nothing to do with it. I’ll go along with the idea because of the way it came to me. I’ll pursue it because it is there. And so I say yes to a fresh course of action because it seems to have come from inside my head and outside it at the same time. Then it works. It becomes part of me and I learn to love it.

Is this what is often called ‘vocation’? Perhaps. Though in the context of this openness to the Spirit I might choose to pluralise the word – somehow the singular fails to hit the spot in describing something that is frequently not a great passion or a grand career. So, plural it is for me: I have come to think of my day-to-day existence as a constant clustering of tiny vocations. And as they continue to multiply like cells under a microscope, they form a life in which my initial bouts of reluctance and fear get swept away in the sheer exuberance of knowing that so much suddenly fits.

Here is Gordon Matthews, a present-day Quaker, quoted in Quaker faith and practice (and himself quoting Thomas R. Kelly in the first sentence):

How can we walk with a smile into the dark? We must learn to put our trust in God and the leadings of the Spirit. How many of us are truly led by the Spirit throughout our daily lives? I have turned to God when I have had a difficult decision to make or when I have sought strength to endure the pain in dark times. But I am only slowly learning to dwell in the place where leadings come from. That is a place of love and joy and peace, even in the midst of pain. The more I dwell in that place, the easier it is to smile, because I am no longer afraid.

You may remember from Part One that Advices and queries suggests that we should listen to ‘the promptings of love and truth’ in our hearts and ‘trust them as the leadings of God’. Finding the love and truth, not only in our own hearts but in those of everyone we meet, is at the heart of Quakerism. The Inner Light within each of us, ‘that of God in everyone’ as George Fox put it, is not something to be worshipped, but rather the spirit that allows people to accomplish things they would never have thought possible. That spirit is found not only in the stillness of worship, but also in a way of life often called – and not just by Quakers – ‘living in the Presence’. It can be actively sought, this sense of direction. It can also arrive involuntarily. But by whatever means it comes, it is unmistakeable and gives us the strength to do what we least expected.

Faith in Action 1

You may have begun to get the feeling that everything in the lives of Quakers is inseparable from its spiritual roots. If so, you are right. This is a faith in which the religious and the everyday are identical, indivisible and without distinction.

People who try to answer that of God in everyone find that their lives alter as a result. When I first began to go to meetings, I remember telling a friend that ‘these Quakers have a lot to teach me about being in the world.’ For a while, I worried that I was never going to be able to reach what I saw as ‘their high standards’, but I quickly learnt that, far from trying to give other people a lot to learn or live up to, what Quakers actually do is pretty simple. They go to their meetings, listen to the message of Quakerism and spend the rest of their time putting it into practice as well as they can. At home, in the street, in the workplace, they are seeking to answer the Inner Light in others. They are looking on their fellow human beings as unique and precious. That does have to mean everybody, of course: not only family members and work colleagues, but also the ones in their lives they may not instantly warm to – the authority figures, the arguers, the critics, naggers and brutes. They don’t achieve anything like perfection – no one can and Quakers mess up just as much as anybody else – so it’s by no means easy. But it is simple. And it changes everything.

In my own case, I noticed that I was involuntarily, often despite myself, beginning to listen to the points of view of others. That, I’m sad to say, came as a shock. I have a tendency to be dismissive of people I don’t agree with: I can be intolerant and judgemental. It is not a helpful trait, to me or anyone else. Yet here I was, warming to opinions that were different from my own. I found myself weighing them, considering them, not discounting them so readily. It made my life easier. Another change, related to it, was that I could look at my own shortcomings with considerably less shame and more of a smile. ‘There I go,’ I would think, ‘being narrow-minded again.’ And so my attitudes to my own behaviour were changing at the same time that I was acquiring more welcoming ways with other people. I wasn’t being so hard on myself. Life started to become more of a pleasure.

An inevitable consequence of being more open-hearted was that I began to see that I was sometimes in a position to help other people. That may come as a surprise if you recognise yourself as someone who has always given generously to your fellows. But again, I wasn’t. So I sometimes startled myself with, say, an urge to talk to a homeless person shivering in a doorway, or a sudden inclination to help with a community project, or an itch to give money that I wasn’t being asked for. It was basic stuff, nothing to get worked up about, but it was a change. Quakers are known to call the fruits of this impulse ‘faith in action’. It is a grandiose term for the feelings I was experiencing, but I have used it as the heading for this section because I hope it will at least serve to show that what Quakers do to ‘mend the world’ is frequently not ground-breaking or heroic. Nor is it necessarily a response to an appeal. And it certainly is not compulsory. It bubbles up unbidden from the inner core of people. They follow their noses. They do what they want to do. Seen in this light, living in the Spirit can be seen as no more than a logical consequence of taking other people seriously.

I have asked three friends to share a little of their experience:

I began worshipping with Quakers nearly three years ago. Week by week I’ve sat with Friends in silence, and this has gradually changed me. At times in the stillness I have felt the outward preoccupations of life dissolve into a state of simplicity where I glimpse a truth that is far greater than me. The preoccupations crowd around again, of course, but I retain a sense of truth at the centre and I am happy to talk about it to anyone who is interested – not to convert anyone but to open opportunities for others to explore their own experience of truth, or of the Spirit. I never spoke about my spiritual experience during thirty years as an Anglican. I had neither the clarity nor the strength that has come through the stillness.

I think religion occupies the ground where art, mental health and ethics overlap. Its particular contribution to ethics is extreme idealism—the idea that it could be worthwhile for a human being to give up their very lives, or at least their popularity, in support of something important. I haven’t been called on to be a conscientious objector, but my Quaker grandparents were, and my Quaker father and aunt were, as also was my atheist mother. It is that background, coupled with hours in Meeting for Worship, that has me always thinking, ‘Could I be doing better? Could we be doing better?’ If there is one thing I feel clear about now it is the need for more manifest respect for everyone.

You might expect me to say that first I became a Quaker, then I learnt more about Quaker beliefs and principles, and then I tried to live them out. But it wasn’t like that. I’ve always felt the need to try to care for others and give everyone respect – but not always been very good at it. It’s more that I became a Quaker so that I could be part of a group that takes its beliefs and their practical implications seriously. My own attempts at treating people with equal respect at work didn’t always seem to ‘work’ immediately, but having become a Quaker I felt supported in keeping at it. If I try to ‘answer’ what is good and true in another person, hopefully it will bring those qualities out. Even if it doesn’t seem to work, this is how I should live. My faith is that it is worthwhile.

The last friend’s idea that ‘even if it doesn’t seem to work, this is how I should live’ is an eloquent description of the day-to-day existence of many Quakers. No one should expect perfection in themselves. In fact, I have never yet met a Quaker who has ever tried to be virtuous: they prefer simply to do what they can, knowing that feelings of shame and self-regard, of not ever being quite good enough, are out of place in a life lived in the Spirit.

Feelings of frustration and anger, on the other hand, are entirely appropriate when the ways of the world make it difficult to pursue such a life. For example, it is impossible to live truthfully if your employer expects you routinely to lie to customers as part of your job. Equally, you are going to have a hard time if you are asked to discriminate among people on grounds of age, or if you work for a company with money invested in the arms trade. You can’t surrender moral responsibility for your actions because another person or agency has asked you to. They are yours. You must own them and be accountable for them. So Quakers have a long history of saying no to familiar behaviours that some of their neighbours might regard as everyday essentials.

A mindset of constant refusal, however, can make for a negative attitude. So Quakers declare clearly to each other and to the world those things that they choose to say yes to: the values to which their lives bear witness. These are the Quaker testimonies, and they are what the next few sections are about.

Testimonies

Let us return briefly to the Quakers of the 1650s. Testimony began early in their history. There were behaviours and customs in society about which they needed to be assertive. An important one, as we saw in Part Two, was the bowing and curtseying and scraping and hat-doffing, known as ‘hat honour’, that was a permanent feature of life in the mid-seventeenth century. It felt distasteful to the equality-minded Friends of Truth. Not only that, they considered it an offence against their religion because it came between them and their belief in ‘the invisible power of God in everyone’. So they came up with a testimony, or corporate witness statement, in which they made it clear through their actions rather than a written declaration that, unless they were praying, they would keep their heads covered and remain upright.

Another seventeenth century example before I move on to the present: a testimony evolved with its origin in the fact that the days of the week and months of the year were named (they still are, of course) after Roman emperors and pagan gods. So those early Quakers decided to call them ‘First day’, ‘First month’ and so on, because, as Christians, it mattered to them that they should not be evoking heathen icons when they did something as simple as checking the date. These customs are rarely seen as being of spiritual importance to Quakers any more – though some do still adhere to them – and so the present-day Religious Society of Friends has chosen not to declare them as corporate testimonies that speak for Quakers in Britain.

So why, you will ask, have I begun to write about the testimonies with two examples that don’t apply any more? For exactly that reason: they are no longer in use by Quakers because they have stopped mattering to them. Thus, I hope to have established at the outset that Quaker testimonies should not be confused with creeds. Unlike statements of belief, testimonies slowly emerge as a result of the lives people are already leading. Quakers find themselves walking the same walk as each other, being inspired to take the same actions. With time, that particular walk, those particular actions, are seen to be evidence of a spiritual understanding that they all share. It becomes their witness statement, their testimony: a consequence of their convictions, not a starting point for them.

These days, testimonies tend to be broader in scope and, on the surface at least, less specific than some of those of the seventeenth century. British Quakers have, for many years, proclaimed four to the world: they are to truth, equality, simplicity and peace. And there is today emerging a fifth, which has become so intimately a part of Quaker life that it is clearly representative of them all. That is a testimony to sustainability: to the earth, to the environment and to the ways in which we all care for it. This issue is, as I mentioned in the Prologue, one of religious as well as practical significance to Quakers; and so, while it may not appear on every list of testimonies, I feel it is right to include it here as a crucial witness statement to the evolving beliefs and actions of Quakers in the twenty-first century.

These testimonies are ‘umbrellas’: they cover large numbers of interconnected actions and detailed concerns. Each is of vital importance to many individual Quakers, but not necessarily to them all. So, the testimony to peace, for example, speaks about the minutiae of our everyday behaviour just as much as it touches the war-like ambitions of national governments. And the testimony to equality covers hundreds of initiatives: from same sex marriage to fair trade; from problems faced by women in prison to ethical investment.

It is an easy mistake – I know, because I’ve made it – to believe that something as central as, say, the Quaker peace testimony is a foundation stone of the faith. It may well be non-negotiable in the lives of some Quakers – it has turned out to be a determining factor in my own – but that doesn’t mean that things have to be the same for everybody. Quakers do not impose their testimonies on anyone. Each is a pinch on the individual conscience, a religious imperative for each person, a response to what they consider, as a woodworker might say, to be ‘out of true’.

That word ‘religious’ is vital in all this. I often hear non-Quakers express surprise that the Religious Society of Friends is not a secular group (missing the clue in the title) because they associate it with peace and philanthropy and assume that’s all there is to it. It really isn’t. Quakers may be members of peace organisations, they may join colleagues in the fight for equal pay, work with their neighbours in initiatives to recycle waste – and they do – but their motives for declaring commitment to the Quaker testimonies lie deeper than matters of mere principle. They insist, for religious reasons, that their own lives bear witness to truth, equality, simplicity and peace. The testimonies are not just beliefs, they are faith in action. They epitomise those words I quoted in the Prologue: Attend to what love requires of you.

A friend puts the situation well in what I regard as a perfect metaphor:

For me, the testimonies are not some kind of optional extras in my Quaker journey. They grow directly from my experience of a loving, healing, transforming power within and beyond me which I call God. Remember what it feels like when you have a hangnail or a bit of rough skin on your hand and you are asked to handle some delicate material like silk? The rough bit catches on the material – you can’t not be aware of it. For me, testimony is the place in our lives where our experience of God’s love and truth ‘catches’ on the everyday assumptions, frameworks and values of the world around us, demanding our attention and, often, our action. It is the place where God’s kingdom breaks through into ‘the world the way it is’, opening the possibility – and the imperative – for change.

So when Quakers hear people say that religion and politics don’t mix, they smile. For them, religion and politics, religion and peace, religion and truth, religion and equality, religion and simplicity, religion and sustainability are all mutually inclusive. The impulse of Quakers to ‘mend the world’ is a religious one. And if any one of these testimonies begins to speak to you in such a way that you start to take it seriously, to the extent that you see it as a deal breaker, that you even want to base your life around it, you are inevitably well on the way to thinking like a Quaker.

In the next few pages, I shall reflect a little on each of them. It is important to be clear at the outset that Quakers don’t claim any kind of monopoly or exclusivity in these testimonies. They are shared by many other organisations and individuals, religious and not. What makes them work in the lives of Quakers is the blend of them, the acknowledgement of the ways in which they overlap, their affirmation that religion is indistinguishable from everyday life.

Truth

There is an old joke, something of a chestnut, that says a lot about Quakers:

Q: How do Quakers sing hymns?

A: Very slowly, because they’re always reading the next line to see if they agree with it or not.

Gerald Priestland wrote in his excellent little book Coming Home, ‘One thing you do not have to leave on the pegs in the Meeting House vestibule is your intellectual integrity’. It remains a great feature of Quaker practice that you never, under any circumstances, have to declare, affirm or intone anything that isn’t true for you. Quakers rarely sing hymns, of course, but more to the point, they simply won’t, either singly or in unison, tell any spiritual white lies that begin with ‘I believe’.

As I’m sure you’ve already grasped, ‘truth’ means more to Quakers than not lying. It is a religious term, a way of expressing the principles behind how they behave and what they say yes to. Having said that, however, I can also confirm from my own experience that a decision to stop sidestepping the truth can be a good place to start a Quaker journey. My turnaround happened not long after my first meeting for worship. I’m sure there was a Quaker connection, but I don’t remember anybody suggesting it. I think it was an idea that came to me in the stillness. I resolved to put an end to the fibbing I’d been making a habit of – no great whoppers, just a myriad little fictions and evasions, the kinds of thing, I persuaded myself, that everybody did from time to time. And I managed, more or less, to do it. I stopped. I spoke plainly and tried to do what I said I would. It was hard. It made me feel odd, not quite myself. Then I read a sentence by Thomas Merton from No Man is an Island that helped me to understand my difficulty. He wrote: ‘We make ourselves real by telling the truth’. Yes, that was it. I understood it now. The unfamiliar queasiness was just me feeling real.

The simple stuff, like not embroidering facts and returning money when I had the wrong change, enabled me to take bigger, tougher decisions. I remember the first scary time that I found myself able to question a racist joke that I was told by a stranger: I thought I was going to get hit and felt anything but empowered. But then again, perhaps that in turn enabled me to turn down a lucrative job because its ethics sat awkwardly with me. I became significantly less fearful. And so I began to move into a mindset in which I worried less about reputation. I was able to set aside thoughts of failure, because success had a different meaning.

And even as I write this, I’m thinking, Is that all truthful? I think it is. Have I put a gloss on it? I don’t think I have.

Like all Quakers, I remain an apprentice. It is the learning that matters and I continue to do it. I have discovered that, as with the other Quaker testimonies, truth works at its most potent level when it is combined with love. The plain speaking that is a refreshing feature of Quaker life only works when it’s part of a desire to care for other people. Attend to what love requires of you. It isn’t about one-to-one confrontations or, heaven knows, giving someone else a piece of your mind. It is having an instinct for what to say in a spirit of openness, sympathy and balance: a spirit in which the heart and the head are on the same axis. It is a testimony to truth, not to home truths.

If you want a simple exposition of its essence, you can do no better than to read Advice 17 of Advices and queries). It is a piece of writing I particularly cherish. Like all the Advices and queries, it blends uncomfortable reminders with an abiding message of hope. I’ve personally found it helpful when, as can happen with me, I jump to conclusions or make detailed value judgements on the life of someone I don’t know. Occasionally, it can be a person who just happens to be walking by. When words are strange or disturbing to you, try to sense where they come from and what has nourished the lives of others. Listen patiently and seek the truth which other people’s opinions may contain for you. When I am told the very thing I don’t want to hear, that last sentence gives advice that I need. And if I let my mouth run away with me and win an argument for the sake of it, I can try to remember not to allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue. Then there is the final clincher, eight words that for me epitomise this testimony to truth: Think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Some people describe it as being a testimony to truth and integrity. Advice 37 of Advices and queries encourages Quakers to be honest in all they say and do. In other words, not just to tell the truth, but to behave the truth as well. If I am behaving the truth, I won’t speculate with money, either mine or other people’s, in risky financial ventures. I won’t invest my cash in ways that I know to be unethical. If I also embrace the Quaker testimony to peace, I won’t be investing in any company that is involved with, or benefits from, the manufacture of arms – depending on my ethical stance, that can whittle itself down to a surprisingly small number of organisations. And I won’t kid myself that I’m making ethical investments when I’m not.

I won’t be gambling my money away in the hope of sudden riches, either, since that represents a similar kind of speculation and is the antithesis of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. It may not hurt me financially, depending on my bank balance and my ability to stop, but the dreams it engenders can damage me spiritually and emotionally; Quakers don’t anchor their spiritual or emotional lives in things imagined. Being wrenched from the mindfulness of the present to a mirage in the future is like having a double standard of truth. It doesn’t work for Quakers. As with their refusal to take oaths, what matters to them is to be the same on the inside as on the outside.

They expect just one standard of truth from governments, too, and agitate to get it. It was a Quaker, Milton Mayer in the mid 1950s, who coined the expression ‘speaking truth to power’. Quakers have been talking plainly to rulers and their representatives since 1652 and continue to do so. The Quaker United Nations Offices in New York and Geneva lobby governments and work with them for human rights, economic justice and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Quakers everywhere march and agitate, sometimes taking nonviolent direct action when they perceive that the need arises. Governments are just as capable as individuals, perhaps more so, of behaving in ways that are out of true. Quakers see it as essential to point it out as soon as it happens.

Early Quakers called themselves ‘publishers of Truth’. The word had associations in the 1650s with what we might call ‘reality’ today. (It still survives in that form in some modern expressions – ‘true north’ and ‘true grit’ for instance.) But, as I pointed out in Part Two, they also used it almost synonymously with the word ‘God’. That seems eccentric to us in the twenty-first century, so we are entitled to ask what was going on: was its use some kind of provocative play on words? Not exactly, but I do think that in speaking of Truth and the Divine in the same breath, the pioneer Quakers were making a point. They were saying that they had experienced God as an authentic, creative presence in their lives; that their religion was grounded in reality, not in something fancied or imagined. So I find it helpful to look at the testimony to truth through the lens of that word ‘real’. In the words of the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast: ‘God is a name for a reality that cannot be named’.

If this is a testimony to what is real, it can help me choose some of my courses of action – do they represent reality for me? If not, I should acknowledge the fact and do something about it. The lifelong dream I have of winning a fortune on the horses – is there anything real about it? If not I can save my money. This claim of a government to be helping a nation by bombing it – is there a hint of reality in what they say? If there isn’t, should I lobby and protest? Is my façade of politeness helping me to express what is real? If it’s not, I might need to speak more plainly. These encounters I am having with a power outside myself – what, if anything, is real about them? If they are not imagined, perhaps I should do some serious thinking.

Equality

Quakers say (see Advice 22 of Advices and queries) that ‘each of us is unique, precious, a child of God’. Quakers’ commitment to equality is an essential component of all their testimonies. You can’t have truth, simplicity or peace without it. And, as with those testimonies, this one to equality is infused with love.

But what’s the point, I’ve heard people say, when the world already knows that everybody is equal? We work hard as a society to turn our backs on racism, sexism and ageism. We have equal opportunities legislation. If Quakers are just agreeing with all that, why bother with a collective stance? You might just as well declare a testimony to brushing your teeth.

Quakers go further. Attend to what love requires of you.

Do all believers in equality extend it to people in prison? How many think that in almost every case separating offenders from society and suggesting they suffer some form of degradation is counter-productive? Are they happy for asylum seekers to live next door? Is everyone agreed that gay couples should be able to adopt and bring up children? Should prisoners have the vote? Should sixteen-year-olds? Should children and young people have an active say in the running of schools? Should prostitutes and sex workers be treated the same as the rest of us? Do we regard transgendered people as suitable to undertake important state responsibilities? What do ninety-year-olds have to offer businesses, communities and organisations?

I vividly remember a 2005 television interview with an American second lieutenant in Iraq, who was intelligent, honest and direct in his responses. He was asked, ‘Why do the invading forces call Iraqis “the Haji”? Why don’t you use their right name?’ He replied (I wrote down his answer as it was transmitted), ‘You have to desensitise yourself from them. That’s why we call them “Haji.” If you start thinking about them as human, then my God, how are you going to kill them?’ I found it a disheartening, but also in its way surprisingly refreshing remark. His answer was truthful and clear. How, indeed, can you kill someone if you can imagine their mother, husband, or children? How can you shoot a person if you are able to look into their eyes? How can you murder another human being if you believe they have that of God within them, if you believe that we all possess the Inner Light? It is easier if you give them a name that removes their soul.

We like to treat people who threaten our equilibrium as ‘other’, because it is easier for us to objectify them. And we don’t have to be trying to kill them to do it. As we know, there is always a name for people we regard as stupider, dirtier and less well-dressed than we are. Thirty years ago in Britain, it was ‘gippos’; at the time of writing it is ‘chavs’. We need to ensure that other people are different and laughable. Over the years, the British have become inured to hearing about chinks and wogs, nerds and hooray henrys: as one name becomes unacceptable, another takes its place.

Quakers are not perfect – they have sometimes taken a while to implement much needed change – but they try to reject the stereotypes. Men and women work together and are given the same and equal responsibilities, with no jobs reserved either for them or their gender. They aren’t called ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ or ‘Ms’ – first and second names work fine for Quakers. And children are considered to be valued members of the community in the same way as their parents, doing jobs within the meeting if they wish to. Homosexuals are welcomed unquestioningly. Transgendered people too. Men and women serve their Quaker meetings until they choose to stop and if physical circumstances or old age make things difficult for a person, everything possible is done to help.

I remember being a member of a committee alongside a woman whose valued contribution was threatened when she had a fall and lost a little of her mobility during her eighty-eighth year. The biggest problem was that she found it difficult simply to get to the committee room, because it was up a flight of stairs. Another member offered the ground floor of his house for the meetings, which continued uninterrupted. At the end of her three-year stint on the committee, when she was coming up for ninety, she decided that it was time to lay down her active Quaker work, but she continued to offer the committee’s clerk the fruits of her experience by phone. Age is not a barrier to an active life.

None of this seems odd to Quakers, but it might be considered unusual in some churches and organisations. Christians who have a problem with women or gay people being priests and bishops are inevitably going to find the ways of Quakers distasteful, but then the concept of ‘the priesthood of all believers’ runs so deep in the Religious Society of Friends that debates are likely to founder long before they reach details of gender or orientation. It is in some of their ‘endeavours to mend the world’ – for example, in matters of criminal justice and prison reform – that Quakers are frequently seen to be beyond the pale. They are more interested in healing than retribution, more keen to achieve rehabilitation than punishment and far more concerned to achieve a balanced outcome than a tit-for-tat. If you want to know about the kinds of project that interest Quakers in this field, I suggest that you begin by investigating some of the organisations in which they have had an input – perhaps beginning with Circles of Support and Accountability (www.circles-uk.org.uk), Quakers in Criminal Justice (www.qicj.org) and the Restorative Justice Council (www.restorativejustice.org.uk).

The plight of refugees and asylum seekers is a great concern of Quakers. They simply don’t accept that any single person or group of persons is deserving of less respect than another. So when asylum seekers and failed immigrants are left for years in detention centres, it sparks a reaction in Quakers that won’t be stilled. They work on their behalf, lobbying government, organising petitions, trying to persuade their fellow citizens that everybody is deserving of the same respect: www.qarn.org.uk will tell you more.

The spirit that fires these projects, as well as many more like them, is the same one that energised nineteenth century Quakers in their demands for the end of slavery. And just as their views were considered extreme, so are modern Quakers sometimes thought to be bizarre and unconventional in the inequalities they notice and the work for social justice that ensues. But for Quakers, it is a simple matter of caring for others. If you regard the rest of the world, everybody you meet, as truly equal and if you also see it as a religious matter, based on the light of God being found in every person, you share a Quaker view. If you also find the testimony to truth empowering, you are beginning to discover a duality which lies at the heart of the Quaker faith. Those two testimonies, truth and equality, are the quintessence of it all. From them grow the testimonies to simplicity and peace. Without truth and equality, simplicity is little more than an advertiser’s gimmick. Without truth and equality, peace is just a politician’s promise.

Simplicity

The designer William Morris wrote a sentence that meant so much to Quakers in the early twentieth century that they included it in their generation’s edition of Advices and queries: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’. It no longer appears in current versions, but it still has resonance for Quakers, who tend not to be comfortable with gaudiness and tat, either in clothing, goods or choices of entertainment. Times change and the homespun styles that they sported in the late twentieth century are less in evidence among their younger counterparts in the twenty-first; but a distinct lack of interest in fussy acquisitiveness continues.

While I am dwelling briefly on the topic of design, it may be useful to be clear that Quakers are not Shakers, so none of that old world, functional look so beloved of the furniture industry is attributable to them. Nor are they Amish – a surprisingly common confusion – so suggestions that Quakers are out of touch with their century or reluctant to use electricity are misplaced. They are as connected with contemporary life as anyone else, welcoming of innovation and relaxed with modern technology. There is no rule that says Quakers have to leave the world alone or turn their back on any particular style. These are matters of personal taste and discernment. Quakers make their own choices in every aspect of their lives. And in doing so, they are led in their distinct and individual ways by the testimonies.

All the Quaker testimonies are at some level about the things that block us from God: this one to simplicity is about nothing else. Attend to what love requires of you. It suggests that it is a bad idea to become involved in anything that we know will get in the way of a clear and unmediated relationship with the Divine. It doesn’t make sense to allow a car or a necklace or an enjoyment of luxury (or, for that matter, an altar or a ritual or a piece of stained glass) to damage our ability to see the way forward in our religious lives. For some people, the car or the ritual may ease their path or at least provide no obstacle to it. For others, they form a barrier. So it is about taste and personal choice but, more importantly, it is about listening for the promptings of love and truth in our hearts.

Such promptings have a lot to tell us about the ways in which we decide to spend our money. Many Quakers, unwilling to fork out cash on possessions that they regard as footling and unimportant, prefer instead to direct their earnings towards things they believe to matter more. So, if I am an employer, it could make sense to think about ploughing some of my profits into providing better conditions in the workplace. If I am an employee, it might be preferable not to pursue a lucrative promotion that takes up time I can use effectively elsewhere. If I am an entrepreneur, I might consider using my gifts to work for a charity as well as what I normally do. If I can afford to save money for a pension, it might be sensible to consider early retirement in order to spend time on projects that help others and give me fulfilment.

Quakers challenge the materialism of society. At the same time, they are not afraid to look hard at the way they live themselves, questioning their own needs and trying not to exceed them. This doesn’t mean that they refuse to eat well, take holidays or enjoy themselves. Quakers are not killjoys. But they think carefully about the balance of what they spend on themselves as opposed to others and they tend to avoid extravagance. They remain alert, too, to the artificial creation of new desires by an advertising industry that feeds off people’s reluctance to look reality in the face. Quakers are as fallible as anyone, of course. I know many – I am one – who would like to do better at living within their needs as opposed to their wants. But they do keep trying.

And they query the extent to which a comfortable lifestyle may be achieved at the expense of people who are not able to benefit from the prosperity enjoyed by rich minorities. They are careful not to endorse activities that may harm the environment or hurt other human beings. They often quote a sentence attributed to Gandhi: Live simply in order that others may simply live. And paragraph 41 of Advices and queries adds to it by saying that we, not just ‘others’, are likely to make gains from the change: Try to live simply. A simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength. That, it seems to me, is where the heart of this testimony lies. It isn’t just about whether to sell the car or cancel the fancy holiday. Those may be part of the journey, but they are not the point. This testimony helps us to avoid abandoning our identity. By living simply enough to understand who we are, we gain strength. We are able to concentrate on the things that matter.

In The Man in the Sycamore Tree, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, wrote:

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Quakerism, unlike some religious faiths, doesn’t tell us what to live for. Only we can find that. But in the stillness of its worship – an important aspect of this testimony – we have a holy space in which to explore. I spent a lot of time worrying about simplicity when I first started mixing with Quakers. I felt intimidated. I knew that I had alterations to make in my busy, complex, abstracted life but I didn’t know where to begin. It was through Quaker worship that I began to understand that I didn’t necessarily have to alter the externals first. In fact, it was better for me to work from the inside. I allowed myself slowly to change and felt my priorities shift. I began to see the Quaker testimonies as an invitation to live adventurously. And in doing so, I started to understand what keeps me from ‘living fully for the thing I want to live for’. Now, years later, my life is simpler. It has been an unpredictable and fulfilling aspect of my spiritual journey.

Peace

There are a lot of ways of seeing the peace testimony: a lot of windows, if you like, into the same room. Conflict transformation; the arms industry; nonviolence; peacemaking; the relief of suffering in battle; the determination never to lift an impatient finger to a child; conscientious objection; pacifism; an end to state killing; an end to state torture: to name but ten. No one can be committed to activism in all those spheres, but we can know what we think and, who knows, we may find ourselves thinking so deeply that we start to care. Caring can lead us to make connections. If we already know that truth matters to us as a religious imperative, it follows that we can’t fight a war, because warfare and truth are mutually exclusive. And if equality has become an all-encompassing necessity for us, we can’t kill another person or allow them to be killed in our name. So, if only on the basis of those last two testimonies and some simple logic, there is a chance that peace will become something of profound importance. Some of us may turn into energetic campaigners. That’s how it is with Quakers.

When I first got interested in Quakerism, this topic worried me more than any other. If you are already a member of the Peace Pledge Union or the Peace Direct Book Club or connected with a peace movement in some other way, it is unlikely that you’ll share the difficulties I had. But I was one of those who think that ‘war is a dirty job but someone has to do it’. As long as it was happening far away and I was able to keep my eyes tightly shut, I could pretend that I didn’t bear any responsibility. ‘And anyway,’ I thought, ‘sometimes you have to meet force with force.’ I don’t think I was alone. Newspaper editors have always understood the value of portraying all military action as heroic, and politicians know how many millions of votes there are in calling their adventure a ‘just war’.

It was thinking about that flawed mental construct, the just war, that started my change of mind. As I sat in the silence of Quaker meetings, I began to see things differently. Was it that I thought you had to be a pacifist to be a Quaker? If so, I was wrong. Was it that I was sitting in a room week after week with people who were thinking deeply – more deeply than I ever had – about these matters? Probably. Whatever the reason, I began at last to separate in my mind the cause from the war. And it made all the difference. There are many just causes, I realised, but there is no just war. If you believe there is that of God in everyone, you have to find solutions that don’t involve the justification of mass murder. There are other, better ways and it is our duty to channel public money towards helping skilled peacemakers to find them, rather than perpetuating the myth that only combat professionals know how to deal with violent conflict.

At the same time as I was having these changes of heart, a quotation from G.K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic, hit me hard: ‘The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.’ As I read those simple sentences, I was overwhelmed by a feeling that here was a truth I had always known but somehow never dared to acknowledge. It reached the bottom of my soul. And, in my vivid reaction, I started to realise that I was living out religious impulses I had been experiencing for years, but at a subconscious level. I began to look again at the peace testimony, but this time as a purely spiritual concern. The practical issues of war and conscientious objection became less pressing. I knew that, because of my rediscovered religious faith, I could not allow other human beings to be destroyed in my name. In the words of William Penn: ‘A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it.’

In rejecting violence, I have not necessarily turned my back on the use of force. I see force and violence as being different from one another. They have different effects. Whatever its intention, violence depraves and corrupts: it is counter-productive, because its aim is to destroy. The considered use of force, on the other hand, may not be destructive and can work for the common good. So I am able to accept that the forcible restraint of one person may sometimes be necessary to save the life of another. But I won’t be drawn on hypothetical scenarios and imagined challenges (the ones that begin, ‘Suppose you saw someone threatening your sister with a knife…?’), because they have no bearing on a reality I understand. The truth is that no one can be sure of what they might do in such circumstances. Instead, I have to concentrate on the realities I know. And at the top of my list is a precious reality that simply refuses to go away: the sanctity of human life. Once I believe in that, I must continue to believe. No exceptions. I can’t lay the sixth commandment (‘thou shalt not kill’) to one side for set periods of time and then pick it up again when it suits me. I either think it is right or I don’t. So, in my first year of attending Quaker meetings my position changed from tacit acceptance of the status quo to a conviction – as yet untested, of course, because I’ve never been asked to join an army – that, for religious reasons, I would be a conscientious objector in times of war.

The domestic issues of daily life, however, have proved a valuable testing ground. I grew up in my teens and twenties to be an explosively angry person at times of conflict, often handling the familiar tussles of everyday life without either consideration or calm. After thirty odd years of messing up, I took the decision in middle age to do things differently. Through much trial and a lot of error, I slowly acquired the ability to forgive myself and move on from my old ways, and in the process I made some useful discoveries. I learnt that conflict is inevitable and not something to withdraw from – it is, after all, what makes the world go round – and so I have no choice as to whether or not I confront it. Where I have complete freedom is in how I handle the conflict. And I made a personal breakthrough in realising that – irrespective of my religious impulses – an instinct to be violent and shouty when presented with a tough situation was less effective in solving problems than its polar opposite. Nonviolence is a better coping mechanism for me than violence. It works. It is a positive response to challenges. So, I gradually changed my behaviour. Quakers taught me that the most effective way of renouncing violence is to become actively nonviolent. I brought up my children without smacking, I rarely raise my voice in anger these days, and I usually manage to maintain respect for those who disagree with me. A lot of small decisions have led to a few big consequences.

I have drawn on a little of my own life because it shows the kinds of change that can sometimes happen to people who go to Quaker meetings. I understand that my experience may not be yours, and you don’t, of course, have to share my opinions or life lessons for Quakerism to make a difference to you. Nor do you have to be any kind of activist. If, as was the case with me, you don’t quite know what your viewpoint on the peace testimony is, you might let the experience of being with Quakers help you find out. Talk to them. They love the subject, while by no means necessarily agreeing with each other all the time: some, for example, believe that limited military action may be essential in certain instances, while others find that position to be anathema. Still more, unsurprisingly, espouse one of the myriad viewpoints in between.

This talk of conscientious objection and personal change, however, is far from most Quakers’ everyday experience of the peace testimony. For them it is about personal attitudes, about peacemaking, mediation and conflict resolution. There is a statement, probably originally made by Gandhi but now attributed to a host of iconic leaders (I once saw it claimed for Picasso) that states the position perfectly: There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. Here it is again, reworded as the title of Thich Nhat Hanh’s fine book: Peace is Every Step. And it was the essence of that first poster I saw, quoting the Quaker Sydney Bailey: Peace is a process to engage in, not a goal to be reached. It is something to do every day. There is no end, no target, no victory. Peacemaking becomes a constant, tough, rewarding way of life. And so Quakers have a history of setting up projects dedicated to the resolution of conflict. Let three of the best known tell some of the story.

The Alternatives to Violence Project (known as AVP) was started in 1975 by a group of inmates at Green Haven Prison in New York as an experimental workshop in collaboration with local Quakers. It spread throughout the prison system, and eventually into mainstream society. It now consists of a worldwide network of volunteer groups whose goal is to reduce the level of violence in society by providing workshops in which people can learn nonviolent methods of resolving conflict. In Britain, there is an extensive programme of work in schools, prisons and workplaces, as well as weekend workshops for individuals and communities. You can find more information at www.avpbritain.org.uk.

Leap Confronting Conflict is a British-based organisation established in 1987, specialising in conflict among young people. Their aim is to prevent the escalation of everyday conflict into violence. They deliver their work through community and school based projects, always in local partnerships. They are supported by more than fifty specialist trainers around the UK, many of whom are young people themselves. They have a holistic approach to conflict resolution and a distinctive training style, tackling everyday interpersonal conflict, group offending, knife crime, bullying and racist violence. Like AVP, they don’t stress their Quaker beginnings. They can be found at www.leapconfrontingconflict.org.uk.

Turning the Tide is a Quaker initiative, organising workshops which pair Quaker meetings with groups of local activists exploring nonviolence in all its aspects. It also offers one-off workshops as requested by organisations. Its work is varied and active, so for latest news you should look at its website, www.turning-the-tide.org. The description of nonviolence offered there is a model of concision and clarity:

Nonviolence is a way of actively confronting injustice. Not doing nothing, not responding violently, not running away; but struggling creatively to transform the situation. It’s about doing conflict better; bringing about change without doing harm.

These three examples can only scratch the surface of the initiatives through which the testimony to peace is expressed. There are many others, some Quaker and some not, and still more that have Quaker roots no longer routinely acknowledged. Conscience, the peace tax campaign (www.conscienceonline.org.uk) is one example, lobbying for the legal right of conscientious objectors to have the entire military part of their taxes spent on peace building. The Campaign Against Arms Trade is another (www.caat.org.uk), working to end the international trade in arms. And Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org.uk), an initiative originally with Quaker connections, continues in its aim to ‘protect people wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied’.

Quakers do not have a rule, of course, that says they must be active in all this – it is entirely up to the individual. However, there is one sentence in Advices and queries that can be said to apply to each of us, both Quaker and not. It is part of Advice 31 and quotes John Woolman, the American visionary whom we met In Part Two: ‘Search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war’. And it echoes some words of George Fox, who talked of living in ‘the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars’.

It is possible, as we go about our business every day, to take decisions that work for change. What we buy, what we use, what we read, whom we listen to, what we say: it all matters. This business of peace is for us to work out in our own lives, just as much as it is for others to fix in our name. Attend to what love requires of you.

Sustainability

If the peace testimony encourages us to live our lives in ways that do not contain the seeds of war, Quakers’ concern for care of the earth is about a way of behaving that does not contain the seeds of destruction. The parallels are plain. Both uphold the rights of every community to enjoy an equal share of what the earth has to offer. Both bear witness to a tendency in us all to extinguish life through selfishness and avarice. Both acknowledge the necessity of balance and wholeness. Both are concerned with the building of community and understanding through common values.

When I began writing this book, I asked some friends to identify the issues that mattered most to them as Quakers. One responded immediately:

Mankind is rearranging the world and its resources to suit perceived needs and feed greed. Happily, Quakers are now evolving a testimony to the care of the earth and the environmental issues that are involved in that. But there is an interdependence among the testimonies. You cannot, in my view, pick out one and leave aside the others. People will say that the peace testimony can stand on its own – but how can they justify that, when the world’s conflicts are driven by inequality, hunger and injustice? The unequal distribution of resources per head as between, say, Africa and the USA is scandalous, while we are now threatening to affect the food resource by growing crops to provide fuel for the western world.

In speaking of Quakers ‘evolving’ a testimony, he chooses his words carefully; there has been a lack of clarity for years now as to whether Quakers have declared, or should declare, or might declare, a testimony to sustainability. (There has been disagreement, too, as to the appropriateness of the word ‘sustainability’ itself, since it has so many meanings and interpretations – I take as my guideline a definition by the UN’s Brundtland Commission in 1987: ‘Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future nations to meet their own needs’.) Some Quakers believe there is no requirement for a testimony to this specific issue, because so much of the concern is already implicit in a corporate, passionately held testimony to peace. Others feel that, since just about all Quakers are committed to the greening of their lives, a testimony is now effectively in place. Still more are of the view that, while many individuals have responded to the news of impending catastrophe with a personal commitment to action, a collective take on environmental awareness will need to be more distinctively Quaker before a testimony can be declared: there is no point, they think, in simply repeating a familiar piece of received wisdom with which the whole world agrees. No one is complacent, however. Every Quaker I have met is passionately convinced of the need to do more, much more, at both a personal and community level, to help avert global catastrophe.

Whether or not sustainability is, strictly speaking, one of the Quaker testimonies, there can be no question that it represents a living commitment for Quakers. They grapple every day with what it means to live sustainably. And, as with the first four testimonies, they regard the issue as a religious matter. Quakers see all persons as holy, and they question accepted notions of equality. So, confronted with a crisis that exposes lack of care for the spiritual well-being of people, social and cultural divisions among communities, and negligence of the welfare of future generations, they respond by emphasising the need for action. Attend to what love requires of you. The task before them, before all of us, is to abandon status, unearth our innate generosity and unselfishness, and prioritise people who are as yet unborn. Quakers know that, adapting Gandhi’s statement on peace a few pages ago, there is no way to sustainability: sustainability is the way.

The Quaker testimonies to truth, equality, simplicity and peace developed slowly, from passionately held concerns of small groups of individuals to corporate witness statements that spoke and still speak for Quakers everywhere. Their organic growth can be clearly observed with hindsight. In the case of a Quaker commitment to sustainability, however, progress has been an uncharacteristically start-stop affair. John Woolman whom we met in Part Two was perhaps the first Quaker to take a personal stand on caring for the environment. In his diary for 1772, he wrote, ‘The produce of the earth is a gift from our gracious creator to the inhabitants, and to impoverish the earth now to support outward greatness appears to be an injury to the succeeding age’. I find it sad to contemplate that the ground-breaking Quaker entrepreneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth were in some cases responsible for the very damage he was talking about. Abraham Darby, for example, a British pioneer of metal manufacture and a notable herald of the industrial revolution, was already producing pig iron in coke-fired blast furnaces sixty years before Woolman made his forlorn, prophetic observation. As in so many aspects of his thinking, the American was years ahead of his fellow Quakers and centuries ahead of his time.

The great Quaker entrepreneurs can hardly be blamed for failing to grasp the long-term effects of their labours. They shared with Woolman a belief in the unity of all creation, a respect for the earth, an acceptance of the sanctity of life and an understanding that the human footprint on the globe should be a light and undamaging one. Their twentieth century counterparts held all those convictions, but were as slow as the rest of the world in catching on to the ruinous effects of industrialisation. Greenpeace, for example, was founded in 1971, but it was already 1988 by the time British Quakers made their first clear corporate statement acknowledging that the globe stood on the brink of a disaster:

Our planet is seriously ill and we can feel the pain. We have been reminded of the many ways in which the future health of the earth is under threat as a result of our selfishness, ignorance and greed. Our earth needs attention, respect, love, care and prayer.

This pronouncement coincided with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and shows alertness to the depth of the problem. But while many individual Quakers responded to the news of impending catastrophe with a personal commitment to action, their collective response remained muffled. It was another twenty years before the British Quaker community began to unite on the issue.

In August 2011, Pam Lunn, a programme leader at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, gave a talk to an assembly of around a thousand Quakers at their annual gathering, known as Yearly Meeting (described in Part One). She named her lecture Costing Not Less Than Everything, a quotation from T.S. Eliot that conveys the flavour of her uncompromising message. She spoke graphically of the depth of the crisis, of a worsening global economic environment, failures of infrastructure and interruptions in supplies of energy, food, goods and services. But this was not an hour of negativity and gloom. She made practical propositions. She suggested that when such temporary glitches occur, we should treat them as practice for a future in which they are certain to become everyday facts of life. She was positive in encouraging her audience to take personal responsibility in making whatever changes may be called for, but she also acknowledged the necessity for people to work together. Emphasising the need for spiritual impulses to be turned into action, she urged Quakers in Britain to become ‘truly a low carbon community’. Here is a passage from the book (publication details are in Appendix One) issued to accompany the lecture:

Quakers are needed … to be faithful to Quaker testimonies; needed to be visible, to be speaking out, to be offering leadership; needed to do what is right in the face of external pressing circumstances. To use Gandhi’s phrase, Quakers – individually and corporately – need and are needed to “be the change we wish to see in the world”. To do and be so will require us to deepen our spiritual grounding, alone and together – not only for the sake of inward exploration but for the future of human society. A further challenge will be to find the corporate will, the rediscovery of a depth of corporate discipline, to undertake this wholly and fully, not just as a matter of piecemeal personal choices.

The gathering united behind the message and Quakers in Britain pledged themselves to action, to ‘a strong corporate commitment to become a low carbon sustainable community’. The minute of the meeting continued, ‘The process needs to be joyful and spirit-led’, adding that Quakers ‘keep it in their hearts that this action must flow from nowhere but love’.

Quakers know from their history that it is the process that matters, the daily routine of putting one foot in front of the other: not looking for handy goals, so much as faithfully practising spiritual discernment. Only through an attitude of acceptance, with equality and simplicity as our watchwords, can any of us prepare for the massive shifts in openheartedness and generosity that are needed now, and that will have to become a way of life for future generations, as the world crisis is tackled daily. So, we are back where we began. As we prepare for greater selflessness and the breaking down of cultural barriers, as we look for resources to enable the human spirit to flourish in the face of possible global disaster, we are reminded once more that the whole of life is sacramental.

Faith in Action 2

There is a story that Quakers sometimes tell to explain the connection between the silent meeting and the work they do in the world.

A newcomer walks into a meeting for worship late and is confronted by a room full of people, all sitting silently. He pauses in awkward anticipation. ‘When does the service begin?’ he asks. ‘When the meeting ends,’ comes the reply.

As improving tales go, it is a bit on the smug side, it seems to me – and I hope the Quakers you meet are kinder to you than that – but it does contain an essential truth. As the meeting comes to a close, the real work begins. As we have seen, Quakers are under no pressure to do anything and the impulse to give service may take a long time to bubble up, but it does frequently appear. How does it happen? It is channelled through the mindfulness and love that are the quintessence of Quaker worship. They are the same mindfulness and love that characterise Quakers’ work in the world and they are carried forward from the meeting house into the everyday. It becomes a continuum. In time, it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.

A quest for meaning is at the core of every religious faith. For Quakers, meaning lies not only in the revelation of great truths, but in finding a purpose and fulfilling it, in taking action that may help someone else. So, meaning and purpose become the same thing. Meaning becomes purpose, purpose becomes meaning, and it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins. And they have nothing, absolutely nothing whatever, to do with sacrifice. This whole process is about delight. It is the joy of meeting other humans in the spirit, the exhilaration of being in the right place at the right time, the thrill of offering one’s heart and soul.

It is not a phenomenon, of course, that is exclusive to Quakers. Many other religious and secular groups report exactly the same responses. Being in the world, working for others, joining the struggle for social justice, helping to resolve conflict: these are some of the ways in which people of all faiths and none find not only meaning, but also purpose. For Quakers, there are many such initiatives. Some undertake groundbreaking schemes: founding charities, helping the homeless, giving advice to refugees and asylum seekers. Others organise soup runs for people living on the streets, organise peace vigils, work in prisons, read to patients in hospitals. Still more give service to their own Quaker meeting, ensuring that it can function at a day-to-day level. And a large number put into practice, in their workplace, housing estate or street, principles of mediation and conflict resolution that they have learnt through mixing with other peacemakers.

I have asked some friends to write a few words about the kinds of thing they find themselves inspired to do. I don’t want to suggest that their experiences are necessarily typical or representative of the ways in which Quakers behave, but I hope you may find them intriguing. You will notice a wide variation in their activities, from everyday experience to large projects, none any less or more important than another.

When I retired, people advised me not to fill every hour with activity: wait, they said, for the right things to come along. In our local paper, an advertisement said the Youth Offending Team wanted volunteers. This spoke directly to me: I felt a clear leading to apply and was accepted for the work. As a sociology and religious studies teacher, I had taught that faith communities advocate helping offenders to reform and to make reparation to society. As a Quaker, I was clear that offenders were unique, precious children of God and that our testimony to equality demanded that they be helped in a positive and humane way. My experience of working with young offenders has convinced me that people do have that of God in them, that this can be reached and nurtured and that they can change for the better.

At the heart of my work for peace lies the belief that there is something of God in all of us; we are all precious and unique, all able to contribute our particular gifts generously to the world. This means being non-judgemental, softening and opening to hear each voice, our own as well as others. Then maybe we can each see from different perspectives and get beneath the surface to our different fears and needs. And we can also learn more about ourselves and hear ourselves as others hear us. The first time I realised what this means was when I organised a meeting for six traffic action groups who disagreed fiercely about the solution to the huge increase of cars in our neighbourhood. I invited each of the twelve representatives to speak for five minutes about their fears and needs and after a few protests and interruptions, they discovered the value of it. Anger gave way to a palpable wave of relief, as each voice was seen to belong to a real person. But the question on my mind now is: How can I apply this open, soft practice in political campaigning?

Some years ago I became aware of women working in street-based sex work in London. The first woman I came across was sleeping in doorways on Dalston High Street. She was pregnant, HIV positive, had TB and ulcers. She wasn’t registered with a GP and wasn’t even getting pain killers. She described a life of violence, loneliness and fear where crack, when she could get it, gave her a brief respite from pain. She had a learning difficulty as well as having been traumatised. It seemed that if her mental health wasn’t taken care of, nothing would change. Sadly she wasn’t alone and I went on to set up Street Talk, a registered charity which takes mental health care to women in street sex work and to women who have escaped from trafficking. I like working with very poor people because I find them honest. They have a greater generosity than the rest. And I include myself among the rest.

Having worked most of my adult life on energy and climate policy I’m now with the Quaker charity Living Witness, supporting Friends and Meetings addressing sustainability. Central to our work is strengthening spiritual community through listening, shared food and worship. I live at a new Quaker community, where we’re beginning to welcome Friends for short stays and retreats. Most people find me a bit odd – I’m vegan, don’t drive or fly, and often wear shorts as I hardly heat my home and find most buildings too hot. For me the key sustainability challenge is changing the way we live and engaging the spirit of the age within and around us, with its focus on individual material consumption. Quakers have a particular contribution in our experience of finding unity in complex, difficult situations: listening, seeing God in the other, and thinking it possible that we might be mistaken.

In my work as a teacher, the most significant change I have experienced since becoming a Quaker has been the ability to be silent and to listen, I mean really listen; not just to what is being said but to the voice of that of God in them. It may seem strange and even spooky to think like that but it has helped me enormously in getting students to reveal more of themselves and to work more harmoniously with colleagues. Many of the international students I work with really appreciate and need the pastoral care I give. Sitting in silence in meeting for worship has brought out the reflective side in me and helped me become more attuned to the needs of others.

My working life was spent mainly on NHS finance, and it was easy to feel that the doctors, nurses, porters and cleaners on the front line were doing a more valuable job. But I came to realise what a huge difference it made to them if finance was handled well. So when, after retiring, I became a Quaker and was immediately recruited to be the meeting’s treasurer, it felt good. The way we handle our money enables the meeting to flourish, and also facilitates great things, from Britain Yearly Meeting’s work worldwide to some tiny charities run by our own members. Indeed, without a lot of backroom work there would be no meetings, no outreach, and for that matter no hospitals. Backroom work is important, and this has wider implications.

If I never want to resort to violence, then I have to work to eliminate the seeds of war from my life in every way possible. For example, if I buy clothes that are made in sweatshops then I am complicit in economic violence, so instead I buy my clothes from charity shops and mend them as much as possible. But I also have to try to eliminate the violence and injustice that is perpetrated by the state on my behalf. This has led me to write a guide on how to disrupt arms company recruitment on university campuses, to being arrested for blockading the entrance to a nuclear weapons base, to taking part in Camp for Climate Action to highlight the injustice and damage of climate change, to lawsuits, lobbying and legal observing to counter police repression, and to not a lot of free evenings and weekends! Quakerism for me is not about an hour on Sunday, it is about every moment of your life. It is not comfortable, easy and conformative; it is a radical challenge to our whole way of life and society around us.

I had a light bulb moment in 1956. I was thirteen years old. As I watched the television news I saw ten-year-olds throwing stones in anger and anguish at the Russian tanks as they rolled into Budapest to crush the uprising. I was awed by their courage but it galvanised me. I became active in fighting for the things I believed in and I have been active ever since. Much later, and after I had become a Quaker, I was watching television news again and saw the treatment of disabled children in another country in eastern Europe. It led me to found a charity to work with the children, the staff and their parents to create a better quality of life and more equal opportunities. My action was deeply rooted in the belief that each person is precious, a child of God. I was sustained by my Quaker faith and worship which saw me through the many setbacks and challenges. It also helped me to accept that which I could not change.

There are groups with a Quaker connection that you can join as soon as you start attending a meeting and many others with charitable status that you can help either with money or as a volunteer. Here is a selection, more or less at random: Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs; Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network; Quaker Theatre Company; Quaker Concern for Animals; Quaker Fellowship for Afterlife Studies; Quaker Green Action; Quaker Homeless Action; Quakers and Business Group; Friends Fellowship of Healing; Quaker Lesbian and Gay Fellowship; Quaker Universalist Group. You will find a full list at www.quaker.org.uk.

Internationally, Quakers liaise with each other constantly, often under the auspices of the Friends World Committee for Consultation (www.fwccworld.org), sharing their knowledge and experience and frequently partnering with each other in peace building initiatives around the world. At the time of writing, British Quakers are active in Burundi, Kenya, post-Yugoslav countries, Israel-Palestine and five nations in South Asia. It is a constantly changing scene. For an update, just visit the Quaker website (www.quaker.org.uk).

Quaker Council for European Affairs (www.quaker.org/qcea) has a permanent office at Quaker House in Brussels and works to express a Quaker vision in matters of peace, human rights and economic justice in a specifically European political context. Among many significant projects, it highlights problems which still remain in Europe with regard to the right to conscientious objection to military service, gathers data on the conditions of women in prison and works with members of the Council of Europe to promote economic justice, reconciliation and the right sharing of world resources. Its programme is large, impressive and constantly developing.

There are Quaker United Nations offices (www.quno.org) in New York and Geneva, where their representatives work for human rights, peace and disarmament, refugees, and global economic issues. They have enjoyed a number of successful outcomes, one of the most impressive to me being on the question of the use of child soldiers in war – surely the most extreme example of officially approved violence towards children. Many agencies were involved in persuading the United Nations to make a declaration against it, but QUNO was one of the most active in initiating the process and drafting reports and briefing papers. Quakers are at their strongest when they work at a local level and move their experience forward for use in large projects; this was a classic example of it. In 2000, after years of complex negotiations, the UN General Assembly declared that ‘states shall not recruit persons under the age of eighteen’.

Finally in this section, I cannot resist quoting again from Quaker faith and practice. The writer is Pierre Ceresole, a Swiss Quaker who founded Service Civil International in the 1920s, an organisation dedicated to the rebuilding of poverty-stricken and war-torn villages worldwide:

You say: ‘But with the best will in the world, I can’t get to the point of believing in God.’ Well then, if you want to believe in him, if you feel something great behind it all and not just words, well, work for God, and you will see not only that it comes to the same thing as believing in him, but something infinitely more alive, more real, more powerful which fills you and satisfies you more than anything you might vaguely imagine under the name of ‘real and living faith’ – a reality, a life and not words.

Quakers and You

Quakers in the seventeenth century were condemned and imprisoned as heretics. Modern dictionaries define a heretic as a ‘holder of unorthodox opinions’, so I suppose Quakers would still have to plead guilty today: trying to find that of God in everyone is not an orthodox thing to do. Read to the end of the definition, though, and you arrive at the source of the word. It comes from the Greek hairetikos, meaning ‘able to choose’.

Quakers can choose. They have never felt hidebound by tradition or dogma. Many of them are characterised by a startling open-mindedness. They exercise discipline in their lives, as they always have, but nothing is imposed on them. And yet I am still not sure they necessarily feel they are always the ones doing the choosing. ‘Attending to what love requires of you’ can make unexpected demands. Being guided by the Spirit is not quite the same as thinking for yourself.

At the beginning of this book, I said that I wasn’t trying to convert you. As we reach the end, it seems a good idea to repeat it. I’m not. What this book has aimed to do is explain a little of who Quakers are and leave the rest to you. They don’t claim to have the answers. What they have are some very good questions. In fact, Quakers question everything. And it is your job now as a heretic, as someone with a choice, to question the Quakers and decide whether any of this works for you. It is your faith and your truth that matter. If, like me, you find the meeting for worship a fulfilling experience or if, like me, you find the quiet wisdom of particular Quakers to be a help in your life, you may want to stay a little. You will be made welcome.