Epilogue

You don’t get converted into a Quaker; you gradually come to realise that you are one, usually because other Friends start treating you as one.
Gerald Priestland

In my first weeks of experiencing the subtle beauty of Quaker meetings, I wanted to be there as often as I could. It wasn’t that I had to, or needed to, or even that I was determined to. Nor was it fanaticism. It was just that for the first time in my life I was able to express gratefulness. I kept going back, because Quakers allowed me a space in which I could thank God for my life.

They put no pressure on me to stay. I asked once or twice if they wanted me to pay anything or sign my name or show that I meant it, but they said no, they were happy to welcome me as long as I felt like coming. After about a year, an old hand fixed me with a friendly stare over his cup of tea. ‘You do realise that if you turn up as often as this, someone’s going to ask you to do a job,’ he laughed. He was right: it happened three months later. Someone said, ‘Would you serve on the Children and Young People’s Committee?’ I was doubtful, but I knew they must have considered it carefully, so I said yes. As it turned out, I enjoyed being part of that little knot of Quakers and accepting the tasks and learning about the decision making. I began to give what money I could to collections for the central work and the meeting house funds. Slowly it seemed that there was a place for me among these people.

It was three years or more before I considered joining the Religious Society of Friends. I thought, ‘Well, why be a member? The worship is the same. There are no privileges or perks, no promotion. Quaker work is Quaker work and you can be an essential part of it whether you join or not. You can’t be a clerk or an overseer or an elder, but those jobs take up time and I don’t have much of that.’ A month or two into my third year, I met a woman who had been going to meetings ten times longer than I had. ‘I won’t join,’ she said, ‘because I’m sure they’ll ask me to take on something that’s a burden or a bore.’ I nodded agreement. Then, an hour or two later, I felt a pang of uncertainty. I thought, ‘Aren’t we both missing the point? It’s just about being available, isn’t it? And open? And knowing that these are people we want to be associated with? That we want to help?’ Looking back, I think it was the moment that I was able to come out as a Quaker to other people. Perhaps I also needed to come out as one to myself.

There are some who believe that you can be a Quaker without joining. I don’t share their view, but I think I understand it. Part of the Quaker identity is an attitude, a passion: you can undoubtedly have those without putting your name on a list. And it isn’t an exact condition, like the measles. There’s no kissing of rings, no initiation ceremony, no moment at which you acquire sudden quakerliness. But in the same way that you can catch the measles, it’s certainly possible to catch Quakerism. And some time in that third year, I got it. It bit deep. I began to understand that I could be a Quaker in my way and that if I tried to emulate someone else’s brand of Quakerism, I wouldn’t be a Quaker. I realised that I needed, just for myself, to be able to say in public that I had taken a decision to change. And I felt – and still feel – that, while it’s possible to do that without joining, it helps to know that there are committed people prepared not only to be on a list, but to declare themselves so nourished by the Religious Society of Friends that they want to nourish it back.

I hesitated for weeks. It was a big step. I mentioned it to loved ones and quickly changed the subject. I don’t think they understood why it was so hard to talk about. I don’t think I did. But it felt like a life-changer. Then, one day, something happened as I finished a telephone call. I’d been talking to a member of my meeting, an easy conversation, just a simple bit of business. I put the phone down and, without a moment’s thought, pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer. I scribbled a one-line letter to the Membership Clerk as if I had suddenly learnt the art of automatic writing. ‘Dear Sheila,’ it said, ‘I would like to apply for membership of the Religious Society of Friends.’ Nothing else. I signed it, stamped it and sighed with relief. It wasn’t my problem any more. The Quakers could sort it out now.

The ways in which they sorted it out I found to be gentle and beguiling. The procedure has been the same for many years, a mixture of the formal and informal, of the general and particular. When you express interest in becoming a member, Quakers initiate a process whereby they simply get to know you better. It is your Area Meeting that you will be joining, so your local overseers formulate a plan of action which is intended to help everyone – principally you, but also members of the Area Meeting, whom you may not know well – to be sure that you understand what membership involves. In theory there is an infinite number of ways of achieving the same result; in practice most meetings tend to use one method more regularly than the others.

There are three routes frequently suggested. The first is a Meeting for Clearness, in which you and a group of Quakers come together to talk about what joining might mean to you. Or your meeting might propose a period, not fixed and possibly lasting a few months, during which you meet regularly with a small group of Quakers, who get to know you and with whom you can speak freely about everything. And the third option, well-established now, is that they ask two Quakers (one of whom you know well, the other from a different meeting) to visit you, so that you have an opportunity to talk things over in detail.

It is a system that works. It is based on the Quaker principle of encountering one another in the Spirit. George Fox put it well: ‘Friends, meet together and know one another in that which is eternal, which was before the world was.’ The procedure, whichever form it takes, is one in which people seek to understand the things that make each other tick: the experiences that have significance for them and the journey that has made them who they are. I shall never forget the warmth and care that characterised my own process. I was visited by two Quakers, one of whom I knew, the other a complete stranger. From the beginning of our couple of hours together, I felt in safe hands. These people were my guides. The discussion we had was open, thoughtful and wide-ranging. And it quickly became clear that this was my time. I asked questions and explored the whole business of my Quakerism just as much as they did.

A fragment of the conversation will give you a sense of it. With a modicum of guilt, I told them I was having trouble with two of the Quaker testimonies. Peace and simplicity, I said, were areas in which I thought I was messing up, so perhaps they ought to know. For example, I wasn’t at all sure what I thought about conscientious objection; and I was living a tangled life, entirely lacking in simplicity, that just didn’t seem right to me. If it had been an exam I would have been taking a risk, but I knew by then that this wasn’t an exam. And now, years later, I still feel the affection I felt then for the clarity of their response. They helped. They met my uncertainty with their own experiences of trying and sometimes failing to live out the testimonies. They talked with ease of the speed with which things can change when people open themselves up to a life led in the Spirit. We discussed how Quakers’ lack of dogma allows them to grow; how, by contrast, the shame of not feeling up to the mark blights healthy lives. By the end of the meeting we knew each other better.

A few days later, I heard that the Area Meeting had considered my application and that I was a member of the Religious Society of Friends. I was a Quaker. I felt good about that. I also felt responsible. Something I had always known in theory now came forcefully into my head as a big, important practicality. We members of the Society are it. It is us. If it’s true that we are all the clergy, then it’s also true that we own the buildings, change the light bulbs, put up the posters, hold meetings for worship, paint the walls, lobby governments and do all the other work that Quakers have done for centuries. It is our Society of Friends. There are thousands of us, so we don’t have to feel our responsibility as a weight, but we do need to feel it as part of our religious witness. Running the Quakers in Britain has a pivotal role to play in the life of everyone who joins.

I have called this book Being a Quaker, because I have tried to cover all aspects of a multi-faceted word: it can mean different things to different people. If you want to go to Quaker events and enjoy the wealth of spiritual fulfilment on offer, think of this book as Being Someone Who Loves Quaker Meetings. If you want to be involved with the running of your local group but don’t feel ready to commit yourself to membership, call it Being a Valued Attender of Real Importance to Your Meeting. Quakerism incorporates all that. Being a Quaker means friendship of a kind and quality that you may only rarely find elsewhere. It means a faith that expresses itself in what you do, not what you think. It means the freedom to speak for yourself. It means the security of knowing that others are with you in the Spirit, and the understanding that you have a silent space in which to listen for the still, small voice. Being a Quaker is attending to what love requires of you; knowing one another in that which is eternal; seeking to answer that of God in everyone. I find it a rewarding life.