Turning Inside Out again?

For the second time a course on 18th century Quakers which I had hoped to run for Woodbrooke has been cancelled because of a lack of bookings. This has led me to consider what to do next. I am not going to abandon the 18th century but perhaps the time has come to approach it in a different way. I shall continue to try to 'introduce you to my friends' through this blog and I will look into the possibility of creating an online course for Woodbrooke for 2020.

At the same time I will put some more effort into research and writing and try to make progress on my biography of Catherine Payton Phillips. I have ideas for some journal articles which I will focus on. I know from long experience that, as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, 'Research is endlessly seductive. Writing is hard work'. I think that now is the time to do some of that work.

Also, for a while now I have been feeling nudged towards a new direction - or rather to a new approach to an old path. It is twenty-five years since I set out as a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow to give workshops on spiritual autobiography up and down the country. I talked about this in earlier posts on this blog - first of all ten years ago and then later when I was wrestling with some difficult questions.

Having published my book Turning Inside Out; an exploration of spiritual autobiography in 1996 and given up the workshops after ten years, I thought that spiritual autobiography, although still an interest, had faded into the background of my life, except in its connection to my historical research and writing.

Recently though I have been contacted by a few Friends in different parts of the country who had read my book and wanted to use it as a basis for workshops in their meetings to allow people to share their spiritual journeys. Encouraged by this I got out my notes and at long last transcribed the two background talks I gave as part of the workshops from longhand to the computer. Of course they need updating but I may now look at ways of publishing them as I originally intended to do.

I am also putting together a new Woodbrooke course with Rhiannon Grant on 'Spiritual Blogging' which is due to run in May 2019. It will be a new experience to work with someone else on different approaches to spiritual autobiography and I am looking forward to it.

I am also aware that I need to do more work on my own spiritual autobiography. I have a title - and used it for this blog - but so far I have only written fragments in different places. I was inspired by some of the writers I met at the QUIP conference earlier this year, especially Iris Graville and her memoir Hiking Naked, both to read more and to go back to writing about my spiritual journey. I need to turn inside again before I can take the next step, turn inside out and share what I have found with a wider audience.

So it seems to me that what I am being led to do is not so much a change of direction as a closer integration of the two strands of my endeavour - spiritual autobiography and 18th century Quakers. I need to allow what appear to be stumbling blocks to become stepping stones.

Quaker Alphabet Blog 2014 - K for Knees

The general title of my long-running but (before the Quaker Alphabet Blog project) not regularly updated blog is, as you can see, Stumbling Blocks to Stepping Stones. This is a quotation from the refrain of a hymn which I heard by chance on the radio many years ago and which struck me as being the perfect title for my spiritual autobiography - the one that I haven't quite got round to writing yet!

I have shared parts of my spiritual journey here and in other places and I have spent a lot of time, in workshops and whenever opportunity arose, encouraging people to share their spiritual autobiography with others. I even wrote a book about my project but so far I have got no further. Lately I have been feeling that perhaps the time is right for me to concentrate a bit more on sharing my story, perhaps because I have become aware of another stumbling block in my way which I need to incorporate in my spiritual journey.

Quakers were not the only people in the 17th century to find a virtue in sharing spiritual experience. Many other puritans used this tool to unite their congregations and to encourage one another. One of them, Samuel Petto, an Independent puritan with Calvinist leanings, wrote these words in 1654 and I have often quoted them and found them helpful.

Christians know not what they lose, by burying their experience, they disable themselves for strengthening the weak hands and confirming the feeble knees of others; and it is a great disadvantage to themselves.

When I first came across these words I thought the imagery striking and it was not until I found the same words in another writer's work that I realised that Petto is referring to Isaiah 35,3. The context in which he uses the quotation, however, is his own and that was what spoke to me. He is saying that we don't know how much sharing our experience with others may help them and ourselves - very much the message I try to put across myself.

But what spoke to me most was the feeble knees. My own knees have been feeble for quite a few years, hurting occasionally and sometimes giving way. I knew that I had probably inherited my mother's osteoarthritis and in the last six months things have got a lot worse and the diagnosis has been confirmed. My left knee is worst and hurts whenever I walk on it. Going out for a walk is becoming more of an ordeal than a pleasure and I am often tempted not to try but to sit inside at my computer instead.

What stops me is a determination not to disable myself. Sharing this experience has brought me help from friends, from an understanding doctor and a helpful physiotherapist. There are things I can do to ameliorate the condition and accomodate myself to it without giving up. I am determined to keep going even though this stumbling block may prove very hard to turn into a stepping stone. I may even eventually write more than a blog about my continuing spiritual journey.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 19 - J for Journeys

The report on my fellowship

When telling others about the path they have taken to Quakerism Friends often refer to their spiritual journey. This metaphor goes back many centuries and encompasses a great variety of stories. I have the same kind of narrative to share and this blog has been and continues to be one of the ways in which I have done and am doing that. In Quaker terms journeys have always been physical as well as metaphorical and when I travelled around the UK in 1994 as a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow encouraging Friends to write and then share their spiritual autobiographies I felt that my journey continued both sides of the tradition.

 

In the 17^th century one of the ways in which Quakerism was spread through the country was by pairs of travelling Friends, known as ‘the Valiant Sixty’ by Quakers and as ‘Morris-dancers from the North’ by their opponents. They were supported, financially and spiritually, by the organisation based in Swarthmoor Hall under the leadership of George Fox and Margaret Fell. On their journeys they were often welcomed and set up a network of meetings throughout England. Sometimes they were attacked and imprisoned but this often spoke for them even louder than their words and brought more to the Quaker way. Some also went further afield to Ireland, America and Europe.

Swarthmoor Hall

As Quaker practices became more established a need was felt for more regulation of Friends’ journeys. In the early 18^th century a formal system of elders and overseers was set up and it became unacceptable for Friends to go on religious journeys without the approval of their meetings. A local meeting would ‘recognise’ those who it believed to have a particular gift for vocal ministry and would support them if they had a concern to travel either locally or further afield. Each minister would apply for, and usually be given, a certificate which approved a particular journey. This was to be presented to and endorsed by local Friends at each stage who would be expected to aid the traveller with hospitality and whatever other assistance was required. If a concern arose for the minister to travel further then another certificate from their home meeting was required. On their return to their own meeting  the minister would return their certificate and give an account of their journey.

As more ‘recognised’ Friends began to travel further their names were ‘recorded’ centrally in London and this practice was formalised in 1773. Recorded Ministers were also known as ‘Public Friends’ and many of them did indeed gain a national reputation, helped by the widespread publication of their journals and records of their journeys. Many of the Friends whose lives I am trying to make more widely known through my part in the Quaker Alphabet blog were Recorded Ministers and Public Friends.

During my year as a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow I visited 58 groups in half the Monthly Meetings  in Britain Yearly Meeting and spoke to more than 750 people. I travelled over 9,500 miles, mostly by rail and far more comfortably than Public Friends in earlier times. They often travelled hundreds of miles by foot or on horseback on appalling roads and in dreadful weather. They crossed the Atlantic in both directions and often found themselves in uncharted territory. They suffered accidents and ill-health but were not deflected from their task. Given the conditions under which journeys were undertaken in the 17^th and 18^th centuries it is not surprising that the words ‘travel’ and ‘travail’ were used interchangeably!

Susanna Morris's account

There are so many examples of the rigours encountered by travelling ministers on their journeys recorded in their journals that it is hard to choose between them  but here are just three. 

Susanna Morris from America having problems in the West Country in 1752, 'My companion and I visited all down the south parts of the west of England from Portsmouth to Land's End, though a very hilly country and bad roads, I thought it was very hard for me to get up and down the hills, for some of them were more like to stairs in an house than any other thing, and so stony that my creature threw me off many times, but (forever blessed be my great Master and preserver) I was never much hurt and sometimes not hurt at all; for the creature bowed herself so low with me that it was like laying me down and the last time it was in the soft mud.'

Catherine Payton Phillips

Catherine Payton Phillips, travelling from Cornwall to Bristol in 1776, ‘The weather was extremely cold and the snow so deep that the roads in Devonshire, and thence to Bristol, had been impassable, and were then dangerous; but through Divine favour we got along safe, although the cold was so extreme that it was hard to bear. The road in some places was cut through the snow, so that it looked like passing through a deep hollow way, which had a very striking appearance.’

and lastly Joseph Wood of Yorkshire walking to a meeting at Dewsbury in 1804, 'I set out from home ye 15th. of ye. 1st. Mo. 1804 and 1st. day of the week, about 10 o clock in the forenoon being accompanied this journey by Frances Field my housekeeper. We went by Shelley, Roydhouse and Briestfield, to Dewsbury were we got betwixt 3 and 4 o.clock in the afternoon, having called to rest us twice by the way and got some refreshment we brought with us from home The roads were extremely bad and difficult owing to the very heavy rains which had lately fallen, and when we got near Dewsbury the river was much out so that in one place we should have had to have waded up to the knee had not a man kindly let us through his mill, and in another place the water was upwards of a yard deep in the road for a considerable way so that we were obliged to go through the fields on higher ground.'

Joseph Wood

Journeys of different kinds have always been an integral part of Quakerism and physical journeys can still help to develop our own and others’ spiritual journeys. We do not necessarily have to feel a concern to travel in the ministry or ask or a minute from our meeting.  Visiting Friends and attending meeting for worship when away from home for our work or when on holiday can also lead to a greater understanding of both the  variety among the wider Quaker family and also the similarity of many of our concerns.  Sharing our experiences when we return to our own meeting can also strengthen our home community.