Quaker Alphabet Blog 2014 - O for Obedience

St Martin of Tours, Chelsfield, Kent

Going to a family wedding last week reminded me of my own, almost 44 years ago. Chris and I were married in the Church of England parish church near my home and what a trial we must have been to the vicar! To begin with, although we knew that we wanted (and our families expected) a religious ceremony, our relationship to the church was ambivalent. I had been baptised into the Church of England but had refused to be confirmed as I didn't see why I needed any priestly intermediary between myself and God - you can see why I was so happy to find Quakers later on! Chris had not even been baptised as at the time of his birth his father was a Baptist, later becoming a URC minister. The vicar accepted my position but Chris had to produce a letter from his old college chaplain (at that time conveniently a bishop) to prove his qualifications.

On top of this we had the certainty of youth (we were 22 and 23) that we did not want to use the 'modern' marriage service but insisted instead on the traditional 1662 version, the language of which we both preferred. We swept aside the vicar's objections, assuring him that that we understood what we would be saying, even though it meant that I would promise to 'obey' my husband. After all it was a safe promise to make, as Chris would never ask me to do anything unreasonable!

Lucretia Mott

Looking back, a wife's obedience to her husband has indeed hardly figured in our marriage. I hope that we have so far managed to live up to the aphorism favoured by the American Quaker (and feminist) Lucretia Mott. 'In the true marriage relationship the interdependence of the husband and wife is equal, their dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal'.

But perhaps the importance of the possibility of obedience was always there and it has always been an important part of my commitment to Quakerism. Our worship and testimonies are based on a willingness to be led by the Light, by our Inward Guide, into action and behaviour that, individually and corporately, we might not choose for ourselves. I know that when I have felt led into a new path on my spiritual journey at first it often seems impossible. The leading is not demanding, but it is insistent. It may recede from the forefront of my consciousness for a while but it does not go away. In the end, with the help of my friends, my family and my community, I have found a way forward in faith - I have obeyed. Corporately too Quakers have been led to positions which are often uncomfortable, which are sometimes too difficult for some individuals, but which are still spirit-led.

Obedience is not something to be entered into blindly but it is an important part of the Quaker way. As Isaac Penington put it in 1661, 'Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee'.

Quaker Alphabet Blog 2014 - G for Guidance

Sitting in meeting, considering what my next alphabetic blog post might be, it became clear to me that I should write about guidance.

There have been many times in my life when I have needed help with finding what to do or where to go next. I have often brought my perplexity into the silence of worship (sometimes with others and sometimes by myself) and waited for guidance. Help has often come, not always immediately or in the form in which I have expected it. I may be guided to speak to someone, to undertake a new project, to read something or just to continue waiting.

Where does this guidance come from? In the third of our Advices and Queries we are asked to encourage in ourselves a habit of dependence on God's guidance for each day. I'm not sure that I manage the everyday part but I know that I am asking for and receiving guidance from God, my Inward Guide as well as my Inward Teacher. The guidance I receive is gentle but insistent. I am free to ignore it and I often do, but if I follow, however hesitantly, then it is my experience that 'way will open.'

Although I live in quite different times, when I seek for guidance I feel at one with the travelling Friends in past centuries waiting to be guided to the right ship in which to embark on the dangerous ocean and ignoring many others that appear quite suitable to the outward eye. I know that I am waiting for guidance in the same way and from the same source, however foolish and deluded I may seem to some.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 50 - Y for Yearly Meeting

I can almost echo Amelia Opie when she said in 1843, 'Yearly Meeting has engrossed me much as usual, for I never missed one sitting since I obtained the great privilege of belonging to it '. I have certainly attended almost every sitting of Britain Yearly Meeting since I joined Friends in 1980 but in fact my first experience of Yearly Meeting was not as a member.

D Elton Trueblood

In 1975 I was working in Friends House Library and attended Yearly Meeting as a member of staff (with a red name badge to mark me out as I remember it). We were very busy attending to enquiries from Friends from all over the country and indeed all over the world. It was a great opportunity to get an impression of the wide variety of Quakers and to see them 'warts and all.' I particularly remember a visit from the weighty American Friend D.Elton Trueblood who stunned us with his parting remark as he left the library - "Now I must go and meet some real people"!

Edward H. [Ted] Milligan

The library closed when YM was in session and the librarian, the redoubtable Ted Milligan, encouraged us to go into the meeting where we sat together in specially allocated seats. As I was so new to Quakers and Quakerism he kindly sat beside me and explained what was going on and who people were. I particularly remember an elderly woman Friend dressed in a striking black hat and cloak and sitting in the front row  - Sybil White, then in her late eighties. I learned a lot about friends' eccentricities but was also inspired by their good sense and commitment.

Sybil White at YM 1978

But it was not just the people that drew me back to Yearly Meeting and into membership of the Religious Society of Friends. It was the experience, which amazed me then and continues to amaze me now, of a very large room full of noisy, opinionated, talkative people dropping all at once into silent worship. It was the power of that worship and the depth of vocal ministry that sometimes arose from it that reached me then and continues  - not in every meeting certainly but in enough - to reach me now.

I wish that more Friends would look outside their local meetings and take the opportunity to attend Yearly Meeting. Of course it is good to meet Friends from other meetings - as early Friends put it 'to see one anothers faces'- and to get a sense of the variety of Quakers. But it is by worshipping together, in such a large and diverse group as well as in our familiar surroundings, that we can reach for and find the Light that binds us all together in unity in spite of our outward differences.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 16 - H for Lucy Violet Hodgkin Holdsworth

Violet's father Thomas Hodgkin

Lucy Violet Hodgkin came from a long line of Quaker ancestors. She was born in 1869 in Northumberland, the eldest of the six children of Thomas and Lucy Fox Hodgkin. Her father was a prominent Friend, co-founder of the Quaker bank of Hodgkin, Barnett, Pease and Spence, later amalgamated with Lloyds Bank, and an eminent historian. Lucy Violet was her father’s favourite and shared his love of literature. As she said later, 'He and I lived our real life in the book world.' By the age of ten she was reading his proofs and seemed much older than her brothers and sisters. Her sister Lily wrote, 'In one way Violet was like an only child, it was "Violet and the children" always.'

When she was eleven Violet had a bout of scarlet fever which left her with increasing deafness. Cures were sought but in vain and by 1895 she had no hearing at all. Although she had episodes of despair she learned to lip-read very well and spoke out clearly. Her whole manner was regal and this was accentuated by her commanding stature and by the large hats and long dresses that she always wore.

Violet with her parents in 1911

Violet was educated at home and remained there as a companion to her parents who were very protective of her. In 1894 her engagement to Malcolm Powell was broken off as a result of family pressure. They felt that someone who, although charming, was also mentally unstable was not the right husband for Violet, but she did not forget her first love. When, ten years later, he married someone else she noted in her diary, ‘Wednesday 11 May 1904, Malcolm’s wedding day and not mine.’

The Hodgkin family were wealthy and often travelled in Europe but in 1909 they undertook a longer voyage ‘under concern’ to Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand they stayed with John Holdsworth and his wife Margaret at their house 'Swarthmoor'. Violet was deeply affected by her experience there of silent worship in an ecumenical atmosphere at meetings held at the Church in Havelock North by a group which included Friends, Theosophists and the Anglican minister.

The Holdsworth home Swarthmoor

Like many birthright Friends Violet felt that she had become involved in Quakerism without making a conscious choice and in New Zealand she found a setting for the more mystical spiritual expression that she was reaching for. When she returned to England she pursued this side of her faith and was eventually recorded as a minister in 1915. Throughout the years her ministry was marked by a catholic spirit and by directness, simplicity and depth. In 1919 she gave the Swarthmore lecture on Silent Worship; the way of wonder.

George Lloyd Hodgkin in 1911

In 1913 the Hodgkin family moved from Northumberland to Cornwall but very soon after they had done so Thomas Hodgkin died. Violet felt his loss very keenly, as she also did that of her favourite brother George who died of dysentery while engaged in relief work in Armenia in 1918. She found consolation in her work as a writer and began to publish historical and religious subjects. Her retelling of Quaker stories for young people A Book of Quaker Saints was published in 1917 and many other books and articles followed.

Writing was one way in which Violet could communicate and counter her deafness. Another way was through art. She was an avid watercolour painter, making opportunities everywhere she went to settle down to sketching, complete with umbrella, easel and stool. She would sometimes give ‘sketch shows’, displaying her paintings and talking about them.

In 1922 New Zealand came back into Violet’s life in the shape of John Holdsworth who was on a visit to England. His wife had died in 1920 and the friendship between him and Violet soon developed to the point where they decided to marry. He was 72 and she was 55 when the wedding took place in Cornwall. The couple went back to New Zealand but Violet was not used to running a household without servants and had to learn even how to boil and egg. She was made welcome by John’s daughter Beatrice but felt uncomfortable taking the place of John’s first wife in her own home. Eventually, after several voyages back and forth, John and Violet settled in England for good in 1928.

Illustration from A Book of Quaker Saints by F. Cayley-Robinson

Violet enjoyed the companionship of her husband and of her growing family of nieces and nephews. After John died in 1935 her quiet life continued, welcoming guests to her beautiful home near Falmouth and maintaining contact with a wide circle of Friends through a correspondence which grew year by year. She also continued writing into her eighties, meaning to ‘retire’ and then finding another subject to absorb her. One of her nephews remembers how important ‘the book world’ was still for her. 'Her drawing room was always full of new books including review copies. She would introduce you to them like guests at a party, with an affectionate pat for the good ones and a noise of disgust for bad ones.'

Lucy Violet Hodgkin Holdsworth led the life of the mind that her father had introduced her to, but also found affection and happiness when she had ceased to look for it. Her deafness closed some doors to her but opened others and she always welcomed new experiences and people into her life. She died in Cornwall in 1954 at the age of 85.

Standing next to Jesus

I’ve been catching up with my blog reading and one of the themes that has been speaking to me is the question of whether I should call myself a Christian along with the related one of where Jesus is in my life. Big questions and I am still struggling with answers, although helped by reading about others’ struggles.

So I’ll start by trying to share some of the journey which has brought me to my present position. I was brought up a nominal Christian, in the Church of England, read the Bible stories, sang the hymns, went to church as a matter of course but with no real conviction. When I was about 11 years old, standing alone on the back step of our house, looking at the clouds racing across the sky above our steeply sloping garden, I had what I later learned to call a ‘transcendent experience’.

In one moment beyond time I knew that myself, everyone and everything was connected and valued in love. All that I felt and knew in that moment was God and God was everywhere, in past, present and future, in all religions, all people, everything.

I did not know what to do with this experience. The only person I told was my school speech and drama teacher who gently listened to my confusion and gave me books on mysticism to read which helped me to realise that I was not alone in my experience and saved me from thinking that I was special or singled out.

So I knew that God was real, but I was not at all sure where Jesus fitted in to the equation for me. I certainly did not think that I needed organised religion or any kind of church community. The Christians that I knew seemed far too narrow in their belief for me to belong with them. I carried my conviction of true religion inside me but rarely let it connect with the way I lived my life.

And then, 30 years ago, I encountered Quakers when I went to work in Friends House Library in London. I found people who were living a faith without dogma day by day and I discovered Meeting for Worship. That was the real revelation because here I found again the God that I knew and God, the Inward Teacher, was speaking to me, within myself and through the meeting. When I began to listen I knew that I had to change, to commit myself to Quakerism and to act in faith. Of course there’s a lot more to this story and I will try to write more later, but for now I’ll try and go with the questions I began with.

Having become a Quaker, did I become a Christian? Well I believe that that is the journey I am on but many of my fellow-Quakers, and certainly many others who identify themselves as Christians, would disagree and I have to engage with that.

And what about Jesus? About 6 years ago I went to a performance of 'The Mysteries' at the National Theatre – three plays in one day. These modern versions of medieval mystery plays told the story of the world from creation to judgment with actors and audience mixed together in one space. Somehow during the crucifixion scene I found myself standing behind the actor playing Jesus who was carrying his cross. I suddenly felt a real connexion with the real Jesus and almost reached out to touch him. I knew then that my Inward Teacher was there too. It was an intense experience and again I have told very few people until today. I am still trying to make sense of what I felt and how standing next to Jesus could affect my life.