Doing things together
Richard Thompson writes about the benefits of working together
There are many things to cherish and protect in the culture of the UK: our freedom of expression, our rule of law, our multicultural cities, our bus passes for over sixty-fives, and the general respect for good neighbourliness, to name just a few.
There are also negative elements. Back in the Swarthmore Lecture of 1981, Adam Curle cited: ‘A culture of violence, hierarchy, things being more important than people.’ It looks as if we have continued on this downward route. Adam went on to imply that we tend not to see the infiltration into us of negative elements. The attitudes of individualism and materialism generate in us a feeling of insecurity and selfishness. Many politicians, especially in dark times, exploit this state of mind.
Fortunately, we are like the thirsty man sitting next to a bubbling pure water fountain. We belong to the Religious Society of Friends and our practice of worship together is like a constantly renewed spring.
First of all, in our Meeting for Worship, we sit in silence as a group ‘turning away from our own thoughts and suspending our imagination to feel a spiritual Presence in our midst’. Friends have described their experience of this Presence as God, or the Spirit or the Light, speaking to their condition. I myself use the phrase ‘the flow of love’.
We are all different, so the words we choose have personal resonance for us alone. But we can respect the words that others choose. Adam Curle put it in these words: ‘There is the illusion that we can solve all our problems by an effort of our intelligence… whereas all we need is to be still, to listen and allow for the operation of grace.’
Secondly, by our meeting together, we experience the value of friendship in human life. In her Kindlers booklet Breakthrough to Unity, Roswitha Jarman quotes Martin Buber: ‘All true life lies in genuine meeting’ and adds, ‘our relationships and the way we are present to one another is what matters. You need me to be present to you and I need you to be present to me. We learn from each other and we help each other; in such a real meeting we become what we are meant to be.’
Paul Parker reminded us, writing in the Friend in 2015, of Ben Pink Dandelion’s call in his Swarthmore Lecture of 2014 at Bath to do things together. I believe better networking is the solution. We belong to different groups and can learn so much from each other.
Quaker Voluntary Action (QVA) has built up a lot of good experience here, such as opening up a page on their website dedicated to collecting examples of different approaches of ‘doing things together’ in our different Meetings where a spirit of community has been experienced. You can look at contributions from around the country and then send in an example, or examples, from your own Meeting. This involves just giving the name of the group, how often it meets, a few words of description and why it creates ‘aliveness’ – then, if possible, a contact email address for Friends who would like to know more.
Other developments have been on the same lines. The Vibrancy in Meetings project is a rich way of sharing ideas and experiences, and a QVA weekend at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, in Birmingham, on ‘Heart, Head and Hands’ in 2015 shared the ‘aliveness’ that comes from our way of worship and activities together. One writer I came across wrote: ‘A sense of community is one of the highest forms of knowledge.’
Further information: www.qva.org.uk
