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A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker History

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A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker History A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker history I wrote this book for Quakers and others who are interested in this small but influential church. Each chapter explores a topic from a different period of our history. They were chosen simply because a story caught my attention or a question seemed to need an answer. This has led me into a number of different fields—medicine, psychology, literary criticism, philosophy and the history of ideas. I hope that this makes for an agreeable variety, and not for confusion! Fortunately a reader can enjoy the book without having to read every chapter. But I believe that this book has an underlying theme, the importance and value of our history. You will find here Quakers who made great journeys over land and sea in obedience to the call of God—and even more extraordinary journeys into uncharted regions of thought and spiritual experience. And you will meet others whose perception of the truth was clouded by convention or timidity. On the whole Quakers are no wiser or more saintly than others, but our particular combination of inward contemplation and outward activity for a better world has led to some remarkable stories of achievement. But I also describe some occasions when we failed to live up to our aspirations. The Quaker past has a strong bearing on questions of Quaker identity today. Sometimes the past provides a sharp contrast to our attitudes today and challenges them. Sometimes there is a sudden recognition that we are standing in the same place. In either case our history, besides being fascinating in its own right, has many things to teach us. John Lampen. 1 OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN LAMPEN Quaker writings Wait in the Light: the spirituality of George Fox Twenty Questions about Jesus Mending Hurts (the 1986 Swarthmore Lecture) Findings: Poets and the crisis of faith Love Growing in Us: questioning the Quaker peace testimony For children Will Warren — a Scrapbook The Peace Kit: everyday peace-making for young people The Worship Kit: a young person’s guide to Quaker worship Peaceful Inside [for five- to seven-year-olds] Peace and Community Issues Building the Peace: good practice in community relations work in Northern Ireland A Small Share in History: a Quaker Initiative in Eastern Europe [with Diana Lampen] Answering the Violence; encounter with perpetrators As Editor No Alternative? Nonviolent responses to repressive regimes Endeavours to Mend: perspectives on British Quaker work in the world today [with Brian Phillips] Seeing, Hearing, Knowing: reflections on Experiment with Light. The picture of James Nayler on the title page is an engraving in an anonymous pamphlet Klachte Der Quakers Over haren Niewen Martelar James Nailor in Engelandt (1657) in the Bibliotheca Thysiana, Leyden. It may not be an authentic likeness, but captures something of his spirit. 2 Essays in Quaker history by John Lampen With an introduction by Roy Stephenson First published in 2016 by THE HOPE PROJECT 21 Heath=ield Gardens, Stourbridge DY8 3YD, U.K. www.hopeproject.co.uk In association with Independents United www.iu-hq.com © John Lampen 2016 ISBN: 978-0-9563022-8-1 Printed copies of this book are not available for individual buyers. (There are copies in some Quaker libraries). But you are welcome to download the text from “Recent Publications” on my website www.hopeproject.co.uk which will take you to my Dropbox. You may print all or any part of it for your own use, and to quote from it, as long as my authorship is acknowledged. This book can be downloaded in three formats, all with interactive footnotes. There is a .pdf version for computers, a .epub version for E-book readers and a .mobi version for Kindle users. They can each be downloaded free of charge from the Dropbox. To use it in a reader, you will need to connect the device to your computer, open its icon, and then drag my downloaded =ile into its Documents folder. Though there is no charge for downloading the book, =inancial contributions to our work in Uganda (described on other pages of the website) will be most welcome. You can =ind there the details of how to give. 4 Contents Foreword page 4 Introduction by Roy Stephenson page 5 George Fox and the child page 8 John Woolman's dreams page 13 The witness of Job Scott page 23 Speaking Truth to Power (1) page 30 The Grimké sisters page 41 Tolstoy’s last novel page 50 Schooling & the Peace Testimony page 58 Speaking Truth to Power (2) page 73 A letter from James page 78 A paraphrase of James Nayler’s Epistle XI page 87 In conclusion page 93 Endnotes page 97 If you are reading this book on a computer or e-reader, clicking on a title will take you to its opening page. Page numbers only apply to the printed and .pdf versions. 5 Introduction by Roy Stephenson For some time Quakers, like the rest of the people of Britain, have had an ambivalence about the relevance of history. It has been as if people have thought that by ignoring the past we can escape from it. Perhaps we are now starting to learn that only by attending to our past can we hope to do something about the problems it has given us: whatever the reason, in recent times we seem to have seen a shift in our appreciation of how what has gone before has helped to gift us our present, and our future. People are often ambivalent about their histories, but I think we are seeing a revival of the sense of how significant the past really is. We find we cannot totally lay aside a concern with historical movements. History is never a story of the inevitable, and our current understanding of our planetary home has made us more than previously aware of endings and changings, and that human freedom means we can do something about influencing them if we so wish. If this is true of our culture in general and of history in general, then it is true in a Quaker context also. When I came to Quakerism in the early 1970s I was told a whole raft of stories which were intended to show me who Quakers were. I heard of the exploits and thinking of Stephen Grellet, Elizabeth Fry, Daniel Wheeler, Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stephenson, Sarah Lynes Grubb, John Dalton, Hannah Kilham, Abraham Darby, Caroline Stephen, James Parnell, Kathleen Lonsdale, John Bright MP, Mary Hughes and many more. These were not stories for stories’ sake. They were what showed me our Quaker DNA, what demonstrated our true Quaker identity, and told me the truths about ourselves from which we cannot escape. The spiritual ancestry I was claiming was expressed in what these Friends and many others had done. I was to understand that human perfection was most definitely not a requirement for a Quaker, but I was expected to work out my ideals and aim to live by them as Quakers have always done. Such ideals had a common fount in the Christian tradition out of which Quakerism had sprung, and they demonstrated to me that idealism on its own was not enough. What was important was the interplay between the Divine Force that changed our hearts - our awareness of what Love requires - and the life of action: in other words our personal testimony. I contrast this with the current situation. Our current Book of Discipline – the first place most Quakers would turn to learn what it is to be a Friend - contains almost nothing from the 200 Quietist years of our history. Yet this is arguably the most important time in the story of Friends: from being a reviled and persecuted group of extremists we became respected, appreciated even, for our witness that endured persecution and death, and for what we brought to religious life. Quakerism itself was transformed. Though the time may not have been characterised by an emphasis on doing in the world, our being in the world was our witness and our persistence in that witness gained us the respect of the wider society. Further, I seem to meet many modern Friends who are only dimly aware of the legacy of the great originators of our way of faith – George Fox, Margaret Fell, James Nayler, and all of the others who catapulted us into prominence in the mid-17th Century. I find myself inwardly cringing when I hear Friends ask what the significance of 1652 may be, embarrassed at our collective failure to make plain who we are to those who develop an interest in following our way. It is as if Friends believe we have outgrown the past, or outgrown the telling of stories. Both of these beliefs I would argue to be both dangerous and untrue. To think we have outgrown the past is to suppose that the Quaker tree, the roots of which have nourished the Society for 350 years, had suddenly become an epiphyte, with no need to draw on the sources that have sustained it. If Quakerism is content to change its identity entirely, we may do this; but I cannot understand how we could claim that this was in right ordering, and consistent with all we have said about acting with integrity. Yet conversations I have had, and reports from others, suggest that many Friends feel a 6 James (computer) Introduction by Roy Stephenson sense that the past is irrelevant at best – perhaps even something we must live down. I would myself say that to be an organisation that practices integrity, we need to accept the past, celebrate its joys and strengths, and learn from our failings and weaknesses and try to change them or at least acknowledge and live with them.
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