In the UK, Quaker worship is largely in the form of a largely silent meeting for worship, very different from the "programmed" worship services common with US Quakers.

Just this weekend, kb attended a Quaker retreat week-end, one aimed at what they call "enquirers". Quakerism originated here in the north-west of England, and the week-end was hosted at Swarthmoor Hall, the cradle of Quakerism, where George Fox made his most significant early conversions, and from where the first Quakers departed to bring the word to the rest of England, the UK, Europe and the world (to meet rejection, punishment and death in many places). Here's some of what I learned.

Fox was a fervent evangelican Christian, in Civil War era England he couldn't be anything else. Low-church Anglicanism was at its height of power as state church: visible Anglican belief and practice was identical with having religion, being moral and having any social standing. The few Non-conformists that there were, were second class citizens, and Roman Catholics hardly counted as people at all. Faiths other that Christianity were an almost unknown, remote heathen perversions.

And then comes Fox, an itinerant preacher (but by no means any sort of mendicant), telling whomever will listen that they have no need of "steeple houses", or of priests, nor any need to pay the church any tithe. There is, in particular, no need of any religious institution to bring you to God, any need to fill in the time until Jesus returns with piety, since God, Jesus, is here now, within each of us, and all we need to do to hear God speak directly to each of us is to stop and listen. Fox ended up spending a lot of time in jail.

Since then quakerism has changed greatly, almost the only constant being the listening. The only obvious Quaker observance is the listening for god, in the Meeting for Worship, where Friends sit in silence, until one or another, any one or another, is moved to speak. About anything. Anything whatever.

And that is, I slowly realised, how the sessions that formed part of the retreat were run. We'd just sit together until someone had something to say. The trick here being that the experienced Friends facillitating the sessions always had something to say prompt the rest of us.

The Quakers have no priests, and not even ministers. But they do have ministry. To speak at a meeting is to minister to the other Friends present. To listen to a Friend speak, is to minister to them. For two Friends to sit together in silence is for them to minister to each other. And this sitting and waiting is a coporate activity, it is no meditative withdrawal. The meeting is ended by either an exchange of handshakes, or else the gathered Friends all holding hands. That struck a chord with me, since (as mentioned elsewhere) the only part of the Cathloic Mass that ever meant anything to me was the sign of peace.

And, as well as ministry, Quakers have various "testemonies", essentally ways of living that themselves transmit a godly message. One of these is the peace testemony, which began as a pledge by the Quakers not to take up again the weapons they had used to fight the Civil War, as Parliamentarians, when the Restoration came. It now continues with Quakers acting around the world to promote reconciliation, help rebuild war damaged communities, and perform non-violent direct action against wepons of mass destruction. For which they go to jail.

There's also the testemony of simplicity. One guideline for simple life, mentioned in Quaker Faith and Practice,is to "refuse to be propagandised by the custodians of modern gadgetry" I think that means me, amongst others. Oh well.

QFP is an interesting book. The Quakers have no creed, and while meeting houses always have Bibles to hand for the attending Friends, they have no scripture either. What they do have, in the UK, is Faith and Practice, a book of pleasing heft, containing, uniformly commingled and organised by topic, both anonymous paragraphs specifying, for instance, the responsibilities of meeting house Wardens, and individual, named Quakers' thoughts, ideas and responses to a wide range of events and issues.

It contains, so far as I've seen, few (approaching none) principles of theology, merely the reported thoughts and actions of godly people. Little (ditto) of any theory of moral philosophy, no commandments, no prohibitions, no injunctions, merely the reported thoughts and actions of good people. And so on.

What does it mean to be a Quaker? It means, to answer "yes" when someone asks you: are you a Quaker? It's hard to imagine anyone doing that if they didn't attened Meeting for Worship fairly regularly, if they didn't live a somewhat thoughtful and deliberate life of a certain kind, and so on. Being a Member of the Religious Society of Friends is a different matter, but in practice Montly Meetings (roughly the equivalent of parishes) are composed of Members and "attenders" almost without distinction. Only Members can hold posts that have authority over Society funds, and only Members can discuss applications for membership, but that's it.

There are no sacraments, becoming a Member is a matter of having your application accepted by your local Monthly Meeting, and them entering your name on the roll. That's it. No baptism, by immersion or otherwise, no laying on of hands, no sort of circumcision, physical mental or spiritual, no outward mark, sign or celebration.

The Quakers have their problems. For a long time, both politics and university education (and with that medicine, the law etc.) were denied to all Catholics and Non-conformists in Britain. So, like other isolated religious communities before them, the Quakers turned to commerce. Happily for them, the industrial revolution got underway just in time for many of them to become very, very rich indeed (and to make great strides in the treatment of employees as human beings, not disposable commodoties), and so for a long time the Society of Friends was a relatively rich organisation, and spent a lot of money on a bunch of good stuff. But, for one reason or another, these businesses are no longer in quaker hands, and the Society's income is greatly curtailed. But they carried on spending money on good stuff. Only now the money has nearly run out.

Meanwhile, we watched a video made by the outreach committee. Afterwards we were asked if we had any questions about the Quaker practices shown in it. I observerd that being white and middle-class was a common Quaker practice. The response: that's true, it's a problem, they don't like it, they aren't sure what to do about it.

Brilliant, thanks Keith. Do you know about the importance of the Quaker martyrs, killed at the hands of the Puritans and their embryonic North American State Church, in establishing the principle of religious freedom in what became the USA ? Even the Roman Catholics in the US have something to be thankful for there, if the story I've heard is even remotely accurate.

Yes indeed. There are records of Quakers being thrown out of town and being told that they'd be hanged if they came back, which they promptly did. One such, Mary Dyer, was hanged by the authorities in Massachusetts, which colony had banned Quakerism "on pain of death", after being offered commutation of a death sentence on two separate occaisions, if she would only leave permanently. But she kept coming back. An offical commented "she did hang as a flag for others to take example by", which turned out to be entierly true in a way quite opposite to the intention.

In his prose-poem The Weekender, John Hegley, somewhat of an oblique Christian himself, recounts a train journey taken from Grange-over-Sands to Barrow-in-Furness (coincidentally enough, this is Quaker heartland). He makes this journey in the company of another guest at the hotel, an elderly lady, Mrs Phelps. While waiting at Grange station for the train from Preston, John notes that he "said to Dora that it was a very good sign if people felt relaxed enough to sit reading things together and Dora said she'd appreciate it If I didn't interrupt her while she was reading and she'd prefer it if I called her Mrs Phelps." This is the exact opposite of the deal at a Meeting for Worship. First names are the norm, everyone is welcome to sit together and read or not, and everyone is welcome to "interrupt". It's a commonplace that sometimes the dearest friends don't need to speak, but merely to share each other's silence. With the Friends, that expression of love is avilable to everyone, merely for the asking of it.

One story told at the retreat weekend was from the Warden of Ediburgh Meeting House. One Sunday, it seems, a woman joins the meeting who turns out to be a Jehova's Witness. She stands, and produces five minutes or so of, as it was described, "standard Watchtower stuff". And then she sits down. A little while later, one of the Quakers stands and says: we thank our sister for her ministry. After the meeting she was welcomed and fed tea and buiscuits along with everyone else. Astonishing stuff. Several meetings, even here in whitest Cumbria, have Muslim attenders. Ediburgh Meeting has Bhuddist attenders.

And this brings me to the most remarkable point about the Quakers. They don't have any answers to the problems of your life. They have a rubric under which questions are asked (their presuppositions, I suppose), but no answers. The part of QFP called Advices and Queries begins: Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Later it asks: Do you work gladly with other religious groups? And later still: Do you respect that of God in everyone though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways or be difficult to discern?

Much emphasis thorughout the weekend was put on the fact of each Friend's personal life and spiritual journey. Some are "seekers", and some are "waiters". Some are professing Christians, some take Jesus's life as a pattern and example, some are largely indifferent to the Bible. Part of what would prompt someone to claim to be a Quaker, it was said, is exactly that what the Quakers happen to be right now, well meets the need for spiritual community (whatever that means) that a person experiences right now. It might not have in the past, and may not again in the future, and that's entirely fine.

Indeed, most Quakers today were not born into that church, but have turned to it in adulthood after leaving, or even rejecting, another faith. At the Swarthmoor weekend were attenders and Members who had been variously Anglican choristers, Elder in the URC, and a Baptist minister.

More later

Coincidentally, ps also attended a Quaker meeting for the first time this weekend. "Thoughtful and deliberate" seems quite a fair description of both the proceedings of the meeting and the people who attended.

I say There Are No Coincidences when it comes to anything that might promote more understanding on Why. (That is either a thesis or a statement of desperation. Or both. Perhaps some of the most prophetic statements in the scriptures were both?)

Well then you might enjoy the coincidence that I also attended my first Unitarian service at the weekend too. The occasion of my apology to Keith was the first time I noticed his Belief-o-Matic list which ranks Unitarian Universalism and Liberal Quakerism tops -- those two were the subject of a talk given by a friend at the service.

And what did you think of the Unitarians? As mentioned on Universal Unitarianism, kb came away from his experience with them thoroughly non-plussed.

Me too. Started with my favourite (Protestant) hymn ... I'm not certain, but I think that was the last time God was mentioned. Oh, until the communion service, where practically everyone got up and left, leaving the previously well-camouflaged Catholic observer out to dry with the handful of communicants. Of course the timing was awful -- communion might be only thrice a year, but it had to compete with the world cup final in the hotel next door. My Quaker/Unitarian acquaintance's talk was entitled "Quackers and Loonies" and was about her affection for both traditions.