Carol Saker
Our event team started to plan the Retreat day, and the Quaker legacy element fell to me. I felt we should ground our day in tracing our roots and their evolution through the centuries by way of the wise sayings and writings of our forebears, from our 17th century beginnings to the present.
I went back to one of the earliest Swarthmore lectures, Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience written by William Charles Braithwaite in 1909. This was a time of renaissance
within Quakerism, inspired by John Wilhelm Rowntree. The Swarthmore lectures were part of this, as were the inauguration of Woodbrooke college and other ventures. All had the purpose of bringing Quakerism into the 20th century and reinvigorating it for the youth and the younger generation.
I was struck by a reference to Edward Grubb within the 1909 lecture. Grubb was a British Quaker, a prolific religious author of the early 20th century, a social reformer, and an absolute pacifist. He particularly impressed Braithwaite with his suggestion that the Light Within is just as much a human faculty as is reason. Grubb had realised that the young were at a loss because of the breakdown of outward authority, and he wanted to encourage young people to trust more fully in the inward authority. His Authority and the Light Within had just been published in 1908. Braithwaite referred to Grubb’s distinction between outward authority (practices, rules, laws) and inward authority (morality, conscience, spirituality). Grubb believed inward authority came from God and becomes our guide through life: “in the depth of every person the divine and the human meet”.
Now we had the title for our Retreat! The remaining work on this element of the day was to carefully select from the first two generations of early Quakers’ wisdoms, add 18th century American reformer John Woolman, and then marry the Quaker Renaissance with the post-WWI Quaker thinkers such as Rufus Jones and Kenneth Boulding. Next we would bring in some of our 21st century doubts by drawing on Ben Pink Dandelion’s The Quakers (2008) and his 2014 Swarthmore Lecture Open for Transformation. And finally, we all agreed to end with a final contemporary quotation from Thomas Penny’s thought-provoking 2021 Swarthmore lecture Kinder Ground: Creating Space for Truth, with its absolutely up to date focus on truth.
These fifteen or so extracts were displayed on the walls of the Meeting House and remained there the next day for Sunday worship, so hopefully they have reached a wider audience than the Retreat participants. Though I couldn’t be present at the end of the Retreat because of ill health, I was very much there in spirit ‘from a deep place in the heart’.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 512 • December 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW