Denise Cullington

So, when we write something, we want to be able to reach others. I’m writing to let Friends
know that two books I wrote earlier are now in the library at 43. You may be interested to
know of them. Both bring psychoanalytic ideas in relation to everyday life, for the
everyday reader. And I think Quakers will find much that resonates. The approach is not a
spiritual one, but one that attends to the unconscious in ways that I think many of us will
recognise and may find useful. The ideas are Quakerly in that they concern what we all
grapple with; unwanted and painful feelings such as sadness, anger, vulnerability, jealousy,
hatred and self-hatred- which when we push them aside can also have their own
impact on us.
The first book, Breaking Up Blues is, like it says on the tin, about breakup and divorce, about
guilt and grief, wish to blame, about the addictiveness of battles – and all that can get in the
way of moving on and parenting well for the future. The second, The Rough Beast:
Psychoanalysis in Everyday Life, stemmed from my pleasure in writing the first, and my
feeling that analysts are generally lousy at writing for the general reader, and what a
loss that is, because some of the ideas are powerful and useful. You can find the first
chapter of both books on the Amazon Look Inside page (sorry), and the many reviews.

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

• March 2023
• Washing in Winter
• Children and Young People and Families Update
• Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
• Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
• A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
• Call for a Counsellor
• Oxford Quakers on Art
• Book Review: For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain
• All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
• EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
• Monthly Appeal – March 2023
• Britain Yearly Meeting
• How Do Quaker Meetings Do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
• Meetings for Worship – March 2023
• From Quaker Faith and Practice
• SERVING OUTSIDE THE QUAKER COMMUNITY
• Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer – March 2023
• Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers

The Office

Have you got one of these which you don’t need?
We are short of key cards to issue. If you have one you don’t use please return it to the office. We can always give you the code to the key box if you are only needing occasional access to 43. Many thanks.

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

• March 2023
• Washing in Winter
• Children and Young People and Families Update
• Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
• Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
• A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
• Call for a Counsellor
• Oxford Quakers on Art
• Book Review: For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain
• All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
• EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
• Monthly Appeal – March 2023
• Britain Yearly Meeting
• How Do Quaker Meetings Do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
• Meetings for Worship – March 2023
• From Quaker Faith and Practice
• SERVING OUTSIDE THE QUAKER COMMUNITY
• Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer – March 2023
• Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting

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Back to March 2023 Newsletter Main Page

Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers

Alan Jiang

I’m Alan, and I’ve been a regular attendee at the Young Adult Friends meeting since 2018. I came to Oxford for my undergraduate degree, and ended up making the city my home. Like quite a few of the Quakers I’ve met, I have embarked on a journey as a therapist, and it’s with that hat on that I’m putting out the following call:

I volunteer for a charity in Bicester, Nai’s House, which gives mental health support to young people (up to age 25, roughly). We’re looking for a qualified counsellor to volunteer 4-6 hours a week, supporting the other volunteer counsellors and doing assessments for potential clients. It’s a small and relatively new charity, so the position can only be voluntary.  However, it is a fantastic charity that does really crucial work, in an area that generally suffers from a lack of available services. It is not just counselling on offer, as the charity also provides crisis support for people with suicidal urges, along with other holistic treatments like massages and art therapy. We work closely with schools and get a large number of referrals from CAMHS.

Please could you send this out to anyone you know, who might be able to help out? They could either reply to me or contact the founder, Gem, directly (gem@naishouse.org.uk).

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

• March 2023
• Washing in Winter
• Children and Young People and Families Update
• Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
• Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
• A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
• Call for a Counsellor
• Oxford Quakers on Art
• Book Review: For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain
• All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
• EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
• Monthly Appeal – March 2023
• Britain Yearly Meeting
• How Do Quaker Meetings Do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
• Meetings for Worship – March 2023
• From Quaker Faith and Practice
• SERVING OUTSIDE THE QUAKER COMMUNITY
• Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer – March 2023
• Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting

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Back to March 2023 Newsletter Main Page

Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers

Julia Dallaway

On a Friday evening in late January, I had the privilege of presenting my writing to the Oxford Friends’ writers’ group, led by Stephen Yeo. This setting provided the rare opportunity for me to discuss both my academic writing and my creative writing, which I view as deeply intertwined with each other. I read aloud two pieces of work: a creative essay entitled ‘The Great Revelation’ (published in 2021 in Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith), followed by an academic paper called ‘Shimmer and Decay: Joan Didion’s Image-Based Life-Writing Essays’ (which I recently presented at Oxford’s English Faculty).

Despite their contrasting writing styles, these two pieces shared the same preoccupation with narrative, especially the ways we impose narrative structure upon our life experiences. The first essay was autobiographical, recounting my own religious journey through evangelicalism and then Quakerism. The essay describes how, after a transformative experience, I committed with zeal to the evangelical faith and the tight “before and after” structure of its salvation narratives (or “testimonies”). In the words of the essay: ‘I found a single seam down the centre of my life and unpicked all the other threads’. When that “before and after” story began to ring false, because overly simplistic, I turned to the wordlessness of Quakerism:

I lost my story. Four years on and in a different city, my faith had crawled through long tunnels of doubt and emerged as something tentative and new. On brisk Thursday mornings in the husk of winter, I got up in the dark, walked a couple of streets, and sat down in a small circle of bodies with a single candle at our centre. I sat there in my patch of darkness, relieved to be free of expectations. The room was walled with glass and looked out onto a garden, and during the half-hour of the silent Quaker meeting, the shadow cast by the candle dwindled and the room filled up with sun.

Later, I learned about apophatic spirituality: truth that is found where language becomes undone.

The religious journey told in this essay is also a literary one, as my spiritual shifts occurred in parallel with my first encounters with the modernist literature of the early twentieth century, by writers such as Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Modernism’s innovative literary forms, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel or the associatively-structured essay, offered me a more satisfying representation of the complexity of life experience.  

In my subsequent academic paper, I applied the same ideas about narrative to a very different—although perhaps similarly disorientating—experience: the essayist Joan Didion’s experience of the counterculture movement in 1960s America. Faced with the chaos of her contemporary society, Didion suggests that snapshot-style images could be the most authentic way of representing life. She rejects storytelling as ‘the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images’ and instead grounds her writing in ‘images that shimmer around the edges’. This paper looked at Didion’s recurring images of “shimmering”, and how they might relate to diverse aspects of her personal and historical context, from migraine auras to hallucinogenic drugs to Cold War nuclear anxiety.  

My two readings led to some surprising responses (people unanimously favoured the creative piece) and a nuanced discussion on how less-privileged classes in society, without access to modernist formal innovations, may in fact find narrative liberating in certain ways. I am grateful for the many perspectives offered, which will undoubtedly feed back into my doctoral thesis and creative work.   

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

• March 2023
• Washing in Winter
• Children and Young People and Families Update
• Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
• Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
• A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
• Call for a Counsellor
• Oxford Quakers on Art
• Book Review: For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain
• All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
• EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
• Monthly Appeal – March 2023
• Britain Yearly Meeting
• How Do Quaker Meetings Do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
• Meetings for Worship – March 2023
• From Quaker Faith and Practice
• SERVING OUTSIDE THE QUAKER COMMUNITY
• Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer – March 2023
• Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers

Karima Brooke

Let’s not wait any longer,
let’s hang out the washing!
Voices of doubt say: ‘But you’re almost
drowning in snow’.
Voices of caution say: ‘Not even the birds
are out today’.
The trees are stark naked
and will remain so
for a long, long, time.

We, the optimists say: ‘Look
how bright our clothes are
against the snow’.
If we hang out the washing,
then the Wind will come.
If we hang out the washing,
the Sun will surely come,
because the Wind and Sun
like to play Hide and Seek,
especially in Winter.

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This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

• March 2023
• Washing in Winter
• Children and Young People and Families Update
• Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
• Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
• A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
• Call for a Counsellor
• Oxford Quakers on Art
• Book Review: For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain
• All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
• EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
• Monthly Appeal – March 2023
• Britain Yearly Meeting
• How Do Quaker Meetings Do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
• Meetings for Worship – March 2023
• From Quaker Faith and Practice
• SERVING OUTSIDE THE QUAKER COMMUNITY
• Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer – March 2023
• Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting

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Back to March 2023 Newsletter Main Page

Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers

 

Julia Dover

As the days soften and lengthen, as the sap begins to run, we enter the time of Wonder for OSAM Friends.

Wonder is defined as “a feeling of amazement and admiration caused by something beautiful, remarkable and new”; Wonder summons our rapt attention and well of deep emotion: the sight of a comet in the night sky, on its journey from some unfathomable place. The tender, wordless expression of love. The kindness of strangers. A simple joy of being alive in the present moment, engaging with the world around us as if for the first time. The return of swallows in spring… on and on.

Expressions of wonder are infinite; its felt experience is generous, liberating, beyond time (and often language), and our birthright as living beings on the planet.

The children in our midst are mirrors of our own inner capacity to experience wonder. The Wonder Days series of year-long activities in OSAM celebrate how we connect to each other through the qualities we associate with children but are integral to each of us regardless of age:

Matthew 18, Verses 2-4:

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

The all-aged attunement to wonder kicks off in Oxford Meeting with the making of a ‘Wonder Box’ by children, which they will introduce to the adult Friends at Meeting for Worship on 26 February. Friends of all stripes are invited to write their responses to the question “What makes your heart sing?” on paper hearts, to add to the Wonder Box. The box will be in situ in the Oxford Meeting House (so you can add your singing hearts) until 11 March, where it will be taken to Burford Area Meeting. There, Friends from all parts of OSAM will add their singing hearts to the Wonder Box.

These collected singing hearts will inspire a series of all aged (beyond age!) ‘Wonder Days’ across the year and the region which draw Friends together in different ways through the experience of awe.

Other activities and dates to note:

‘Tea, Cake, and Play’ is now a lively weekly happening for parents, grandparents, guardians, and toddlers from across the city, held at Oxford Meeting House each Tuesday 10:00-12:00. The playful energy the families bring to the MH is a gift.

A core group of volunteer Friends is needed to co-run the group- serving refreshments, greeting participants – so the group can flourish. Please get in touch if interested. I offer full training, inspiration, and guidance to volunteers to support the group’s evolution.

Sharing Stories: Quaker Outreach Afternoon, Sibford School. Thursday 15 June 2023
13:30-15:30

OSAM Friends are invited to spend a June afternoon with primary- aged children at Sibford School, where pupils will practise their interviewing skills with Friends, and all will discover what they have in common regardless of age. Shared afternoon tea is a highlight. It would be brilliant if enough Friends participate so each can buddy up with a pupil one to one. Please contact me by 1 April with interest (all visitors to Sibford School must have a DBS certificate).

Speaking of Sibford School, on 5 July I will join the team of tutors at Woodbrooke to co-facilitate a day for Sibford Year 7 pupils.

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

• March 2023
• Washing in Winter
• Children and Young People and Families Update
• Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
• Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
• A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
• Call for a Counsellor
• Oxford Quakers on Art
• Book Review: For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain
• All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
• EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
• Monthly Appeal – March 2023
• Britain Yearly Meeting
• How Do Quaker Meetings Do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
• Meetings for Worship – March 2023
• From Quaker Faith and Practice
• SERVING OUTSIDE THE QUAKER COMMUNITY
• Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer – March 2023
• Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting

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Back to March 2023 Newsletter Main Page

Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers

Click to Download March 2023 PDF Version

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Children and Young People and Families Update
Julia Dover

As the days soften and lengthen, as the sap begins to run, we enter the time of Wonder for OSAM Friends.

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Washing in Winter
Carol Lange

A poem.

 

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A Talk on the ‘Failure of Narrative’
Julia Dallaway

Despite their contrasting writing styles, these two pieces shared the same preoccupation with narrative, especially the ways we impose narrative structure upon our life experiences. 

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Call for a Counsellor
Alan Jiang

I volunteer for a charity in Bicester, Nai’s House, which gives mental health support to young people (up to age 25, roughly).

 

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Please Return Spare SALTO Key Cards
The Office

Have you got one of these which you don’t need?

 

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Quaker Resonances in Psychoanalytic Thinking
Denise Cullington

When we write something, we want to be able to reach others.

 

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All-Age Worship: Sunday 5 March
Matthew Gee

Our next all-age meeting for worship will be on Sunday 5 March as part of the 10:30 single meeting for worship.

 

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Monthly Appeal March 2023
Gwithian Doswell

The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) supports ordinary people to live in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

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EAPPI UK & Ireland are Recruiting for their Next Cohort of Human Rights Monitors!
Gwithian Doswell

Consider applying or help us spread the word!

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Post of Deputy General Manager Oxford Quaker Meeting
Jacqui Mansfield
Meeting House Manager

Oxford and Swindon Area Quaker Meeting are seeking to appoint a Deputy General Manager to work alongside the General Manager.

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For Thy Great Pain have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie
Nicole Gilroy

For a borderline atheist in lifetime recovery from an extreme Roman Catholic upbringing I do have a rather soft spot for medieval East Anglian Christianity.

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Britain Yearly Meeting
Judith Atkinson

Britain Yearly Meeting is the central body for all Friends in Britain and serves to keep us in touch with the many and varied things which are happening at different levels of the Society.

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Oxford Quakers on Art
Trio Watson

So last week’s meeting for worship, where many ministries responded to my initial one about Good Art, was a real flagship meeting.

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How do Quaker Meetings do Outreach and Welcome Newcomers?
QuakerSpeak

This summer we traveled to New England Yearly Meeting and asked Quakers from all over the region: how does your meeting do outreach? How do you welcome newcomers?

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Serving Outside the Quaker Community QuakerSpeak

I am very, very happy to know that where I worship speaks to many, many aspects of a community that is in need, that is in harm’s way, who are threatened, and that’s just how we put our faith in action.

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Oxford Meeting Quaker and Answer
Luke Young

Luke Young is currently completing his PhD in English at Oriel College. He works on literary style and political thought in the Twentieth Century essay.

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From Quaker Faith & Practice 12.01

Loving care is not something that those sound in mind and body ‘do’ for others but a process that binds us together.

 

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Meetings for Worship
March 2023

 

 

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 527 • March 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

Copyright 2023, Oxford Quakers