Watford Quakers

Early in the day, bleary eyed, we eat our croissants in company. Sip our tea, pass the jam, chat about our lives and get to know one another in the things temporal, the ups and downs of our daily lives.

Dipping lengths of wick into hot wax, the young people teach the even younger, or older, how to make candles. They experiment together, mixing colours, using multiple wicks, rolling the still warm candles in their hands, creating together.

Alongside them others make greeting cards that will carry their thoughts to prisoners of conscience around the world. Perhaps, some one among us may do more than this, may go to one of the world’s troubled places and stand alongside the people there.

Still others are making decorations from last year’s cards. Cutting, stapling, smothering the results with glitter and glue. One or two are sitting quietly, looking, really looking, at the twigs and evergreen leaves, maybe drawing what they see.

Then there’s a flurry of activity as we all clear away. The room is transformed; the produce of the morning is in the middle and the chairs in a circle. We all settle in our seats and fall quiet. We go round the circle hearing briefly from each person and then settle into silence. Now we may be aware that we share something else too, not just our food, our daily concerns, our learning and our doing. Beneath and beyond and within all that, there is something more, that connects us and goes beyond us, and, if we listen, may lead us on to …

Stephanie Grant, November 2008

The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 famously stated that “all men are created equal”. It proceeded to explain this as a religious truth from which political structures and ‘inalienable’ human rights were derived. At the time, both women and slaves were evidently excluded from the application of this principle and equality has proved an elusive ideal to live out both before and since. Probably as many have died in wars fought in the name of equality or against it, as have died in the name of religions.

This is a grim paradox when we consider that the belief in equality stems from a conviction that all people have equal spiritual worth. In the language of Quakers, all have “that of God” within them and the capacity to express this in the way we live together – not just in the values, creeds and causes we speak or write about. Such a conviction is often in conflict with the consumer culture and gross inequalities of the world as we find it today.

The corrupting effects of inequality on human relationships can be seen in the attitudes and behaviour that have caused the current world crisis as much as in the desperate actions of dispossessed people at the other end of the economic spectrum. Spiritually the ‘winners’ are as impoverished as the ‘losers’.

To “make the world a better place” we each have to recognise that the power of love is more sustaining and creative than the pursuit of an unequal share of the world’s finite resources. Despite our human fallibility, at some level we all already know this.

Simon Colbeck, reprinted from the Watford Observer

The morning stirs
and struggles to become a day,
accompanied by
engine thrum and the radio man .
I eat buns and apply
stoplight coloured lipstick
behind the wheel.
Kids on bikes glance in as they pass,
“Only someone’s mum” they say.
No magic allowed – it’s term-time
but it happens anyway.
Just above that bus, it’s going on.
The day wins through,
launches itself across our routines.
We don’t notice.
Seen it all before, seen it every day,
it takes big miracles to get us going,
levitation, water into wine, this –
it’s just another sunrise.

Lynn Overington

1. The baker
   selects:
   fatty, sweet, fruity.
2. Mixing bowl
   laid out:
   all sit as equals.
3. Heat comes as
   silence:
   to gently raise us.
4. The steel point
   of words:
   testing the Meeting.
5. A handshake
   cuts it:
   serve results with tea.

Rhiannon, August 2007

She starts with the chores at first sign of light
Then into the fields with basket strapped tight.
She picks all day long in the hot, hot sun
And is wearily glad when the day is done.
Basket heavy with leaves she has picked
Her fingers are sore and her back is ricked.
Her harvest is weighed and she’s paid a pittance
For her sweat and toil it’s poor remittance.
Home and the family meal to prepare
There’s very little – she’s too tired to care.
Evening over, she’s given her best
At last, thank God, she can lie down to rest.
Still she can’t sleep and she wakes with a fright,
Decisions, they haunt her all through the night.
Fees for the school or drugs for the baby
Should it be a little of each maybe?
And what does it taste like? She lies and thinks
These leaves she picks that they turn into drinks.
She dreams one day her children might know
Schooled and healthy, they could prosper and grow.
Who, on earth, can make her dream come true?
If we shop with care, then it’s me and you.

CJP 2006