Readers may have noticed that our pre-BYM issue of 23 May suddenly reverted to 16 May on reaching page 15, where the advertisements from the previous week were repeated. None of us noticed this and there's no explanation other than communal amnesia in the editorial office approaching BYM. Apologies.

Labels: errors

We suspect some lateral thinking behind the delightful presentation of YM epistles by Gerard Benson (from which we print some extracts on page 12).
Gerard, who was an actor in his working life, beguiled BYM with a charmingly edited pastiche of epistles from around the world. This is an enjoyable, uplifting - and possibly diplomatic - way to present material which can sometimes be culturally variable and uncomfortable for us in Britain.

Labels: epistles

A reader identified the wildflower we pictured last week which Chuck saw on his visit to the Quaker centre at Congenies, France. What was it? Margaret Bennett was able to tell Chuck that it was valerian.

Labels: chuck fager

As we introduced our BYM production of Two Caravans (which played to a packed house) we heard of another Friendly theatre group called Plain Quakers, which is going to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. PQ, as they call themselves, is a new company supported by High Flatts Quaker Meeting in West Yorkshire. Their Fringe production is On Human Folly, an 'ironic commentary' on John Woolman's travels in England. What would the radical Woolman make of Samuel Galton, the firearms manufacturer who was eventually turfed out of the Society? The actors ask some uncomfortable questions of their modern audience. Mike Casey and Arthur Pritchard, clerk of Quaker Outreach Yorkshire, take to the stage and ask: 'what did you do when you realised greed was killing the world?' Eye looks forward to this production at the Edinburgh Meeting House (Venue 40) on 18-23 August.

Labels: edinburgh, theatre, two caravans

Chuck Fager entertained us all with his two special interest sessions. He intrigued our Friend audience by pointing out that pyramidal structures and central authority had outlived their purpose. He foresees a much looser and immediate global connection for Friends in the future. So persevere with your computer.

Labels: chuck fager, quaker.britainym, technology

Outdoor carousing (and dining) was a casualty at BYM this year as the spring bank holiday delivered its usual baptismal downpour (but not in the north, where the editor's home town was bathed in sunshine, to her obvious annoyance).
But you can't suppress a tuneful Quaker and so events moved indoors and on Monday lunchtime the Small Meeting House rang to the melodious sounds of Sing in the Spirit. Friends had to travel to Friends House in driving rain on Sunday and arrived with their cagoules dripping. FH staff provided a welcome service drying out umbrellas.

Labels: quaker.britainym, singing

You can follow the Friend at Britain Yearly Meeting on twitter.

Look for 'quakers'

Labels: quaker.britainym, twitter

We broke one of our own rules of journalism recently when we said that we never heard Quakers on Thought for the Day (the rules are to never say that it is a first, or an exclusive, or that it doesn't happen anywhere). Since then a trickle of Friendly broadcasters from around the country have reminded us of their regular radio ministering. The latest to let us know is Ruth Pilkington of Jersey Meeting. Friends do a regular 'God slot' on Radio Jersey and are shaping up for one in National Quaker Week. Ruth urges Friends around the country to approach the local radio station for, as she rightly points out, Quakers get overlooked as 'silent' when it comes to faith broadcasting. It also seems that the local paper has a 'faith' page. That's unique - but we mustn't say that!

Labels: thought for the day

Here's a little story for Friends to reflect on as they contemplate Britain Yearly Meeting.
A reader tells us that he heard a compelling ministry recently at a Meeting he attended. The ministering Friend related how, having a concern, he found himself in a very large and very empty Catholic church, where he sat with his thoughts. A worshipper entered and lit a candle, which persuaded the Friend to stay. He again felt that he might be in the right place when he saw the priest and so stayed for the following mass. During the sermon, the priest told this story. A man was driving a car when he saw three people at a bus stop: an elderly woman who looked ill and in need of medical attention; an old friend of the man; and the third person was a woman who he felt sure would be his ideal lifetime partner. What should he do? He gave the car keys to his friend asking him to drive the elderly lady to hospital and then he made the acquaintance of the potential partner.
Our reader points out that a general perception is that saying yes to one thing means having to say no to something else. 'This ministry shows that with lateral thinking', muses our reader, 'going round the edge of a situation, or parallel to it, there can be another way'.

Labels: lateral thinking

Our BYM speaker Chuck Fager is no stranger to controversy or facing the consequences of 'speaking truth to power'. Our American Friend has 'form'. In the 1960s civil rights campaign he worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (run by Martin Luther King, Jr.) and on three occasions was arrested - spending one night in a cell with Martin Luther King.
Chuck has had a interesting career. He has travelled around the USA, writing and studying and, after spending some years at Harvard Divinity School in the late 1960s, he turned to writing full-time and spent the next decade as a freelance, often publishing in the alternative press.
In the mid-1980s Chuck took one of those lateral routes writers sometimes find attractive - he joined the postal service and delivered mail! But the books kept coming, fiction as well as non-fiction. He worked at Pendle Hill for a time. At present he is the director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a frontline Friends' peace witness project.
Chuck's focus in the past few years has been liberal Quakerism and its development. But the main thrust of his talk for us at BYM is the future for Quakers and how it may be shaped by the inter-weaving model structures of the world wide web. Any reader at BYM caring to go along to the Drayton Room at 5.45pm on Saturday 24 May can be assured of a riveting experience and Chuck positively welcomes interaction. And you can also hear about another of his concerns at a BYM special interest group meeting with the Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture, on Sunday 25 May at 1pm in B19, Drayton House.

Labels: chuck fager, torture, yearly meeting

Edrey Allott of Bath Local Meeting was baffled to read the word 'biogas' in the Friend (25 April). Is the singular 'bioga'? (Sounds like something from Harry Potter to us.) Edrey produced this little tongue-in-cheek ditty:

Just what is a bioga?
And what is its shape and size?
Is it a large wild animal
With black and staring eyes?
Is it a robe-like toga
Or a lengthy period of time?
Is it a coin of small value
Like a farthing or dime?
I read in the Friend it is needed
In China, a vital resource,
But what is this strange new substance?
Oh - it's bio-gas of course!

Labels: green, poetry

We asked if any reader had seen the National Theatre play Fram, which includes a cameo of the Quaker international relief worker Ruth Fry. There were mixed reviews. We have heard from Grace Blaker, who felt positive about this story of polar explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, who made a bid for the north pole in 1890.
'I don't go to the theatre for the expected', Grace writes. 'I want to be surprised and this play did that. Tony Harrison's gift for power writing, bringing to life historic characters and having them grapple with issues that remain contemporary, created a play with a depth that is totally relevant today.'

Labels: theatre

We realise now that there are quite a few Friends around the country broadcasting the regional equivalent of Thought for the Day. The latest to reach us is our former editor Harry Albright, who broadcasts a monthly 'Thought' for BBC Radio Leicester and has done so for ten years.

Labels: thought for the day

Another ironic story - although not necessarily about human rights, or even Quakers, is the experience of the reverend John Lee, rector of St Paul's church, York, who was preaching recently on theft based on Ephesians 4:28* when what the tabloids would call 'cheeky' thieves lifted two laptops from a back office. There seems to be a lot of interest amongst the criminal fraternity these days in computers with databases, and this ecclesiastical hardware contained important training material. The laptops belonged to youth and children's workers. We understand there were some nice family photos on them too.
*'He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work' - or 'get a job' in current parlance.

Labels: human rights, technology

Eye doesn't have much to say about human rights (except they are a good thing).
So we have been scratching our heads to find something ironically human - as is our brief for this column - to impart to readers. But a little story we heard in conversation with Rachel Brett, our Quaker UN representative for human rights and refugees, seems to fit the Eye criteria.
It has a David and Goliath flavour. A Turkish shepherd has taken his government to the European Court of Human Rights because he was forced to do military service at the age of seventy-one. Why was an elderly agricultural worker snatched from the hills and put in a military camp to train with fit twenty year-olds? You may well ask, as did Hamdi Tastan, the shepherd. The answer is, his neighbours ratted on him.
Hamdi told the court that he had been a shepherd since childhood. He worked for his local village in exchange for a roof over his head in winter, clothes and food. When he stopped this arrangement, explaining that his wife had died in childbirth (we assume that he had a much younger wife), the villagers took umbrage. They knew he had never registered for military service and denounced him as a deserter. With neighbours like these, who needs enemies?
Poor Hamdi suffered in camp, speaking only Kurdish and having no teeth. The extreme cold of the camp landed him in hospital suffering heart and lung problems, although his health had been robust out on the hills. Eye feels he must have been coaxed into taking this litigious route but we are glad he did. The court ruled that what happened amounted to degrading treatment under Article 3 (and Article 13) of the European Convention on Human Rights and awarded him 5,000 euros damages with 1,000 euros costs. Now that's what we call a result.

Labels: conscientious objection, human rights, Turkey

We feel something - someone - is missing from this 'cheerful' issue. We have been looking at violence and conflict from the human perspective - but what about our fur and feather friends? Eye has been reading some fascinating material about what academics call 'non-human animals' and we see there are wonderful lessons to be learned in the matter of conflict resolution.
We would direct readers with a love of animals to the work of Frans de Waal, a psychologist and primatologist, who has written learned but popular books even accessible to Eye. They have intriguing titles such as Chimpanzee Politics and Peacemaking among Primates.

The clever professor is a pioneer in studying the emotional and social lives of animals. Early in his career in the Netherlands, Frans worked on aggression but found he was more interested in what happened after fights.
'I got interested in seeing these fights going on in a group of primates and then seeing that fifteen minutes later everyone settled down' he said during an interview for the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. 'I got puzzled by how they built aggression into their social life.'

After fights, chimps kiss and make up, and there are similar 'reconciliations' among other primates. Such behaviour was spotted first at Arnhem Zoo but researchers have now refined their methods of observation and realise that conflict resolution is widespread. In one study of chimps, former antagonists were attracted to each other after fighting. The researchers believe that chimps show one of the highest conciliatory tendencies among primates. Frans de Waal says information from primatology is relevant when studying violence between people.


To take this theme further Eye has two stories. One concerns a cat called Lilly, who was the companion of Eliza Johnston. Eliza attended Hampstead Meeting. For many years she was in and out of hospital suffering the disastrous effects of bipolar disorder (manic depression). Then, in 1998, Eliza acquired Lilly from the Battersea home for cats and dogs. When Lilly stepped out of her box into her new home 'I got a wonderful sense of a beautiful white light spirit arriving with her.' It was the start of a ten-year relationship in which Lilly rekindled a sense of responsibility in her owner. ‘She gave me a way to learn how to look after myself by caring for her,' says Eliza. 'The thought that I could be sectioned, leaving her alone, possibly left to die, compelled me to stay well.' When Lilly did eventually die, Eliza says she was able to mourn for her companion without being overwhelmed. (We hope to bring you the story of Lilly in a later Friend).

Our second tale is of Molly Brown, a 'love dog'. Molly was the best friend of a professor of philosophy, Anne Benvenuti. In writing of her relationship with the brown and white Jack Russell (in Presence, the international journal of spiritual direction), Anne says 'the most important, immediate and shocking thing I learned when I met baby Molly was that I had a heart.' The dog, she said, prepared her heart for human habitation, and opened the entire non-human world to her awareness. '...we cannot be human without the guidance and support of the nonhuman world,' she concluded.

It seems to us that communing with animals can play a big part in reducing tension and violence in humans.