Photo: Marisa Johnson.
Open season: Joseph Jones talks to Marisa Johnson, clerk to Britain Yearly Meeting trustees
‘I was asked to serve, and I said yes.’
You’re almost halfway through your term as clerk to Britain Yearly Meeting trustees. How has it been going?
Surprisingly well. I was very surprised to be asked. I thought that being in my late sixties, and a white middle-class woman, would be against everything we were trying to do in terms of bringing some diversity into the group. But younger Friends have a lot of demands on their lives – young families, careers, elderly parents, and local Quaker commitments – so I could see that I at least had time to offer. Some experience as well.
So I accepted service, and one of the most pleasant realisations I had was just how diverse the trustee body actually is. It’s more diverse than many of the other Quaker committees and institutions that I am involved with, locally as well as nationally, or internationally. My assistant clerk is in their very early twenties and it’s an absolute joy to work together. Considering our different generations, we do appear to be two souls that resonate. And there is a great deal more experience and diversity within the body of trustees, which I find inspiring.
The committee changes quite a lot every year, but even so, it feels a very cohesive group. Very focused, with a great deal of wisdom and experience in it. So it’s been a very, very positive experience from that point of view.
The bit I have struggled with is the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, which is so prevalent among Friends. You know, these continuous insinuations that somehow there is a group of people, an elite within the Yearly Meeting, that is out of touch with what’s going on at Local and Area Meeting level. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each and every one of us is first and foremost a local Friend, attached to a Local Meeting, where we have responsibilities. I’m in my sixth year of being clerk of my Area Meeting. I’m a pastoral Friend in my Local Meeting. I am as well versed in the Local and Area Meeting levels as anybody.
It’s the converse that is true: there are a lot of Friends who don’t look beyond their Local Meeting, and don’t take an interest in what goes on at Yearly Meeting. But this is not the kind of problem that gets recognised, and those Friends don’t get the same snidey asides.
I have to say that I have stood up to that. I will not accept these kinds of insinuations. If Friends appoint us, then it behoves them to support us. We only serve for a limited amount of time, and anybody within the Yearly Meeting can be asked to do this job. I would not have applied for it if it had been advertised. I was asked to serve, and I said yes, because I didn’t really have any good reason for saying no. But it is really, really important to me to be clear that this distinction between Friends House and everybody else is totally false. And it needs to be challenged.
You’ve been very robust on that when you’ve talked about it at Yearly Meeting or Meeting for Sufferings. What do you think accounts for it?
It’s the idolatry of individualism – the shadow side of our commitment to equality. It’s a sad reflection on how we have enthroned the small self, when we should all be part of a community that is committed to following the greater Self, which I’m quite comfortable calling ‘God’. Sometimes we do not really accept discipline, which is discipleship, the setting aside of one’s own personal will and preferences and foibles and accepting the guidance that we discern together. We pay lip service to it. But as soon as goes against our own personal, little selves, we baulk at it. It’s a sad thing.
You started by saying that the trustees are more diverse than other committees within the Society. When some people hear that, they hear ‘metropolitan’, or whatever that is code for, and feel that it’s unrepresentative. As you’ve said, it does mean that trustees are a different group of Friends than you might find in your average Meeting…
It’s because the nominations process has deliberately sought to increase the representation of those groups of people who were (and are) under-represented in our community. We say that we want to change, and to be more inclusive. Well, that’s got to start at every level.
I know that there is an antipathy from some people to the very idea that we have trustees, but we have always had a body of people who had to be delegated to make decisions on behalf of the Yearly Meeting. When that body was Meeting for Sufferings, it did not have, by all accounts, an easier ride than we are having now.
‘What have I got to bring? Only being open to guidance.’
It’s the very concept of having any sort of leadership that Friends find difficult. Personally, I’m not wedded to any particular form of governance. But if we don’t have it in some form, nothing is going to happen. Nobody is going to take responsibility for anything. Nobody is going to be accountable for anything. So whether you want to have it one way or another way, I don’t mind. But whatever it is that we have set up, we have to honour it and make it work.
And because we are the sort of organisation that we are, anybody can be asked to be a trustee. I mean, I was asked. Goodness knows I was not expecting it. But another problem is that very few people say yes, because of the sort of flack that they see these bodies getting.
Perhaps the feeling is that not anybody could be asked. We’re not pulling names out of a hat, it’s a system of nominations and discernment…
But no one person has to have all the characteristics that are needed. We’ve had people with very different kinds of experience. One of the things I thought would have disqualified me is that I’ve never run a large organisation. My predecessor had huge experience of managerial responsibility. I didn’t. I’ve only ever run very small organisations. So the idea that, for example, I should be the line manager of the recording clerk was very daunting to me. What have I got to bring to that? Only being open to guidance, being open to being supported, being open to learning. And that is what is needed. There’ll be some people who are experienced in accounts, or property, or investment, but first and foremost we have to look at our spiritual capital, and what we bring by way of being faithful. That is the requirement. And I would hope that any Friend would be able to offer that.
We employ a large number of people with experience in particular areas, and bring a lot of wisdom with them. I’m not there to duplicate that, I’m there to test it and to ask questions. It’s a good thing not to know everything: to learn you need to ask questions. So it’s about creating working relationships that are respectful and constructive.
You used the word ‘leadership’. Does it feel like leadership?
Oh, absolutely. But there are many forms of leadership, and I don’t aspire to anything ‘top down’. I think of it like midwifery. It’s the art of making something safe, but you don’t take away from the person – the people, the body – who are actually doing the creative work.
Given the way you’ve talked about how openness to the Spirit is essential to your role, perhaps we could step back a bit and talk about how you got there. Where does your spiritual journey start?
I was brought up in Italy as a Roman Catholic, because that’s what you are there. But I had a very conflictual relationship with my faith of origin. It was important to me, but I was also a bit rebellious in terms of the teaching. When I came to live in London… it was like the whole world was there. What were these Protestants about? And other faiths; I’d never come across anybody who wasn’t Christian before. I suddenly had access to so much, learning about Hinduism and Judaism and Sufism. But I also missed having a community, a place to go and to be part of. And it was very difficult to identify where that should be. I tended to go to the church nearest to where I lived, and we did find very supportive communities there as my young family was developing. But then we happened to be going to a very evangelical church at the time of the first gulf war. I was very distressed by the fact that our nation was being an aggressor towards another nation. I remember listening to the news bulletin during the night when it started and being really, really upset. But when I went to church it was like nothing was happening. I had dear relatives and friends who died in that time who were agnostics or atheists. I was being asked to believe that God had no room for them. And I just couldn’t believe that. If God is merciful and infinite, it doesn’t matter whether somebody believes or not. It’s whether they have lived a life that can be affirmed.
So I stopped going… and then I missed the fellowship. I missed the community. Then somebody suggested I try the Quakers, who were just up the road. So I turned up with the whole of my family, all four of us. The rest is history.
The interesting thing for me was that while Quakers allow this breadth of theological belief, there is a commitment to actually living it out day to day, and not just on Sunday. That was a big challenge to me, and something I took very seriously. And it led me to all sorts of experiences. For instance, serving as an ecumenical accompanier in occupied Palestine in 2005/06. That was a really, really huge spiritually formative experience for me. Then I was secretary to the Europe and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation for twelve years. That introduced me to Quakerism in a very different way, understanding how different Yearly Meetings can be from each other. You know, you don’t have to go very far. Ireland Yearly Meeting is so different from Britain Yearly Meeting, then all the other European Yearly Meetings… let alone going beyond to the other sections.
At the World Conference in Kabarak and then the World Plenary in Peru, the diversity of Quaker experience and Quaker expression blew my mind. It gave me a sense of needing to be more ecumenical. There was me thinking I had left Christianity behind when, very definitely, I moved to a position of being more Christian as a Quaker than ever I was as a Christian before being Quaker. So I’ve travelled in the opposite direction to many Friends in Britain, who start in a theistic environment and become nontheist. I’ve come to appreciate a more personal godly presence in my life.
But I don’t see that as being a problem. I look at the mystical traditions that talk of the via positiva and the via negativa. The via positiva, which affirms God, and the via negativa, which denies God for the sake of God. Those two things, I think, are woven with each other, and I’ve experienced both in my own life.
It’s interesting that you frame your theism as if it might be a problem.
Well, we’re talking about an ultra-liberal Britain Yearly Meeting…
And what effect do you think it has on us here, that there’s less theism?
I think people have to maintain their own integrity. If people find certain concepts difficult and cannot believe in them, then they need to have the space to say, it’s OK. If we are in an environment where we can actually talk to each other, and share our experiences with each other, then there is room for movement, there is room for understanding things for which we did not have the words.
People have less trouble understanding ‘Spirit’, because that’s the energy that gives us life. My concept of God is Life with a capital L: life in all its forms, life in all its abundance, and the creative power that can bring new things out of nothing, and can bring healing out of terrible brokenness.
Do you believe in the devil, too?
I don’t believe in the devil, but I do believe that evil is real. And there is a concept of evil that sees it as a hole in a sock, it’s an absence. And in that absence, all sorts of darkness can take hold. I’m aware of evil in all its sad manifestations. You don’t serve as a magistrate on a bench for thirty-two years without seeing what human beings can do to each other.
‘I became more Christian as a Quaker than ever I was as a Christian before being Quaker.’
I was saying to my spiritual director the other day that I found Easter very difficult this year. I think I’m stuck on Good Friday, because all I can see is the ongoing crucifixion of Christ everywhere. And I am really, really stuck with the grief of it. I’m not able to just move on in a couple of days into the joy of Easter, and the overcoming of death and evil. It feels facile and it feels false. And so we talked about what we do with that. And I think we stay at the tomb until the stone gets rolled. It’s not been rolled yet for me.
People can forget Easter Saturday, can’t they? The harrowing of hell. But I want to talk about how it fits with you being a magistrate. It must feel very satisfying, dispensing justice. You get to say what the right thing is that ought to happen here, and then move on. But much of the other injustice we’ve been talking about, global injustices, conflict around the world, you don’t get to dispense justice. I wonder how those two things play together, for you.
First of all, law and justice are not necessarily the same thing. Applying the law is not always the best way to serve justice. But sometimes that’s all you have. And there are very, very stringent rules, which I find helpful – the fact that we sit as three people, and so even as the presiding magistrate, it’s not necessarily my opinion that counts. If my two colleagues have a different opinion, I have to put aside my own judgment. That’s a big, big discipline to learn. And it helps me sometimes in terms of discernment, to know that it doesn’t matter what I think, as long as the process is sound. That’s what matters. It matters to me that we should protect the victims of violence. It matters to me that there is room for reparation and rehabilitation in the system. One has to be realistic about these things, but it’s important to me that everybody in court should be treated with respect and accorded dignity. It’s very upsetting to me at the moment to see how the dignity of people has been completely overruled by those in power in certain parts of the world, and that the rule of law is being completely subverted. It makes me very, very sad that international law doesn’t have any bite to it at all.
At Meeting for Sufferings I’ve seen you in your keffiyeh, wrestling with whether we should use the words ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ about what’s happening in Palestine. I could see the pull in you between the experiences that you had there, and your institutional role, in terms of what effect using those words was going to have on our ecumenical partners.
My anxiety was that we project too much of the blame onto the other. And that we fail to acknowledge the very real responsibility that we bear for the disaster that has befallen the Palestinian people. That has its roots in the genocide that the European world perpetrated against Jewish people, and the persecution that Jewish people have suffered for centuries. Not to put a spotlight on that seems to me to be a failure in communication and in acknowledgement. There is an absolute direct connection between that and the existential fear that motivates a lot of Jewish people to support Israel, to see Israel as liberation and the promised land. Meanwhile I cannot bear to see the images of the utter destruction that has been meted out to Palestinian people – which is not to say that I don’t also think that Hamas is to blame for knowingly carrying out atrocities that they knew would bring hellish retribution on the whole of their people. What were they thinking? What were they thinking?
This way of trying to hear all sides… how do you use those lessons when you come into conflict within the Society of Friends, if you come up against something where we aren’t in unity?
First of all I would say that unity is not unanimity. It’s very important that we make this distinction, because the Yearly Meeting is the sovereign body of our community. We don’t have a pope; we don’t have an archbishop of Canterbury; we don’t have anyone who is in charge of telling us what it is that we do or we do not do. Within the Yearly Meeting, the Yearly Meeting is sovereign, and what unity is reached there is unity. We have a discipline of recognising that we have heard a particular voice at a particular time, and that is what governs us. So, as trustees, our job is to deliver on whatever commitments the Yearly Meeting has made. We don’t look to have everybody on board, that will never happen, but a minute of a Yearly Meeting is as close as we get to the word of God in our midst, and that’s what we as trustees will work on. We do not seek to change it or to modify it. We take it as read.
Are there any particular issues that you’ve found challenging?
Well, the obvious one, which keeps on cropping up, is what we meant by the Minute 31 of 2021 Yearly Meeting, affirming and welcoming our trans Friends. It is, for me, and for the body of trustees, and for the senior management team of the Yearly Meeting, crystal clear that it means that we work towards making our communities a safe place for people who are transgender or questioning their gender in whichever way. We are absolutely determined that that is the voice of the Spirit that spoke to us at that time.
There is a little bit of sophistry going on in saying, well, we can accept and affirm a person without affirming their gender expression. There can be hardly anything more intimate than the way a person decides to express their gender, particularly when it is not what was expected of them. So, affirmation, which means validation – look it up in any dictionary – and encouragement, and support, is what is wanted and needed at Local level, at Area Meeting level, and Yearly Meeting level, and that is what we will seek to deliver.
Does that mean that a Quaker under discipline must believe that a Friend who says they’ve changed their sex has in fact changed their sex?
I don’t think they have to believe anything, because we don’t have a doctrinal approach. People can believe anything they like. They can believe that there is reincarnation, or no reincarnation. They can believe that there is a life after death, or there is no life after death. Belief is not a problem. If people believe that sex and gender are immutable, that’s their right. What is different is behaviour, and policies, and the way we interact with each other. That is the key difference.
So they can have that belief, but they oughtn’t voice it?
They can have that belief, but, you know, there may be people who believe that a marriage between two people of the same sex is not really a valid marriage. The couple still have every right to get married and have all the benefits of marriage, and that marriage is recognised in our community. So, OK, do you want to stand up and say they are not really married? How do you voice that? It’s a private conviction. Nobody forces anybody to do anything that they do not feel is right for themselves, but you can’t tell anybody else what is right or wrong for them. So I don’t see what the problem is. You can believe it, fine, just don’t interfere with other people’s rights.
Just to double down on this, because I’m sick of the letters, when the minute says that we need to keep on listening, you don’t believe that it means listening to people with gender-critical views?
I’m not talking about gender-critical, I’m only talking about transphobia. There’s a difference. Beliefs are beliefs and they are fine. But we will not stand by if there is any attempt to marginalise people or to make them feel uncomfortable or to discriminate against them.
Is there a way to voice a gender-critical view without being transphobic?
Is there a way to criticise the existence of equal marriage without being homophobic?
So the listening that is required of us in Minute 31 cannot be to a person voicing a gender-critical view, because to do so is transphobic?
What we need to listen to is to each other’s experience. I’m perfectly happy to listen to people’s experience. But real listening doesn’t happen with a megaphone. Continuously restating the same views over and over and over again is not conducive to listening. Listening, when it’s real, creates movement, creates understanding. I don’t see that that is happening. I don’t see that those views are moving, do you?
Some not, sure. But I believe I see a willingness to learn in some people. And I suppose I worry about the psychological effect on an organisation, on those willing people, when they think some other part of it is not heard. If someone says they’re scared to use a woman-only space because there might be someone they think of as a man there, isn’t that their experience?
It’s not experience though, is it? The fear is a fear. The transphobia is in assuming that trans people are dangerous. It’s akin to saying I don’t feel safe with a Muslim person, because there are terrorists among Muslims. What does that say? It is prejudice and discrimination. We have robust safeguarding practices, which are there to protect us all.
With all these challenges, with this and more generally where the world is at, are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Well, like I said, I’m still on Good Friday or Saturday. This is not a good moment for the world. And I have to say that I have been severely challenged in my own lifelong pacifism, in particular regarding Ukraine. We have had a family of Ukrainians living with us, and I have found it really, really difficult to reconcile my pacifism with what is going on in Ukraine. Very recently we had a visit from the father of the family that we’ve been looking after. He’s in the Ukrainian army and has seen terrible things. He had not seen his own daughter for two years. What do I say to this man as we speak over Google Translate at my kitchen table? When he’s got tears in his eyes because three years of his life have been taken away. He wants to be here, but how can he let down his comrades? So many of them have given their lives.
You know, what am I to do? What can I say to him? It helped me to go to Quaker faith & practice 24.21. It’s a quote from Isaac Penington in 1661, which says, ‘I speak not against any magistrates or people defending themselves against foreign invasions or making use of the sword to suppress the violent and evildoers within their borders.’ That says to me that there has got to be some room for understanding that some people are put in a position where it is necessary to protect and to defend. This is not easy for me to accept, but I cannot ignore the reality and pain of the situation. I hope that Easter will come. I hope that Easter will come. It’s not come yet.
Comments
“So, affirmation, which means validation – look it up in any dictionary”
So I googled “Quaker affirmation” and received these as my first two responses
Oaths and affirmation - Quaker faith & practice
https://qfp.quaker.org.uk › passage
Every affirmation in writing shall commence: ‘I AB of X do solemnly and sincerely affirm’, and the form in lieu of jurat shall be ‘affirmed at X this … day of …
Quakers Act 1695
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Quakers_Act_1695
The Quakers Act 1695 was an act of the Parliament of England which allowed Quakers to substitute an affirmation where the law previously required an oath.
By Ol Rappaport on 1st May 2025 - 8:30
Please login to add a comment
