What's This ‘Privilege’ Thing, Then?

In about a month, Friends from across Britain – and beyond – will gather in London for Britain Yearly Meeting 2019. The theme for this year is privilege, examining our own and the range of privilege within our community. As the document Preparing for Yearly Meeting (available from the BYM website) notes:

Privilege – whether we recognise it or not – fundamentally impacts our ability to act on our urgent Quaker concerns regarding climate justice and sustainability, and inclusion and diversity. Privilege is fluid, there are many types, and each varies according to context. The purpose of our examination of privilege is to help each of us become aware of the unseen chains that bind us and determine how we act in our lives.

That document has a lot of great material to prepare, and I don't intend to reproduce it or compete with it. There is also a ‘toolkit’ available from the same link above, Owning power and privilege, produced by QPSW, and I do not intend to supplant that, either. It looks at some key concepts and explains them somewhat shallowly, albeit with examples. I say this not as a criticism – for many, this is the most we can expect them to learn about this on their own, and the information in the toolkit is certainly clearer than a lot of explanations of these things. Hopefully, sharper learning will come from sessions at YM.

There are two things that I want to try and help with, in this post. One is simply to recognise the fact that most active Quakers in this country, including myself, won't be at Yearly Meeting. I imagine Friends House would collapse – organisationally, if not physically – if that weren't the case. Friends elsewhere in the world who are interested in the same sorts of learning that Britain YM is trying to encourage will also (in the vast majority) won't be there. These conversations have to happen in other places if they are to have the greatest benefit.

Aphorism 17

Easter Reflection: The Lord's Supper

I wrote last year about Quakers and Easter, both what it can mean from a community perspective, and what it can mean from a spiritual perspective. This year, I wish to reflect on a Christian story that forms part of the Easter narrative, but which has led to a practice that is undertaken regularly, year round, by most Christian and derived traditions – though not, largely speaking, by Quakers (certainly not by those who worshipped in an unprogrammed manner, and not consistently by those in programmed traditions). I refer, of course, to the story of the Last Supper, and the practice of the Eucharist – also known as Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, the Blessed Sacrament, Sacrament of the Altar, the Breaking of Bread (a term which can relate to wider and older traditions), and other names besides. For those who do not recognise those terms, this is the symbolic (or more than symbolic, depending on your denomination) consumption of the body and blood of Christ – in the form of bread or wafers and wine (or grape juice or water, depending on denomination) – during the main worship service in most Christian churches.

Maxim 17

Recognising and Supporting Ministry

We always say, and have said for some time (not without scriptural authority, though I sometimes think that one of the favourites is being twisted a little away from its intended meaning) that there are many gifts of the Spirit. These are abilities that we might put into use in the service of Truth, usually now meaning in service of our Meetings. However, liberal Meetings have largely grown away from recognising certain gifts. I speak, of course, of gifts of ministry.

It is necessary here to digress slightly into what we mean by “ministry”. It is a wonderful word, quite rich in its meaning before we Quakers came along and bent it into new shapes, albeit ones not inconsistent with the history or etymology of the time. It is derived from the Latin ministerium, meaning the office of a minister. Of course, what is meant by that term in Latin would not necessarily be terribly recognisable to modern English speakers. In countries where governmental terms derive from Britain (but a more recent divergence than that of the United States), a minister is a member of a government, generally one with considerable power – or at least who likes to think they have. Certainly they tend to have plenty of underlings. Of course, they are led by a prime minister, often conceived of as a first among equals but generally speaking the head of the executive element of government. In many faiths, we have ministers of religion, who tend to exercise authority over their flock in some way. A third major instance of the term, much less familiar to most people nowadays, is in the world of diplomacy. There, it is the usual short form for the title envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, and obsolete but still technically extant diplomatic rank used for the heads of missions that were rated as legations, a lower status than an embassy (which is naturally headed by an ambassador). There was also, going further back, a further rank of minister resident, for missions ranked below legations – often from or to states that existed de facto rather than de jure, or otherwise poor or unimportant polities. Since the growing value of the UN in the 60s, sovereign states now generally only create embassies as their diplomatic missions, unless there are not full diplomatic relations between them. In that case, a mission led by a chargé d'affaires en pied will be established, if anything. In that case, the head of mission is accredited between the foreign ministers involved, rather than between heads of state.

Sharing Joy

When we see two people in love, we can rejoice in it and share it even though we are not, ourselves, part of that love.

When someone has a passionate interest that we do not share, we might have little interest in hearing them talk about it at great length, but we can still take joy in the joy it gives them.

Even where we have been hurt and cannot engage in romantic love, or where romantic interest is no part of our own makeup, even where we have been traumatised by that in which someone else is interested, we can share their joy.

Aphorism 16

Maxim 16