We Quakers can talk a good talk. But when it comes to practical action, we often seem to struggle. Oh, when we do take practical action we can be very good at it (and we can be ineffective – no-one is effective all the time), but actually taking the step of trying to take practical action seems to be difficult for us. I cannot count the times, in Meetings for Worship for Business, that I have been frustrated – we have a clear leading that something needs to be done, but ministry on what to do or how to do it is sparse, and often, to speak plainly, wishy-washy. Where it does occur, it is often in such a minority that, quite understandably, the clerks do not feel able to see it as the sense of the Meeting and include it in the minute.
What ministry do we hear, when it seems to me time to talk practical action? More generalisations. Some even suggest that “act with love” or “follow the promptings of truth and love in our hearts” count as practical actions sufficient to make a difference. I have heard that many times, often expressed forcefully. When practical action occurs, it usually happens one of two ways – a separate business item is brought proposing something specific, or more often some small number of Friends just start getting on with it, sooner or later asking the Meeting to sanction what they have already begun to do.
Bringing specific proposals or starting to act under concern is fine, it’s good, and it’s vital once the idea is well-developed enough or is something large. But when it is simple, or when ideas need to be generated, that can come from the floor during Meeting. It should come from the floor during the Meeting. For some subjects, it does easily enough, I’ll admit. When we start talking about how we can make our own buildings more environmentally friendly, we are full of ideas. When it is about some action out in the world, the most action we tend to end up with is a minute that we agree to send to someone, somewhere. When it is about things we should do differently, especially things involving people, it is a struggle to get anything more than a general intention to do something better, or encourage something fairly non-specific. And quite often it is a long time – some I’ve seen start years ago are still waiting – before anything more concrete is taken.
When it’s not easy, we can make it easier. It takes time and work, giving people spaces and support to think and learn about issues, safer spaces to discuss their first thoughts, and then coming together to share ideas as a Meeting in Session. Some Meetings have a lot of experience doing this, and Britain Yearly Meeting has done very well at it for several important issues in the time I’ve been among Quakers. Young Friends General Meeting, when I was there, often did very well at it (and occasionally very badly). It’s a matter of properly preparing an item of business, and of preparing the Meeting for that item of business; if people come prepared to make a decision in principle and are suddenly asked to make both the decision in principle and decide how to put it into practice, then that failure of preparation will make Quaker Business Method comparatively ineffective.
The fact it’s hard to make a start on practicalities as a whole Meeting doesn’t mean it should always be delegated to a smaller group; sometimes that’s appropriate, and sometimes it’s better that the whole Meeting be prepared to help get the ball rolling. Where it’s practical to do so, that keeps the whole Meeting involved in the process, and, in my experience, tends to lead to better outcomes. The trick is knowing when it’s practical; do it for the wrong things, and it will mire the Meeting down and make life harder for everyone. Where a Meeting meets frequently, simply taking the decisions in principle and in practice at separate Meetings for Worship for Business can benefit this greatly, even (or perhaps especially) when one person has come with a complete proposal about what to do, as well as whether something needs doing. This can be made even more effective by some steps being taken to facilitate people’s preparation for the practical decision in the time between the meetings.
When it comes to certain things, the starting point before making decisions or changes can be very important. Let me illustrate this more specifically; let me tell you a story. I’ve told it before, in several times and places to different people. It’s about feeling othered, excluded, different – not belonging. The first time I came to a shared meal among Friends – often called a “bring and share” meal among British Friends, a “Jacob’s join” in my particular part of the country, or a “potluck” among anglophone North American Friends – I felt that. I often feel it even now, after going to so many – Meeting events, celebrations of marriage, or just shared meals for a committee before the committee meeting begins. The reason for it is simple. I went to plenty of these things in my younger life, among my local community as a child, or among my mother’s family (my father’s being smaller and further away). I’ve been to some as an adult among other communities, communities more rooted in working class culture – the class culture I grew up in. What I see at Quaker shared meals is very different.
I’m not going to get into what is different at such meals in different communities, but the difference is stark. What I initially brought to such meals was more in line with my encultured expectations, and that made the difference even more stark. Now sometimes I bring something that ‘fits in’ better sometimes, and sometimes I stick to my roots. What I bring is rarely terribly popular, as it usually includes meat, and that’s a whole other sense of othering – even among groups of Friends where vegetarians are a minority, and not a terribly significant one, there seems to be an unstated expectation that people not bring meat. If that’s going to be an expectation, it should be stated. Even so, when I bring a meat dish that ‘fits in’ with the other dishes, it is more popular than the simple foods I grew up seeing at such meals.
I don’t claim that these differences are entirely class-cultural; there are a lot of factors in play, though a lot of them are correlated with class. There is also the question of ours being a community where more people have more free time and energy to make things themselves from scratch, for instance, which is related to class and socio-economic background, but also to age. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, I hardly ever see anyone bring the sort of things that I grew up with. When I do, it’s from people who share that background, albeit often with regional differences; working class culture is a little more regionalised than other class cultures. Usually people who’ve not been part of our community very long. Often, they don’t hang around very long after.
Now, I should note that anyone who has heard me speak, likely anyone who has read my writing, might be surprised that I have a working class background. I speak and write the way I do, in the words and sentence structures I use, because my mind works a certain way, and because of my education. I have the accent I do because… well, actually, I have no idea how that happened. If I speak to my mother, or several members of her family, for a few minutes, my accent changes, but it quickly flips back to this weird fairly-received-pronunciation-with-odd-colourations-of-London-and-of-northern-England, and even those colourations fade for a while the more I speak to people with a more RP accent. Most importantly, I am aware that the way I speak, and the fact that I speak so in Meeting, will have a similar effect on making those who do not speak in a similar way feel less belonging.
Patterns of food and of speech can vary on grounds other than the class-cultural, of course; that’s just what I can speak about directly from my own experience. Patterns of speech and dialect can differ in communities of different ethnic and national background, even where an individual’s family have been in the same country for generations. Words from languages associated with the community’s background make their way into English speech within the community, or oddities of grammar and syntax – oddities from the native English speaker’s point of view – make their way into English spoken in the community. Even where vocabulary and syntax are the same, the choices of ways to talk about things, how people answer questions, how they tell stories, can vary a lot with culture.
Food can be one of the things that shows the greatest cultural variation. We might welcome someone making a South Asian, Southwest Asian, or North African dish; in my experience it’s often more welcome than the food I would, from my own background, expect to bring to a shared meal. I would also judge that it tends to be more welcome than, say, much Eastern European food; the most welcome seems to be food with its origins around the Mediterranean, as far as I can see among British Friends – whether it is brought by someone of such origins or not. Yet even where such food is warmly welcomed, there is still the issue of being the only person who brings such food. Even with the welcome, it can be othering, and lead a person to adjust what they bring to conform – to fit in, rather than be welcome and belong as they are.
My point in this story is just this – simply by being ourselves, when our community is in certain ways rather homogeneous, we can exclude, we can stop people from feeling they belong, from feeling welcome. Sometimes it’s active behaviours, the way we speak and the food we share, but sometimes it is just being there. How easy can it be to make Friends – or potential Friends – of colour feel welcome when, in most Meetings, they see a sea of whiteness, even in localities that are ethnically diverse. Our very lack of diversity is a barrier to diversity.
It can be even worse than that. The way that we wrestle with some issues can, in itself, lead to making our welcome towards, our acceptance and inclusion of those affected by those issues worse. I did it – quite consciously and deliberately – in the previous paragraph, and to a lesser extent in the story of my own experience. When we talk about Quakers being overwhelmingly white, of being mostly middle class, of being mostly academically educated to a level much above the average, of being mostly economically comfortable, we other those who are not in those categories who are already part of our community. Where such people are well established in their Quaker community and identity, this is bad but not disastrous. Where such people are enquirers or newcomers, not fully settled in our community, not having taken on a Quaker identity, we push them away.
In relation to some issues, we do worse still. Our discernment and debates – a word I use advisedly, for there are debates in our communities not conducted through Quaker methods, and always will be – can drive away people affected by the matters they concern. I’m not going to go into examples, because I don’t want this post to become part of those debates. Suffice to say I’m sure most of my Quaker readers will be aware of some debates in their own communities that this problem may apply to.
So what does this mean for practical action? It serves as an example, which may help us with not only wider issues of diversity, but wider issues in general. To continue the example, we cannot manufacture more diverse Meetings, and we certainly shouldn’t have our majority middle class cultural membership try to speak and act otherwise. Similarly, we can’t just not have disagreements and controversies that will affect some people more than others. I don’t have all the answers, but I have what I think are the beginnings of answers, or the shape of answers.
The first thing we need to do is to recognise and accept that these are problems, that who we are and what we do helps create barriers. I’m not even talking about owning each of our privilege in wider society. This is just about things within our Quaker communities. We cannot even think about counteracting this until we accept that it is real.
What do we do then? I’m not sure. Sometimes when someone obviously different from most Friends in a Meeting turns up, they are over-welcomed. That can be very off-putting. Excessive focus on a person’s difference makes them more aware of that difference, but treating them exactly the same as everyone else is a risk in itself. We need to learn more, about all these ways of being different, in order to respond the right way. Actually, in a lot of Meetings, almost any new person can be over-welcomed – being new being exceptional in itself, for many Meetings, and it’s a problem even then. However, where the over-welcome is obviously focussed on a difference, or even perceived as such, it is a bigger problem than otherwise.
The same approach applies to issues other than diversity. We need to look at what the actual problem is, be honest and clear about it, and how we contribute to it. We need to be self-critical as well as aspirational. We need to see what is wrong in order to make it right. Clarity about the nature of a problem and the steps to take to remedy it are sometimes clear, like, say, Japanese knotweed on a meeting house’s grounds. Some appear simple but quickly become more complex as soon as you look at them, like damp in an 18th century building. Some are so complex that we often can’t see the wood for the trees – or indeed we can’t see the trees for the wood. We need to make sure we understand a problem before we tackle it, but identifying some of the problems and talking about first steps to fix them facilitates further understanding.
Now to reiterate, none of this is to say that we never do practical action, nor even that it is vanishingly rare or ineffective. Rather, especially where practical action needs buy-in from a whole community, it takes a long time and is, sometimes, more ineffectual than one might hope. We often make jokes (sometimes quite dark jokes) about how long it takes Quakers to make decisions, but it isn’t an even, consistent long time, nor even just a matter of complex or controversial things taking a long time. In my experience, we can be quite quick to come to agreement on the need to do something, but deciding what, and actually doing it, can take a much longer time, and I don’t think it’s all a straightforward impact of using Quaker Business Method.
The ideas I’ve presented here probably wouldn’t completely address the issue. I hope they are a starting point, and more ideas will come up. I hope, with perhaps less confidence, that people will then put some ideas, mine or others, into practice to address this issue.
But, just for me, maybe when I bring sausage rolls to a shared meal, people who aren’t vegetarian could at least give them a try – even if they are shop-bought.
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