Sitting in Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, waiting for our course to begin, and giving the iPhone version of WordPress blogging software a try.
I used to come here a lot back in my Quaker years, and Jennie still does as her doctoral studies are supervised by Woodbrooke tutors. For me it feels odd and slightly painful; I feel a kind of ’sect envy’ that I can’t be part of the Quaker tribe.
On the lawn there is a labyrinth. As well as being an apt metaphor for an undercurrent of lostness, this summons memories: of the one at Norwich Cathedral that I walked after lighting a candle for a friend who had died untimely, and of the one on a set depicting Oxford negotiated by Laurel and Hardy in grotesque but curiously numinous slapstick in a film I watched last week. The significant and the stupid seem intertwined and I can’t easily unravel them.
Was just reading about Thomas de Quincey, who in his urban rambles ‘came suddenly upon…knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares’ that he ‘doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.’ Later in life he wrote that ‘the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep’…
Hopefully that won’t happen to me, though napping I had strange dreams of Gadarene swine rushing gratefully into the lashing grey sea into which Doug McLure threw the narrative of The Land That Time Forgot, this time wearing a suit instead of animal skins. An obvious side effect of having come here straight from three days at a marketing conference.
Pics below: Woobrooke labyrinth, and BT Convention Centre from earlier this week.
Have you come across Richard Long? Some parallels with your interests, I suspect:
http://www.richardlong.org/
Yes yes! Love Long’s work. I have one of his walks in postcard form on my wall. He came to speak at my art school – I remember us snotty undergrads feeling cheated by his choice of music to play over his slideshow – though it was something awful… Mull of Kintyre? 10cc? But I forgive him.
I’m a lapsed Quaker and often wonder about going back to meeting. I’m interested to know why you can’t be “part of the Quaker tribe”?
Hmm, an interesting question. One answer is geography – there isn’t a meeting where we live, so to attend on a Sunday would involve a lengthy round trip. We used to do this but
a) it doesn’t seem very ecological, and therefore not very Quakerly, to do this and
b) more selfishly it cuts a huge chunk out of the day. As a ’sleep camel’ who gets up early and works late in the week those Sunday lie-ins are physically and mentally important. (I doubt my desire to lay in bed watching Stargate would cut much ice with George Fox, but there you go.) Also
c) buggering off to to worship in some other locale where we have no ties seems a bit odd. ‘Bloom where you’re planted’ is a good admonition.
Added to that I carry a certain amount of burned-outness from when I /was/ a Quaker, in membership, Assistant Clerk of a Meeting, involved in all kinds of stuff. And some bruises from not feeling part of the culture, a certain sense of being rejected for not being a peace activist, social worker etc.
That’s how I rationalise it to myself anyway. Beneath the steely gaze of a grizzled Friend (with the proper moustache-free beard or ‘Newgate fringe’) these arguments seemed to wither to the idle posturings of a shallow popinjay.
After immersion in Woodbrooke for 4 days I was hot to trot and get back to meeting. But the practicalities then intervened. Does God want me to abandon my wife for half the day while I swan off to Liverpool? (A quick read of the Bible would suggest that the answer is ‘Duh, yes!’, eg the family-unfriendly sayings of Jesus.)
It remains a vexing issue.
Sunday lie-ins are part of what did it for me along with being burnt out from the treasurership. I didn’t have a problem with not being a teacher or a social worker. I think they saw someone working for an American owned private company as something of a novelty. Being an athiest I did struggle with the Christian ‘faction’ but I was not alone.
I do occasionally think it would be good to go back to meeting. I might well just do it one of these Sundays.