~ June 2007 ~
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Dear Friends, Welcome to the QFAS Newsletter. Change of Status The great news for QFAS is that we are now recognised as a Listed Informal Group by Britain Yearly Meeting. This gives us a wonderful opportunity to raise our profile among Friends. We can be listed annually in the Book of Meetings and will be entitled to hold meetings and exhibitions at Yearly Meetings and Summer Gatherings. It also means that we will have to comply with certain criteria. For example, we will need to hold an Annual General Meeting (AGM). (A report of the 2007 AGM is included in the newsletter). Also our membership is limited to Friends and attenders. Forthcoming Events The next QFAS event will be a residential weekend at Claridge House from 2 – 4 November, cost: £160. (Bursary help is available from Claridge House). This will include a workshop run by Paul Lambillion, a spiritual teacher, medium and healer from Bury St Edmonds . The workshop will be on the theme of “Afterlife and Communication” and will include a demonstration of channelling by Paul. More about Paul and his work can be found on www.paullambillion.co.uk . The rest of the weekend will focus on sharing our thoughts and experiences together as a whole group and in small groups. To this end, anyone attending the weekend is asked to bring something to share for the Friday evening session. This can be a personal experience (either your own or another's) or an extract from something you've read. It should not last more than 5 minutes. Contact: The Manager, Claridge House, Dormans Road , Lingfield, Surrey RH7 6QH. Phone 01342 832150. Website: www.claridgehouse.quaker.eu.org . Possible Future Event It would be good to hold an event in 2008 in a place other than the South-East of England, perhaps in the North or South West. This could be either a one day event or a residential weekend. Does anyone have any ideas about how we could do this? Would any QFAS members be interested in organising or at being involved in such an event in your area? If so, please contact Angela Howard. Financial Position
(*given by CH for the QFAS residential weekend.) The deficit of £366 was entirely due to the £476 cost of printing the new edition of the booklet “The Not Unfamiliar Country” and £99 spent on advertising it. We hope to recoup this in due course. QFAS membership now stands at 87. QFAS Spring Conference held at St. Pancras Church Hall on 28 April The Spring Conference this year had no overall theme. The first talk was given by Jan Arriens on “This world and the next: the psychic and the sceptical in the Society of Friends.” The following is a summarized version of his talk: Extrasensory perception was interwoven into the lives and faith of early Quakers, as was a strong belief in the life hereafter. They heard voices, had visions and took dreams seriously. Now, that awareness of an unseen dimension guiding our lives has faded. Response to the paranormal among many Quakers now ranges from outright rejection to indifference and neutrality. Some may have had psychic experiences but attach no importance to them, while to others such experiences have had a profound effect on their lives. There are two main reasons why attitudes differ from those of earlier times. We live in a rational, post-Darwinian scientific age. We have looked back at the Earth from far out into space. Modern scientific knowledge can encourage us to look away from ideas of God and any higher form of collective consciousness. Such thinking is behind much of the scepticism or indifference towards psychic phenomena that we find in the Society of Friends today. The second reason is that, very much to their credit, Friends have never set much store by the afterlife. Even in the early days of Quakerism, the concern was much more with the here and now than with storing up any reward in heaven. Quakers have never been particularly concerned about the resurrection or the doctrines of redemption and atonement. Instead, the emphasis has been on direct revelation, individual discernment, collective discernment, and collective worship. Friends rarely admit to any kind of revelation of a personal kind. Discernment, particularly of the collective kind, has also become much less common. What we are left with is collective worship – our meeting for worship. The fact that we are, largely, operating on only this one cylinder is because we have lost touch with the unseen dimension of our lives. In this, we are in line with society in general. Even though the United States forms a curious exception, there has been a general secularisation throughout western society. This reflects many things, but at its heart, surely, has been the different way we look at the world intellectually. Science is based on two things: reason and observation. Sometimes observation comes first and we build a theory around those observations, and sometimes we come up with a theory and see whether the facts fit. Yet nowadays, orthodox science is, by and large, turning its back on a whole range of evidence that the world is not quite as it seems. Because paranormal phenomena are inexplicable in terms of our present scientific way of looking at the world, they are rejected, ignored or derided. Anything that cannot be measured or reproduced in the laboratory is treated as being unworthy of serious consideration. The evidence, however, is very strong. Our own booklet, The Not Unfamiliar Country , provides some beautiful and thought-provoking cases. The point comes at which one can no longer dismiss all these experiences as being due to fabrication, coincidence, distortion, or wishful thinking. The experiences that people report have a striking consistency. First of all, we may identify a whole range of psychic activity and phenomena. To start at the bottom, why do we have such an extraordinary, instinctive affinity with some people and not with others? Fairly near the bottom, although it can soar much higher, is the gathered Quaker meeting. Up another rung or so is telepathy, with beyond that precognition and retrocognition. Higher up again we might put near death experiences and some of the extraordinary phenomena with which QFAS is concerned and, finally, peak mystical experiences when the veil momentarily parts. There are three particular areas of experience which the sceptic finds difficult. Firstly, there are those concerning physically impossible instances of perception such as “out-of-body” experiences. Familiar examples are surgery patients who, under anaesthetic, float to the ceiling of the operating theatre where they are able to observe details and overhear conversation in a way that should be impossible. This challenges our understanding of the physical world. Secondly, there are experiences that stand our understanding of time on its head. These include premonitions, precognition and clairvoyance. An example of this is a painting by the mother of my friend, Emma-Sue. This shows her mother lying dead in the road in front of a house in Oklahoma , where the family were then living. Emma-Sue's mother was not suicidal. The painting was made six months before her death and shows what happened precisely, when she was visiting a friend and knocked down by a drink-driver. We can put this down to coincidence or we can ask how the world is ordered as to make such an artistic foreshadowing possible? What channels are operating here, whereby the artist's creativity is used to prefigure her own death, presumably in such a subtle way that she did not herself interpret the painting as a warning? Thirdly, there are the extraordinary experiences in and around death with which QFAS is mainly concerned. These too may involve challenges to our understanding of time and space, but they often also have a spiritual dimension as well and suggest that the universe is essentially benign and full of a love going far beyond what we would normally understand by the word. Here, an example of such an experience is told in the book The Hidden Place by Corrie ten Boom, who was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp with her sister, Betsie, for hiding Jews in their home in the Netherlands . As she lay dying in the camp, Betsie optimistically shares with her sister a vision in which she sees them living in a large house after the war looking after people traumatised by just such experiences as their own. The house has large gardens, parquet floors, bas-relief statues set in recesses in the walls and a large staircase surrounded by a gallery. To Corrie, despite partly seeing this as a fantasy concocted by her sister to transcend their terrible circumstances, there is something very compelling about the vision. After the war, while giving talks in Haarlem , Corrie is offered a a 56-room mansion by a wealthy woman, Mrs. de Haan, to further her work helping those suffering from the war. Staring up at the house Corrie asks the owner whether it has inlaid floors, a broad gallery around a central hall and bas-relief statues. “You've been here before!” exclaims Mrs de Haan. No, says Corrie, I heard it from… but how can she explain? “From someone who's been here,” Mrs. de Haan finishes her sentence simply. “Yes,” says Corrie, “from someone who's been here.” There is also the phenomenon of near death experiences. Are these just a product of a dying person's mind? Even very young children can have near death experiences, well before the age at which any notions of survival beyond death may have occurred to them. Some may that what we regard as “supernatural” or “paranormal” are simply phenomena that we will one day be able to explain with the normal laws of science. But this will require a radically different scientific approach. Some scientists, such as Rupert Sheldrake with his theory of the “morphogenetic field”, are already starting to take such an approach. Within the Society of Friends, the most pronounced scepticism comes from the humanist quarter. The humanists set particular store by the human spirit and such values as mercy, pity, love and peace. These values are seen as not being in any way transcendent but as “human”. They stem, it is argued, from the human spirit. Yet, the human spirit is itself transcendent. The old-fashioned notion of God may be an easy target but, in demolishing it, are the humanists throwing the baby out with the bathwater in claiming that everything derives from the human spirit? Being unable to say anything very meaningful about God does not mean that there is no such thing as the transcendent. And once we accept that the human spirit is itself transcendent, the differences with the humanists melt away and we can join together honestly in worship and seek to live out the values of mercy, pity, love and peace. Surveys suggest that about a quarter of Friends do not believe in God or are “not sure”. In his experience, Jan would put the figure considerably higher. Yet, those who describe themselves as non-theists do not necessarily reject some unifying form of truth and reality transcending the self. This can be seen in the statements provided by 27 Quaker nontheists in Godless for God's Sake edited by David Boulton (2006). Robin Alpern, for example, writes there being one life, one source, one being, one energy, which manifests physically as the universe and of the connectedness between people which enables us to hold others in the Light. James Riemermann writes of the energy of the universe flowing through him that this is the essential and constant reality of being human in the real world. We are a part of everything, he says, and all is linked together. Statements like this suggest that our differences may be more apparent than real. When we take a more extended view of our physical reality we end up in much the same place. We see that there is not just outward but also inward evidence and experience. There is an inner knowing or recognition, so that when we read or hear of other peoples' experiences it resonates with us at a very deep level. The experiences confirm what we knew innately. This is akin to the feeling one can get reading Shakespeare or the great poets, when what they say points to greater truths which we recognise in ourselves and which gives us an extraordinary sense of kinship with the writer. It is as though we carry within us a blueprint of experience that provides a basis of recognition or validation for psychic experiences in general. Where does this leave QFAS? What is good about QFAS is that it starts from the evidence and has its feet firmly on the ground. Many Quakers are in sympathy with us but either don't know about us or are too caught up in the mood of scepticism and embarrassment to link up. We have a responsibility to present our evidence carefully and, in line with Quaker theology in general, to avoid claims to certainty and be cautious about theory building. It is, for example, very easy to move from the evidence of survival of consciousness beyond death to theories of reincarnation. Rather than being concerned about the afterlife for its own sake, in QFAS we are interested in paranormal phenomena in an experiential sense and for the way in which they can inform our lives. Most significantly, such experiences suggest an interconnectedness that goes to the heart of what religious faith is all about. Regrettably, this great realm of mystery and wonder has become increasingly tucked away in the basement of the Society of Friends. Our religious experience could be so much more rounded and profound if we were more comfortable with sharing the intimations we receive when the veil parts. That is where QFAS has such a contribution to make. There are two ways through which we may improve our image. Firstly, we might seem less of a fringe or way-out organization, if we broadened our remit to more than just “afterlife ”. We could for example call ourselves the Quaker Fellowship for Afterlife and Psychic Studies. Secondly, we need to avoid flights of fancy. It is essential for us to come across as solid and mainstream. We need to start from the evidence, as we have done in our excellent booklet “The Not Unfamiliar Country”, and to draw conclusions concerning the wider spiritual significance and implications for the way we lead our lives in terms of openness to the force-field around us. We have a great deal to offer to the Society of Friends. The supernatural or paranormal are only labelled as such because of our limited frame of reference. As time goes by we will probably understand some phenomena that are now regarded as unfathomable, while other occurrences will require a whole new scientific approach or paradigm. Our task is to help make that possible within the Society. It means making the “supernatural” a much more everyday part of our lives, as it was for early Friends. Scepticism about God should not be confused with scepticism about the connecting energy and mystery that bring us to Meeting for Worship and that give life its essential meaning. The talk in the afternoon was given by Angela Howard on “The Phenomenon of Channelling”. Angela suggested that a possible definition of channelling might be “The relaying of wisdom, love and encouragement to humankind through a sensitive person from a discarnate soul or group of souls in a higher state of consciousness.” She stressed, however, that we should not treat such teachings as “holy writ” because they are channelled from a higher world but treat them on their merits as and if they speak to our condition. Angela's talk then mainly concentrated on examples of on-going teachings which have been channelled from the next world by various “guides” such as:
Angela also mentioned Paul Lambillion who channels “Heartstar” and will be running the workshop at our residential conference this year (see above). The rest of the day was given over the discussion in the main and small groups. For a number of people this was their first QFAS event. As usual, there was a general sense among delegates of the value of sharing together with those of like mind. Here are some of the comments on the day:
I've found the day heart-warming especially since it has offered chances to meet kindred souls with whom you could talk about the things that really matter! * Interesting talks. Glad to meet others with similar experiences and interests. * I enjoyed the conference very much. It gave me more material with which to pursue my growing feeling that life does indeed continue after the demise of our bodies.
QFAS AGM 2007 The QFAS AGM was held after the Spring Conference. 16 members attended. The following Friends were appointed to serve on the Committee until the AGM 2008: Angela Howard (Clerk), David Britton (Treasurer), Jan Arriens, Rosalind Smith, Cherry Simpkin, and Beryl Spence. Clerk's Report for the year 2006 Since we last met QFAS member Joanna Harris has died. Joanna was a founder member of the group and was instrumental in helping to compile the anthology. She will be greatly missed
The newsletter Two editions of the newsletter were circulated one in July and one in December. Conferences The pattern of holding a spring day conference in London and a weekend residential conference at Claridge House was continued. The spring conference was held at St. Pancras Church House on May 6. The main speaker was Beth Allen whose subject was “Quaker Taboos”. David Britton spoke about “Margaret Fell and the next world.” There was the usual time for sharing in small groups. The autumn conference took place over the weekend of November 10-12 led by Rosalind Smith and called “Living between two worlds.”. Ros spoke about “Developing Awareness”, “Personal Responsibility”, “Listening-in” to inner guidance and “Angels”. She facilitated sessions in which we took part in group meditation and exercises to expand our sensitivity to the inner worlds. There was also the opportunity to share in small groups. Both conferences seemed to be very much appreciated by participants. Outreach Publicity material was sent to Surrey and Sussex General Meeting and Kent General Meeting. (In 2005 London and Middlesex GM was circulated.) An article appeared in “The Friend” in June written by David Britton and Angela Howard and our events are advertised in “The Friend” and “Towards Wholeness” (journal of Friends' Fellowship of Healing). Members have contributed articles to the Quaker Retreat Group and The Friends Quarterly. I would also like to mention Elizabeth Angas who is a member committed to outreach for QFAS through her writings. “The Not Unfamiliar Country” reprint The committee asked Nicholas Rawlence to reprint 300 copies of the anthology (which had run out). It was enlarged by the addition of articles by David Britton and Jan Arriens. This has also been advertised but sales have so far been slow. New contacts New contacts by phone, email and letter continue and membership grows each year though we also lose a proportion of existing members. The website at www.webbscottage.co.uk has been kept up to date and contains news of future events as well as articles and talks, etc. The committee met twice during the year. Angela Howard, Clerk, 24.4.07. The future Spring Conference 2008. 10 th May. Friends' House. A letter publicizing QFAS will be sent to Local Meeting Clerks who have not already received them. Members in areas other than the south-east of England please consider organising or being involved in a QFAS event in your locality. The Committee will help you! Talking Point A member has raised an important question about the spiritual effects of organ transplantation. If you have an experience or a view to share on this (or any other subject) please contact me. |