REFLECTIONS ON A QUAKER LONDON AREA MEETING

City of London street. Photograph Andy Hall

---

by Martina Winter

The London Stone is a block of Clipsham limestone, roughly 53cm by 43cm by 30cm, now housed behind a grille in Cannon Street. It is unremarkable—a lump of weathered oolite, It is a stone that has a history, but it has no inscription and explains nothing.

London itself, however complex, is as ancient, but more like the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone sits in the British Museum, in the heart of London. It is an object that unlocked the language of the ancient Egyptian civilisation because it held the same text in three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. The known could read the unknown. London is not a flat expanse but a vertical stratigraphy. Every era is still there, beneath the feet of the present.

And this stratigraphy contains the codes of our modern condition, and the task of reading it becomes a matter of deep spiritual urgency. If London is or was the epicentre of the industrial, scientific, cultural, and imperial transformations that have made the modern world, then to decipher London is to decipher the trajectory of humanity itself. And the Quaker Meeting for Worship in London is one of the instruments—perhaps one of the few remaining—capable of this spiritual decipherment.

For a London Meeting contemplating the city’s hyper-complex reality, understanding its needs and history means understanding in our bones the nature of modernity and empire: London at the centre of the industrial revolution, the revolution in science, and observing its multicultural layers. No excuses, no false stories.

Patient attendance to the City of London requires us to understand its scale and the nature of its power. London was/is the greatest city, at the centre of the greatest transformation in human history, with that fact comes a question: what is the meaning of this immense concentration of power, creativity, and destruction?

To understand what this act of attention entails, we must first understand the nature of London. A gathered Meeting for Worship in London is a form of attention directed at a 2000-year-old, world-shaping, near indecipherable human reality, real and concrete and existing in its material substrate and in the bodies and minds of London’s people and those who visit it. The London Area Meeting assembles with a specific, disciplined practice applied to the largest possible object: the city as a whole is a living, accumulating, spiritual and material entity that no single mind can comprehend.

Understanding the British Empire and its consequences must come, inevitably, into our silent attention. The gathered silence of a London Area Meeting will carry the presence of the docks, the slave ships, the trading floors, the colonial office. The Light speaks of the contributions of London and its people to humanity, but also of accumulated historical guilt, of unacknowledged and unpaid debts to almost everyone almost everywhere, of the specific shape of a repentance that the greatest post-imperial city has never admitted.

---

London is not just large, it is deep. It has layers of Roman wall, Saxon church, medieval guildhall, Restoration coffee house, Victorian sewer, Blitz rubble, post-war concrete, and Canary Wharf glass, all piled on top of and alongside each other.

London has absorbed the languages, foods, faiths, and memories of a planet worth of peoples. London has generated institutions like Parliament, the Royal Society, the Bank of England, the BBC, the West End, the East End docks, the Police, the Post Office, Chadwick’s’ sewer system and so on and so forth and these institutions have shaped the modern world. No one individual can hold all this complexity in their head. No map or book can tell it all. London is beyond the comprehension of a single human mind. It is a living organism made up of millions of people, past and present.

But the instrument of listening itself, the Quaker Meeting for Worship can be ambivalent. There is a shadow. The gathered silence of a London Area Meeting can be an opening into London’s being, or a tightening circle of self-reinforcing convincement. The same stillness, the same room, the same people, and two utterly opposite things can be happening.

The Quaker way of doing business, stripped of creed and magisterium, is uniquely vulnerable to becoming a coven without anyone easily noticing. A group that gathers in silence can, over time, develop an unspoken orthodoxy, a shared emotional atmosphere that is mistaken for the movement of the spirit. Vocal ministry that once came in as the unexpected can become a polished performance of the expected. The silence itself can become a charged, and directed rather than an open waiting.

Still, though a coven and a Meeting for Worship might look identical from the outside, they are metaphysical opposites. One is a magical technology that manipulates the collective will; the other, the Meeting, is a surrender to the small quiet voice within. A Quaker Meeting for Worship is not a technique for the manipulation of a magical spiritual force, but an act of collective listening.

The gathered silence of a Quaker meeting for Worship can be a space of the most profound openness to objective and inner truth, or it can be a subtle, elegant trap for collective subjectivism; the Quakers becoming the Lib Dem party or the Greens at Prayer.

---

In response to this risk, Friends have developed practices of communal discernment that serve as guardrails for the gathered silence. What helps direct the meeting for worship is ‘testing leadings’: ‘discernment’, ministry, and dissent, arising from a genuine promptings during the silence, not from prior planning or emotional pressure. There is a shared responsibility to protect the openness of the space.

The meeting as a whole, not the coven, listens deeply to ministry, weighing it in the Light rather than debating or performing. Quakers consult the accumulated insights of nearly five centuries contained in Quaker Faith and Practice and are guided by the history of Quakerism. Ministry deepen the silence and gather the group are signs of authenticity; polished performances or those enforcing an atmosphere sound alarms. Eldership, oversight, and community nurture worship, encourage faithful ministry and gently discourage what does not serve.

Quaker Queries and Advices prompt ongoing self-examination, for instance, “Are our meetings held in expectant waiting…?” And they function as gentle correctives, read or reflected upon together and individually, keeping the community focused.

Yet even with these correctives in place, the danger of spiritual corruption by the the status quo and the soft and hard power of the British establishment extends beyond the meeting house and into the entanglement of Quaker practice with the darker currents. Subjectivism and conviction can emerge into overconfident objectivism, pragmatism and caving in to dehumanising philosophies of social Darwinism, Malthusianism and ‘the necessity’ of neoliberal austerity politics; into Lloyds bank and Barclays, into slave-worked sugar plantations providing Cadbury, Fry’s and Rowntree with all the sugar they needed for their confections, their Quaker chocolate.

---

There is always the permanent temptation to reduce the mystery of existence and the enormous complexity of life, the city and the earth in the cosmos, to a tractable, manageable problem solving. This natural philosophy also lends itself to the ideas of empiricism. Quakers can be full of mysticism about aspects of their inner life, but at the same time they be dedicated to demystifying aspects of lived reality and understanding the needs of real people and helping them. The Quaker-empirical instinct can be pragmatic, moral and effective, or it can decay into self-deceit, and a tacit, implicit support for imperial and post imperial warmongering with ambulance brigades and relief funds that smoothed the edges of empire without questioning its foundations. Playing intellectual games of moral equivalence in the middle of a genocide.

The gathered silence, in a city like London, is not a retreat from the world. It is an act of attention. The Meeting, for that hour, is doing on behalf of the city what the city cannot always consistently do for itself because it is so busy and loud. Listening, the meeting makes London accountable to a reality beyond its own frantic movement. The Inward Light is real. There is a reality that it can illuminate, evaluate, and guide.

The weight of Empire must be held in meeting if the silence is to be deep enough to receive what might be given for the future. And yet, even as the London Area Meeting must face the shadowy past and complicated present of London, it also sits within a city that is already becoming something new, a living experience of the future of human community. London is already a cosm of a new kind of global civilisation, a city where hundreds of languages are spoken and multiple faiths coexist creatively. The silence, if it becomes more inclusive, holds the possibility of a genuine unity. London forms pattern of living together that the world desperately needs to learn. And to say this is to understand this. The city loses nothing through its human enrichments. On the contrary, those of us who have come here (and more will come) are the future ancient history of London. For the future we are the ancestors.

---

And so the question returns, with renewed force, to the Quaker community that takes up this work. Can the London Area Meeting hold a hyper-complex object like London in the light and receive glimpses of its meaning, its trajectory, its soul and understand its needs as a whole.

And we might look further still to the unresolved questions of our own moment: prison reform, justice for Palestine, peace and opposition to the armaments industry, health, the mitigation of global warming and the pursuit of sustainability, poverty alleviation, housing, animal rights, the deep work of diversity and inclusion, the defence of migrant rights, food education and health, a dignified retirement for all and the enabling of the full emotional, artistic and intellectual flourishing of the human spirit.

These are not separate campaigns. They are the specific, urgent. How shall we live together sustainably, peacefully and in equality? And further on and further in!

The gathered silence that can hold a hyper-complex city may also be asked to hold something more radical: the possibility of new forms of governance altogether. The current forms, in which politicians in power always end up answering to those who hold real economic power, have shown themselves on many occasions to be incapable of addressing the structural question of equality. The city’s institutions, for all their liberal reforming achievements, are configured to maintain a distribution of power that systematically ignores the deepest needs of the majority of people of London.

This is not a new predicament, and the Quaker tradition carries within it a memory of a different way. On arrival in North America, Friends did not merely campaign against existing injustices withing the colonial settler community, they actively established new modes of governance. In Pennsylvania, they attempted to build a polity on different foundations: treaty-making with Indigenous peoples rather than conquest, religious liberty rather than enforced conformity, a legal system oriented toward rehabilitation rather than retribution. That experiment was imperfect, compromised, and eventually overwhelmed by the forces it sought to resist. But it remains a historical witness to the possibility that the Quaker calling is not exhausted by protest. It can extend to the patient, costly work of building alternative structures, implementing new modes of governance, and living them into being.

For a London Meeting today, this memory poses an uncomfortable and electrifying question. If the gathered silence has the potential to hold the whole reality of the city—its empire, its complexity, its injustice, and its incipient future—might gatherings like this not also become the place where the outlines of new forms of governance are glimpsed, not as a blueprint to be imposed, but as a seed to be planted? The gathered silence that attends to London may, in time, receive the gift of what might be. And a community that possesses the unreadable stone and that deciphers the three-scripted stone might find itself, once more, becoming a key stone of a celestial city not yet seen.

---

Martina Winter is a professional ghost writer who lives Near Shoreham in Kent near the magical valley where Samuel Palmer painted. She has a degree in English Literature and Masters in the History of Art and is an amateur archeologist and anthropologist with a particular love for the Mediterranean and the southern downland, weald and coast of Britain. She is currently engaged on writing a fictional account of the life of Pythagoras. She loves gardening and making jams and preserves and lives alone with her dog and two cats. She is a member of the Ramblers Association and the National Trust.