Page 19 - Quaker News & Views Nov 25 - Jan 26

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On a warm sunny afternoon 21 century Quakers came:

They sat in silence for about half an hour within the church ruins.

Interestingly a visitor came and sat with them.

What were Quakers doing here in what has long been regarded as a ‘sacred place’? Quakers do not go on
pilgrimages, visit shrines and ask favours of holy relics. For Quakers the whole of creation is sacred; the
divine presence, the ground of all being, is enshrined in the totality of creation. God is everywhere. So,
what were they doing sitting in silence in the ruins of a church?

In 1932 A S Barratt wrote*:

‘We need to guard against undervaluing the material expression of spiritual things. It is easy to make a form
of our rejection of forms.

And we need to ask ourselves whether we are endeavouring to make all the happenings and doing of life
which we call ‘secular’ minister to the spiritual. It is a bold and colossal claim that we put forward – that the
whole of life is sacramental, that there are innumerable ‘means of grace’ by which God is revealed and
communicated - through nature and through human fellowship and through a thousand things that may
become ‘the outward and visible sign’ of ‘an inward and spiritual grace.’

Nature and Human Fellowship – created over centuries: perhaps this was what a handful of Quakers
experienced on their visit to Knowlton Rings.

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*Quaker Faith and Practice 5 Edition 27.43
Courtesy of Eric Johnson, Bournemouth

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