The first Quakers I met lived in a small mining village in Yorkshire in the north of England. They were a family who were enthusiastic about different churches working together. At that time, the mid 1970s, I lived in a small religious community and worked as a teacher in a local Catholic school. I remember being attracted to Quaker faith and practice at the time but felt that to leave Catholicism and my religious order was too great a leap.
I was brought up as a Catholic in my home city of Bradford, also in Yorkshire. At the age of nineteen, in 1966, I joined a Catholic religious order called the Sisters of Christ. The sisters ran schools in England and I became a teacher.
It was a very exciting time to be a Catholic and a nun. In the 1960s there was a Council of the Church, the Second Vatican Council, which revitalised many aspects of Catholic life, from liturgical change to deeper relations with other Christians and other faiths. Catholics in many countries became actively involved in issues of justice and peace. This appealed to me too and I was able to work with others on issues such as nuclear disarmament and inequality in society.
In 1993, after several happy years working as a school chaplain, again in Yorkshire, I became ill. In 1994 I moved to a community of our sisters in London and began working with homeless people. It was at this time that I heard about the Catholic Worker Movement.
Dorothy Day, whom Pope Francis has quoted many times in his recent visit to the USA, co founded the CW in 1933 in New York. Catholic Workers run Houses of Hospitality for vulnerable people and actively work for peace, sometimes using nonviolent direct action to highlight the injustice of the military industrial complex. Most CW communities are in the USA but there are CWs in Britain, Holland, Germany, New Zealand and Australia. With the support of my religious order I was able to spend two years living and working with CW communities in Los Angeles, Washington D.C and New York. During this time I learnt a great deal about Dorothy Day and the CW Movement. I also met other peace activists, especially those acting from Christian conviction. In 2001 I was arrested for the first time outside the White House on Holy Saturday.
On my return to England I joined the CW community in Oxford. This was again with the support of the Sisters of Christ and I shall always be grateful for their encouragement. However, it became apparent to me and to my superiors that this work of hospitality and resistance to war was where God wanted me to be. After three years of discernment it was decided that I should leave the Sisters in order to carry on this work. The Sisters loved the work of hospitality but were uneasy about the direct action, especially as I have been arrested several times since 2004 when I came to Oxford. I officially left the Sisters of Christ in 2009, with sadness but with the blessing of my superiors. I still keep in contact with the sisters.
As soon as I came to Oxford in 2004 I met Quakers. Oxford has a large active Meeting and many of the people I met on demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons were Quakers. I began to deepen my knowledge of the Society of Friends by attending Meeting for Worship and reading Quaker literature. I realised that the non hierarchical nature of the Society, the mystery in the silence at Meeting and the Testimonies answered a great longing in me for a simpler way of following Jesus and putting his Gospel teaching into practice. For a few years there was certainly a tension in me for I was, after all, part of the Catholic Worker Movement. Again I set out on a journey of discernment with the help of two guides, a Catholic and a Quaker. I also did a silent retreat. For a while I attended both Mass and Meeting for Worship on Sunday but found this cumbersome and confusing. I decided to focus on Meeting for Worship and see where God would lead.
In 2012 I went to Afghanistan on a peace delegation with three other women from Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK. I had already been attending Meeting for two years and was deeply moved by the support I received from Oxford Quakers as I prepared for this visit. I decided on my return to apply for membership and have now been a member for over two years.
Until June of this year I continued to work at the Catholic Worker house of hospitality for refugees in Oxford. Becoming a Quaker has made no difference to my commitment to hospitality and resistance, indeed it has strengthened it. For practical reasons the house had to close in June so at the time of writing this I am disowning the best way to go forward in the remaining years of my life as a Quaker and a peace activist.
Last year I visited Perm in Russia as part of the exchanges between Oxford and Perm who are twin cities. On my return I attended a conference at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre in Britain, about Quakers in Russia where I met Natasha and Sergei from Friends’ House Moscow. In September I met Natasha again in Moscow, on my way back from a second visit to Perm. This contact with Russian Quakers and other Friends worlwide who are similarly connected to FHM has added a new and most welcome aspect to my life as a Quaker.
As an elder I am involved in the life of the Meeting and am also part of the Oxford Friends Action on Poverty, as well as being a member of our group working to commemorate the beginning of conscientious objection in 1916. To close the circle, the mother in the Quaker family I met forty years ago was the daughter of a noted British CO of the First World War, Corder Catchpool.
Live Adventurously 