One small Quaker meeting, four Nobel prizes!

When I began researching Irene's Pickard's archive in 2012, her daughter, Alison Bush, agreed that I could come each Wednesday at 10.00 in the morning and read and study the archive, making notes as I went, until five in the afternoon. Each time we shared a pleasant lunch together, and Alison would tell me snippets of her memories of their life in Geneva, the city that had been her home for the first fourteen years of her life.

She remembered Carl Jung visiting their home in Geneva, and her sitting on his knees. She would have been about eight years old at the time, far too young to realise the importance of the visitor, or to have any comprehension of her mother's fascination with Jung's theories. Beside, she was used to visitors to their home. It was a sort of open house for so many diplomats, academics, theologians, representatives of NGOs, delegates to conferences connected to the League of Nations, journalists, as well as for students attending the Post Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University, or the summer schools in international affairs run by Alfred Zimmern. It was a rare day in which there was just their family in their home. Her father, Bertram, was master at what we now call networking: anybody and everybody concerned with peace-work in Geneva was known to him. 

To cope with these incessant waves of visitors, Irene taught herself to always be ready to feed an unknown number of people, and to cook to cordon bleu standards for special occasions. Although started before the Pickards arrived in Geneva, Irene and Bertram perfected the informal meals used to bring diplomats together for off the record discussion about the issues of the day. A tradition still continued by the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva. The seeds of mutual understanding sown at such events sometimes grow and bear fruit.

Geneva at the time of the League of Nations was a place of experiment in international relations. Nothing like it had existed anywhere before. Countries had to work out how to use the channels of communication opened up between them; how to relate to the newly created and emerging international institutions; how to train staff to work in such institutions – hence the Post Graduate Institute; how to relate to the emerging plethora of international non-governmental organisations; how to be part of the self-styled capital of peace. So much that we take for granted about how the world is integrated was first hammered out in Geneva between the wars, from communications to passports. 

Hawks in each country tell a story of peace being maintained by mutual fear. A narrative promoted, at considerable expense, by what has been termed the military-industrial complex: they have very deep pockets and the need for every increasing investment. The truth is that peace is much more effectively constructed by international co-operations and collaboration, and at much lower cost. It is that co-operation and collaborations that the Geneva experiment sought to encourage and expand. It was an attempt to build on the truth that human being collaborate at their core, but compete at their margins. Count the number of collaborative interactions between the peoples of countries compared to the number of military conflicts: peoples trade, communicate, exchange and intermarry – it is their governments and political leaders that tend to impose boarders and make wars. Much that was achieved by the League was about enabling peoples to interact; its efforts with governments was less successful – they were too invested in power and sovereignty. 

The small Geneva Meeting of the Quakers was at best about thirty people, including both residents and visitors, but among them many were engaged in the prevalent peace-work of the city. The result was a harvest of Nobel Prizes! This completely floored me when I began my researches into Irene's archive. Two Nobel Peace Prizes – Emily Green Balch and Philip  Noel-Baker – one Nobel Prize for Economic – James Edward Meade – which was for work on international trade, something he felt to be crucial in peace-building – and the 1947 Peace Prize for the peace-work and relief work undertaken more generally by the British and American Quakers, of which the peace-work in Geneva was a part. Strictly that is a ratio of one Nobel Prize to every ten Friends at the Meeting, if the 1947 prize is discounted (that was only very loosely connected). An extraordinarily high ratio. It would be hard to find a similar concentration anywhere else.

Militaristic interpretations of history often dismiss the League of Nations and other peace work in Geneva between the wars as being idealistic but misguided: time and energy that would have been far better spent making military preparation. The surprising but little told truth is that much of the post 1945 era draws on the work done by the League and others in Geneva, often the more prosaic and not so noticed stuff that enables interconnection between peoples, but which are essential parts of the framework of modern life.

The War in its Effects upon Women by H M Swanwick, August 1916

Three themes emerged from researching Irene Pickard's archive: Quakerism, Jung and peace-work. If it was not for the peace-work the Pickards would not have been in Geneva, and the Irene may never have been exposed to Jung's ideas with such intensity, and certainly would never have met the man himself, nor, one expects, ever been in correspondence with him nor been on friendly terms with his wife, Emma Jung, herself a significant analyst. 

Emma Jung's visits to Geneva to talk to the Geneva Quakers was one of the key events deepening Irene's appreciation of Jung's psychology and its importance to her Quakerism. For Irene, it opened up the inner workings of the mind and gave life and validity to her faith. It placed it on a 'scientific' footing as an essential part of being a complete and psychologically healthy individual. Contrary to the Marxists or to the Positivists – both prevalent philosophies at the time – religion was neither the 'opium of the people' nor vacuous nonsense: it was, according to Jung, essential to the process of successful individuation (to becoming an increasingly mature and balanced individual).

However, it was not analytical psychology that had brought Irene to Geneva but peace-work. It was where the League of Nations was which put it at the heart of the efforts to build a new way of working internationally that might prevent another catastrophe like the First World War. It was why the Quakers had decided to open a centre near John Calvin's cathedral in the old town, and why they decided to appoint Bertram Pickard as its first full time secretary, with Irene as the warden of a proposed student hostel for young Quakers studying International Relations at the University – the first university courses of this kind in the world.

What made the Quakers adamant that they needed to have a voice in Geneva was their experience of the war. Many had been so much at odds with mainstream sentiment, so much in conflict with the authorities over such issues as conscription, and had reacted to the war so much at variance with the dominant patriotism – working to alleviate the suffering caused rather than compounding the suffering by participation – that they felt impelled to aid, in any way they could, steps taken to construct a permanent peace. 

Living out the Peace Testimony under the duress of a world war had not been a comfortable experience. It had tested many Friends to breaking point and had led some to abandon the Society. Helping to construct a peaceful future would need considerable investment in the opportunities for collaborative working with those outside the Society. That was the model that had allowed the Quakers to have such an impact in the abolitionist movement: it amplified their concern by finding and working with allies.

Once such ally was Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939). She had been active in the women's suffrage movement, but resigned over the Suffragette's active support for the war effort, and particularly their decision not to take part in the Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in 1915. 

In 1916 she published her inflammatory condemnation of men, as makers of the war, for their blindness towards its effects on women, who suffered inordinately but had no voice. War was pre-eminently the doing of men. She also condemned her erstwhile companions in the British suffrage movement for their lack of compassion for the impact of war on women in the conflict zones: 

… although [British women] suffer like all the other women by the death and maiming of their men, they are curiously removed from the stunning effects of war on their own soil. Their grown men die, it is true, too young and very dear. But they do not see their babies killed by the thousands; they do not see their daughters outraged; they do not have their homesteads and fields defiled and burned and blown to atoms; they do not have to take part in those hideous retreats of women and children and sick and old, starving and dying on the cruel roads: they do not bear their babies to the sound of cannon … [The War in its Effect upon Women, August 1916]

She shared with the Quaker an understanding of war as tragedy and as a massive failure of human governance. She even suggest that women should ask themselves –

… whether men are so made that periodical wars are necessary for their bodily and spiritual health. Many people tell them so, and sometimes, in bewildered amaze at all the suffering brought about for what seem trumpery reasons, women will feel inclined to think that, after all, men fight because they like fighting; they always will like fighting; they always will do what they like. 

However, she thinks it is only a half truth, as:

… the mind of man should be equal to the task of directing and transforming this instinct (to fight) to the common good. By the prodigious development of mechanical and chemical resources, men have perhaps forged the weapons that will teach them that they must kill war. For it seems that unless man will kill war, industrial and military machinery will kill man.

Helena went on in 1919 to be a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. The league had grown out of Jane Addams's peace movement via the International Congress of Women. It appointed Emily Greene Balch as its first International Secretary-Treasurer, with its headquarters in Geneva.

Emily soon came into contact with the small Quaker community in Geneva, and became a member in 1921, saying: 

Religion seems to me one of the most interesting things in life, one of the most puzzling, richest and thrilling fields of human thought and speculation... religious experience and thought need also a light a day and sunshine and a companionable sharing with others of which it seems to me there is generally too little ... The Quaker worship at its best seems to me give opportunities for this sort of sharing without profanation.     [Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 60]

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the WILPF. One of three Nobel prize winners associated between the wars with that small Quaker Meeting in Geneva.

In 1924 Helena Swanwick severed as substitute delegate to the League of Nations on behalf of Britain, and between 1928 and 1931, during the build up to the disarmament conference, as part of the Labour British Empire delegation.

During both those periods Helena would have connected with Emily Greene Balch and others on the network of peace activists in the city, including many from the Quaker Meeting. During her second spell that network was joined by Bertram and Irene Pickard. Bertram in particular played a very prominent part in the network. In 1929 he was appointed as Honorary Secretary to the newly formed Fédération Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies à Genèva [FIIG] an umbrella organisation bringing together all the non-governmental organisations [NGOs] in the city. He also became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organisations in Geneva. He made himself very much the hub of the peace activist network. 

There was a fascination in researches springing from Irene's archive, to see how apparently diverse people interwove their lives because of the networks they became part of. How they gravitated towards each other because of their commitment to one or other ideal. The network of committed peace activists in Geneva was no exception. 

I first came across Helena Swanwick in Katherine Storr's book Exuded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914-15 whilst researching outwards from Irene's archive into its historical context. References in Katherine Storr's book led me to finding a copy of Helena's 1916 booklet, which I then used as an example of divergent attitudes to the war. It was only later that I discovered that she was connected to Emily Greene Balch via the WILPF, and had been involved in peace work in Geneva. Writing based on an archive is very much like fitting pieces into a jigsaw, but where so many pieces are hopelessly lost for ever, or others do not turn up until late.

The I Ching, Cary Baynes and Irene Pickard

Archives always hold unexpected discoveries. One of them in Irene Pickard's archive was a letter between her and Cary Baynes, best know as the translator from German into English of the I Ching. It was one of those moments when you go "who? what? why?" It did not seem to make sense that two women from apparently utterly separate worlds should have connected with each other. 

Irene Pickard: wife, mother; one time personal secretary to the first director of studies at Woodbrooke College, Birmingham, UK; resident in Geneva because of her husbands post as secretary to the Quaker Centre in Geneva – itself not exactly the most prominent or prestigious post in the world – a woman whose largely domestic life would not necessarily have connected with many people outside her day to day circle, or the small world of Quakers visiting Geneva. She was at times warden of the small Quaker hostel in the city and was noted for her ability to cater for unexpected guests.

Cary Baynes: American, born in Mexico, educated at two prestigious American institutions – Vassar College and John Hopkins University – thrice married; a friend and collaborator of Carl Jung and occasional resident in Zürich; translator into English of one of the most published Chinese classics – the I Ching – and largely resident in California. 

The degree of separation seemed almost maximal. 

That there should be a letter, written in friendly and almost intimate terms between the two, seemed almost crazy; but there it was in the archive, dated August 1936. 

From the contents both women clearly knew of each other's personal lives and had formed a degree of friendship. 

What the letter revealed was that they had met when Emma Jung had travelled from Zürich to Geneva in order to deliver a series of seminars to a group of interested Quakers including Irene Pickard. Cary Baynes had accompanied Emma to help with interpretation. Clearly the friendship between Cary and Irene had developed then, perhaps because of Irene's famed flare for hospitality, but just as likely was their shared passionate interest in Jung's ideas. 

Cary Baynes had trained under Jung, but never practices as an analyst. What she did, however, was to translate from German into English three of Jung's works, two of them in collaboration with her then husband, H G Baynes. More importantly, she translated from their German versions, two Chinese classics which Jung has deemed of great psychological importance: The Secret of the Golden Flower and the I Ching. Jung wrote major introductions to both of these translations. 

There can be few homes of the hippy generation of the '60s without a copy of the I Ching. It is almost a requirement of anyone who dabbled in Far Eastern philosophies of life as an antidote to the suffocating narrowness of dogmatic Christianity, or the barrenness and sterility of scientific materialism. The choices on offer to the mid-twentieth century Western mind were bleak. Flirtation with the exotica of the East seemed to offer an escape route.

Irene Pickard's world in Geneva was centred very much on the small, but international, circle of Quakers in the city; among the member of which was Elined Kotschnig, a trainee Jungian analyst and wife of a member of the secretariat of the League of Nations. The analyst under whom Elined was training, Tina Keller-Jenny, was one of Jung's earliest protegees, and was the first Jungian analyst in Geneva. Tina was drawn to the Quaker circle, and spent a lot of time in their company, attending Quaker Meetings on occasions. It was Tina who was instrumental in bringing her friend and analyst Emma Jung to Geneva to give a series of seminars to the Quakers.

I am always impressed how the social networks we form are so fundamental in affecting our lives and transmitting attitudes. It is almost as if to understand who we are we need to understand what networks we are part of. 

The Jungian network and the Quaker network first intersected in Geneva. There have been many interconnections since.  

Nozizwe Charlotte Madlala-Routledge, who now occupies the role first created between the wars by Irene's husband Bertram Pickard, spoke of 'ubuntu' in her 2021 Salter Lecture – of a person being a person through others. "I see you" being an African greeting that acknowledges another person as a representative of their social and familial networks, not just as an isolated individual. More widely, ubuntu is:

A collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing – an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world.   ( Mugumbate, Jacob Rugare; Chereni, Admire (2020-04-23). "Editorial: Now, the theory of Ubuntu has its space in social work". African Journal of Social Work. 10 (1). ISSN 2409-5605.)

Complete, definitive & long, or selective & short?

What to do? What to do? Masses of material: many documents, papers, articles, speeches, letters, booklets, notes, drafts, etc. Add an associated library of 115 Jungian related titles. In all the product of near seventy years. A pile of stuff that Irene Pickard described as her 'compost heap' (Inward Light, No 59, Spring 1960). How best to process and present this trove? How to put over its significance? Was there indeed any coherence in the collection? Was there a narrative that would bring it together? How to relate its creation to its historical context? How to trace the lines of development within? Who were the main actors? What were the consequences of their very evident interest that brought these items together and preserved them? How does exploring and writing about it fit into public discourse? What discourse? Within which communities?

Opening an archive is rather like discovering a cave system. An unguessed at network of chambers and passageways is explored, and slowly the system is charted. Perhaps cave paintings, or remains are discovered, and natural wonders revealed. A catalogue of what is there might be created, and a guide to how to access it written and detailed maps drawn. Maybe a history of its discovery and exploration is recorded. What was unknown becomes shared and public. It becomes accessible and known, and may even be valued and added to tourist itineraries. It becomes part of the public landscape.

There clearly was a central event of importance: the direct contact in the 1930s between a group of Geneva Quakers and the psychologist Carl Jung and his circle, just at a time when Jung was developing his theories about the fundamental importance to psychological health and wellbeing of what might be termed the 'spiritual' aspect of life. 

There are the antecedents to this event. Then there are the consequents. How much of each belongs in an account? Where to start and end the narrative? The choice of length and depth would very much dictate how much of each to include, as would considerations of who the likely audience might be and which discourses it might contribute to.

The question of purpose comes into all of this. What is my purpose in researching and reporting on the archive? The latter is easily answered: lacking a specific career goal, such as submitting a thesis, or building a reputation – I am post-career, retired, somewhat past such concerns – I have written about the archive and its creators because that is the only way I know of coming to understand what it contains. It has been my way of processing the contents and their relationship to the historical context. I have then felt compelled to share what I have discovered because, other than whatever contribution it might make to the historical record and the discourses around that, I think it will interest others who share my overlapping interests: philosophy, psychology, history, theology, peace-studies, ethics, Quakerism and the love of a good story. As I opened up the archive, that latter became obvious. 

The main protagonists had extraordinary lives. True, that was in part because they lived in what the apocryphal Chinese curse calls 'interesting times'; but most pertinently they proceeded through those times in countercultural ways. Their history is a history of exception not of conformity. Pacifists and peace-makers in a time of war and bellicose posturing; quietly and undogmatically religious in a time of avant-garde secularism and iconoclasm; deeply and self-critically questioning in a time of assertive certainties (patriotism, nationalism, imperialism, fascism, communism); open and receptive to new and emerging ideas and pluralities, whilst remaining connected and even embedded in their reluctantly evolving and somewhat traditionalist faith community. 

To top it all there were the elements of a good yarn: romance, thwarted love, danger, adventure, and the quest of a woman to find her place in a fast changing and disorientating world; and of an otherwise obscure man who became a founding member of the United Nations secretariat and who was instrumental in helping to shape the post Second World War order.

If I were chasing reputation or career, then a short, punchy account would do the job; but there would only be opportunity for one bite of this particular cherry. A definitive account would be unlikely ever to be written if a short, punchy account was chosen; however, a definitive account would take time and would be difficult to find a publisher for. What was in the archive deserved better than a hit and grab raid, as did the lives of the protagonists, so in the end its been the long haul: a definitive account.

What Is Spirituality? Spirituality is like an adventure park waiting to be explored

Firstly, you don't have to give up! You don't have to be like people who equate spirituality with a religion they decide is false, then abandon. It is possible to look at spirituality another way, as something free of institutional structures and hierarchies, not so much about dogma and beliefs as about attitudes, values and practices, about what motivates you (us) at the deepest level, influencing how you think and behave, helping you find a true and useful place in your community, culture and in the world.

Larry Culliford, M.B., B.Chir. (Cantab), M.R.C. Psych. (UK), is the author of The Psychology of Spirituality and a psychiatrist in Sussex, England. The quote comes from his blog. 

Silently waiting, sitting, hour on hour, week after week, slowly tempering the 'soul' – that inner spirit that drives life forward – like a patient hen sitting on her eggs. This is why they speak of Quakers being 'seasoned', like timbers; raw and green freshly felled wood is of limited use – it will warp and twist too much. The self, too full of ego, twists and warps. Tempered over time, seasoned by the long hours of silent waiting, the 'must have now, must do, must …' subsides as it cannot have the instant gratification it craves. Then the slow hatching of a deeper compassion and care for the living emerges. 

Before Jung 'religion' and 'spirituality' were equated. You were either an entirely secular – a non-believing, reductively rational materialist – or practised one or other religions: signed up and induced into the 'fold' and fed with a pre-packaged meal of belief, which you might be required to regurgitate on occasions. Increasingly that was a diet that was proving to be too indigestible for many.

What Jung found among his patients were increasing numbers who had become alienated from 'religion' as proffered, and who were suffering from varying degrees of ennui as a result. They were – as the title of one of his books suggested – examples of Modern Man in Search of a Soul. They were cast adrift from the anchoring points traditionally provided by religions, but had found no substitute, often believing they needed none: that is why they were floundering and came to him for help. 

His prescription was to look inwardly into the deep mind, often using dreams as a portal – although preferring what he called 'active imagination' – to try to find some anchor points. These often appeared symbolically represented in the pregnant imagery generated in the liminal spaces between full consciousness and the hypnagogic or hypnopompic stages of sleep.   

Such discoveries activated the spiritual aspect of his patients lives – put them in touch with their 'soul'. He was little concerned what symbols triggered such awakening, which religion they might come from – he suspected that they were older than any particular religion – just recurring in different guises as religions transformed and evolved. What mattered was their psychological function in helping his patients become more integrated – less distressed and broken.

That shift from outward induction into a received religion, to inward seeking for what resonates, marks the change from being religious to being spiritual. A phenomena even more marked in recent times than in Jung's lifetime. Books such as Spiritual but not Religious (Robert C Fuller), After Religion (Gordon Lynch), After God (Don Cupitt), or even the Dali Lama's own Beyond Religion being testament to that shift. 

What Jung admired about the Quakers was that they had already made that shift. Their centuries old practice of silent waiting opening them to being spiritually alert rather than being tied to outward forms of worship – the proscribed rituals of religion. Their rejection of creeds and dogmas readying them to respond to what arose rather than providing them with fixed formulas and ready answers.

It was a fascinating part of my research discovering the interactions between the Jungs (both Carl and Emma) and the Geneva Quakers on exactly such topics; and then tracing the consequences of that encounter for the Quaker world and beyond.

Every human has a story

Jung came to the conclusion that every human being had a story, and the derangement came when that story was denied, or if the story was rejected; and it was only in the discovery of this story, enabling the patient to rediscover his personal story (within it), that the patient could be healed again.

Laurens Van der Post: BBC - Time Life film on Jung,

Untangling what it was about Jung that so fascinated, engaged and enthused a group of Geneva Quakers that they would spend the rest of their lives expounding his virtues as someone who had given them the keys to unlocking their deeper selves and vitalised their spiritual lives was perhaps the biggest challenge of my research. Between them, they had created an extensive archive of materials, contributed articles to two journals, one either side of the Atlantic, addressed conferences, written books, acted as editors, and mentored and inspired many younger people as well as their contemporaries. They had been catalysts for change and modernisation, reinforcing trends that has already been at play in the communities they were part of.

The discovery of Jung, and their direct contact with him and his circle, made them more at ease with their spiritual life, more fully engaged with it and more willing to explore it. It helped them to realise its importance to their lives in spite the pull from their being 'modern', well educated and forward thinking people. They bucked the trends and fashions of their age: the affectation of a somewhat bohemian detachment from anything over serious, allied with a cynical disparagement of old fashioned things like religion which could not possibly stand the rigours of critical analysis. Religion was the opium of the people, and was utterly dreary. The stripped down religion of a set of left over tea-total puritans, with all their earnestness, social conscience and pacifism, was unspeakable. 

But somehow, that set of young, intelligent, and highly motivated people found something at the core of the Quaker tradition; in the shared, contemplative, ruminating silence, and in what arose from it; something that inspired and liberated them; and Jung gave them the intellectual justification for opening up to it.

For me, researching their left-overs – what little survives in the aftermath of life – it meant following their spiritual journeys, and tracking their footsteps in what material there was. Annoyingly, such material is always deficient. It is like a giant dot to dot drawing, stretching over three-quarters of a century, two continents and two world wars. Sometimes the dots are years apart. Sometimes they are scattered across diverse and disperse documents, articles and books. It was a six year journey on my part, and one which in some ways shadowed their own. To comprehend their journey meant undertaking one of my own, being forced to question many assumptions about my own life and attitudes. 

In many ways they confirmed Jung's contention: they found the big story which could contain the smaller stories of their lives. I think I have yet to achieve that.

Have I found the bridge?

It was tiny, just a single sentence editorial introduction to an article in a monthly magazine produced in 1970 – the Quaker Monthly – but had it finally provided the bridge I had been looking for? Somehow, I felt that two of the people I have been writing about may have had some connection, but how or when was lost in the mists of time: it sometimes amazes me how little trace is left of many people's lives – just faint scatterings, motes of dust – that a historian has perhaps the fortune to find, if he is lucky. 

The rich, the famous and the powerful leave heaps of traces. They have big footprints in history. So, you wish to research into the life of a Churchill or a Orson Welles? No problem. You will have oceans of source material. Such lives are massively recorded. But try to research the lives of more obscure people, people who have not courted publicity, people whose lives are much more private and out of the limelight of media attention, you often have little more than scattered and vanishing vapour trails.

I suspected that Irene Pickard, whose archive had launched my researches, must have had some contact at some time with Pierre Lacout, the author of a much translated Quaker booklet, God is Silence. They had both been members of the small community of Quakers in Switzerland. They had both lived in Geneva, but not at the same time, as far as I could see; Irene had left Geneva in 1955, and Lacout can only be definitely connected with the Swiss community of Quakers sometime in the 1960s, becoming a member of the Lausanne Meeting after he settled near there. He had undertaken a course of psychotherapy in Geneva prior to that. They both shared a common attitude to the centrality of the practice of silence waiting as the wellspring of Quakerism, and the significance of psychoanalysis – especially that of Carl Jung – as an aid to spiritual development. They both had many Swiss Quakers they knew in common. It was a small pond in which they both swam with a reasonably high chance that they had either directly or indirectly connected.

Irene had maintained an active interest and connections with the community of European Quakers in the years following her and her husband's retirement to England. Significantly, they had been involved in the Friends World Committee on Consultation (FWCC) European conferences, both at the planning stage and during the events. We know for sure that they were highly involved in the 1959 conference on Depth Psychology as a help in the Religious Life, and maintained an interest in, and connections with, later European conferences.

The editorial introduction to Lacout's article in the March 1970 edition of Quaker Monthly notes that the article is:

Concluding our Swiss Friend’s address to last years European Conference, in which he told of his passage from Carmelite Monk to Quaker.

Sadly, what I don't know is if Irene was present at the 1969 conference, or had anything to do with it. Irene would have been 78, and was still involved in many Quaker things, especially the Seekers Association. She was also perfectly fluent in French – her years in Geneva having made her bilingual – but was she actually there? Did she ever meet Lacout? Did they correspond about the conference? We shall never know: there is no record. All we do know is that she had a copy of his booklet in her archive. If there was ever a bridge, it has been washed away.

What we do know is that Lacout and Irene were very much in sympathy with each other as to what was at the core of Quaker religious experience, as were so many of the members of the Seekers. Here I quote from a letter written to me in 2013 by Candia Barman, about the Seekers Movement:

The Seeker Movement aims to explore the discipline of waiting on the spirit at the still centre of our lives. We try to deepen our spiritual awareness in a devotional way based on mutual support and sharing with like-minded people. This leads to the search for expressing Quaker witness in the world.
Much of traditional language has become ineffective and diminished in meaning for people today, including ourselves. We seek through exploration and sharing to connect with the mystery at the heart of our world and our lives. We are active in opening ourselves to new light; this may come from modern scientific, theological or artistic endeavours as well as older traditions. We aim to promote a creative interplay amongst the diversity of understandings within the Religious Society of Friends.
This is done through residential and other gatherings, with a particular emphasis on working in small groups. Also correspondence groups on various topics and the movement’s journal.

It compares well with Lacout's description of what is at the heart of the Quaker experience in his 1969 address:

Silent worship, taking for us the place of dogma and creed, gives to us, by its unsullied transparency, infinite possibilities of dialogue. We think in a climate of absolute freedom with no fear, in principle, of condemnation by the Quaker community. Our faith, not being the prisoner of any form or words, can go without reservations towards the truth of every man, whether he be Christian or not, believer or not. We are as attentive to men as to God. Is not a human brother a part of the presence of God? If we dwell in the receptive state of mind which living worship develops in us, we shall not go towards the other man with the proud assurance of one who seeks to make a convert, but with humility of one who goes forward in gratitude for a revelation he is about to receive. To love the other man is to love his difference. Free from dogma we have more chance than others of building bridges between the fragments of our broken world. In this age of confrontation and hostility, let us learn to draw from silence, as from a well, the strength and art and skill of truthful reconciliation. No other religious family grants such liberty to its members.