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.
