Following the pattern of early Quakers, our Meetings for Worship will take place outdoors. A distinctly Quaker sense of transcendence, stillness and silence, is enhanced by direct communion with the Divine in the openness of the landscape. The stained glass window of nature offers us refuge as we are searched by the Light. Its receptivity will nourish our own. We will meet at cliffs, on the top of Downs, in hidden caves, at streams, and by the sea. When asked about his rejection of the monopoly of man-made buildings – and the implied hierarchy – in spiritual sensitivity, James Nayler replied: ‘God is no respecter of places’. Let us follow his example and reject a Divinity that speaks only from consecrated buildings and authoritarian pulpits. ‘Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?’ (Acts 7:48-49).

To be Lamb-centred means not to violate the beautiful humility of the Franciscan sine proprio (non-appropriation) and the apatheia (detachment) of the Desert Hermits by confining our sense of the sacred or imposing our tyrannies upon God.

‘And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins).