A different perspective on life, war and religion

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy meets Richard Kimball and gets an insight into Quakerism and its core belief of non-violence

The Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, has one of the most distinctive traditions within the Christian tradition. Members oppose all wars, conduct their worship without clergy, have no written creed, don’t have formal sacraments such as the Eucharist or Baptism, and believe that men and women are equal. At their core is their belief in a direct relationship between God and individuals.

The Galway branch of the Quakers recently held an Open Day at its meeting rooms in St Nicholas’ Parochial School – near the Courthouse – to offer the public an insight into what is involved in being a Quaker and what happens at meetings.

The group is not seeking to ‘poach’ members from any other church, explains its current Clerk of Meetings, Richard Kimball.  But people who are looking for Christian spirituality and not finding it in the church they grew up with, might feel at home in the Quakers, he adds.

“We have people from all Christian religions – Lutheran, Catholic, Church of Ireland. Our meetings are a place for people to relax, to take stock and to have God in their lives. It’s good to have God in your life and not to detach from Him.”

Belief in God is a human need and “without it we are not as good as we can be, either individually or as a community. When you believe in God, you are the best person you can be”, he says, observing that Christianity generally in Europe and the West needs to assess where it is going.

US-born Richard, who originally comes from Portland, Maine, has lived in Galway since 1988 having previously served in North Africa with the voluntary US Peace Corps movement.

The Israelis bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunisia while he was there, killing 60 people, and the US bombed Libya the year afterwards, so he had first-hand experience of ‘Superpower’ policies from the perspective of small countries.

As a result, he didn’t want to return to America, so when he got an opportunity to work as a fisherman in Ireland, he accepted. Having grown up in Maine, he was a skilled fisherman, and he’d also worked in a fishing co-operative in Tunisia.

Ireland was a reasonably developed country with a good fishing industry and it was not a belligerent nation.  That was important to Richard.

Quakers believe war is immoral and will not fight, although they will serve in ambulance corps during conflicts and many German Quakers were involved in smuggling people out of occupied Europe during World War II, he says

Mennonites are the only other Christian denomination to have such a fixed anti-war view, explains Richard, who was reared in a mixed family of Irish and Eastern Europeans with diverse religious backgrounds. While his parents were “socially conservative”, they encouraged the young Richard and his brother to check out as many different religions as possible.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune