Yvonne Dixon
‘Forest’ appears as a modifier to describe a number of newly popular activities: Forest School, Forest Church, Forest Bathing, to name a few. My eldest daughter trained as a Forest School teacher just before the pandemic started and I attended my first Forest Church in Bicester at around the same time. I have a striking memory of that first gathering at 7:30 on a frosty morning in January 2020 at which I looked forward to making more local friends through the activity. However, it was 18 months before I could reconnect in person when it recommenced in July last year. Since then I have made many new friends within the local church that supports the Forest Church. We recently enjoyed an afternoon walking through small villages, fields, and woods north of Bicester, visiting a micro-dairy and tasting fresh home-made goats’ cheese. On a recent ramble scoping out a walk I plan to lead with the Oxford Fieldpaths Society next year, I saw a notice next to a village pond announcing ‘Wild Church’ with services held outdoors, and of course early Quakers were quite familiar with worship under an open sky.
I have many friends and connections within Chiltern Area Meeting from my time as a Quaker Prison Chaplain, and I was very enthused by one of their latest initiatives, a series of guided walks starting from each of the Meeting Houses in the Area. In June this year I went on the first one of these, an extremely enjoyable and informative tour of Eton, setting off from Slough Meeting House and led by a Blue Badge guide. This month (August) I have just been on a walk starting from Amersham Meeting House with guides in Tudor dress from the town’s museum introducing us to the history of the Lollards, their calls for the Bible to be made available for everyone to read in English, and a ‘flatter’ more egalitarian church structure. We climbed a hill above the town to the place where the Amersham Martyrs were burnt at the stake for these beliefs; similar in many ways to those of the Quakers in a later century.
I do enjoy the ‘incidental fellowship’ of walking alongside people on hikes, pilgrimages, and walks such as these, and I wonder if OSAM could envisage something similar: a series of short walks starting from a Meeting House door and visiting a few sites of interest. Post-pandemic, a number of habits have been overturned and some connections lost in the process. My own patterns of worship and modes of belonging have changed in ways I could not have foreseen, and maybe an idea like this would offer an opportunity of helping us ‘seek to know one another in the things which are eternal’ (Advices and Queries 18).
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 521 • September 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
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