I first came across Sally when she came into the Quaker Bookshop in London in the 80's. I don't recall the exact words at our first meeting but it was something like "what have you got to say for yourself".
In 1986 I traveled to America for a Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP) meeting in Richmond Indiana. My time at the meeting was brief as my flight was delayed a whole day, but it was apparent Sally was a lady of strong opinion. Between her and Betsy Muench, the treasurer it was worked out that my initial plans for after the meeting were not up to scratch and Sally would drive me back to Philadelphia, host me a couple of days and then drive me up to Betsey then to Durham Massachusetts were I would be handed over to another family who would get me on to the Appalachian Mountain Trail, walking for three days then returning via Boston to Philadelphia....
Journeying by car with Sally was always an adventure - although her car was equipped with standard cruise control she preferred to use her walking stick wedged on to the accelerator. Food was obtained from McDonalds only, (I think because of her teeth) although she always ,and embarrassingly suggested, that the staff should unionize to the servers.
We arrived back at her little plot of heaven quite late. It was a slightly extended but very historical farmhouse, in 1986 not yet surrounded by McMansions, but they were building them nearby.
The next day Sally borrowed a pick up truck and with a large red setter balanced precariously on my lap gave me a tour of the area. First the woods and fields she owned behind her house - one son was building a large house there, another had various cars and a school bus parked and decaying in among the trees and nearer the road a third son had an arborists (tree surgeon to Brits) yard with buildings and trucks. Then it was off to her beloved Mill Creek Meeting House and along roads by the White Clay Creek that had been saved from being dammed and turned into a reservoir by Sally and a bunch of other local residents.
There was a whirlwind tour of other Meeting Houses in the area. Often involving emergency braking to turn into small steep drives. A potted history of the meeting was given and if possible the pickup driven round the graveyard. Other places visited were old civil war battlefields and the museum and houses related to Andrew Wyeth who she seemed to have known.
After that Sally passed me on to other Quakers for a very adventurous couple of weeks. Hiking the Appalachian trail in the snow, seeing a bit of Boston and then experiencing the commune like street where Steve Sarafain of FWCC lived.
There followed several other visits to QUIP events at Pendle Hill, and another trip to Richmond all involving me staying Sally's house.
In her bedroom she had a very very early photocopier - the document to be copied had to be put in a plastic bag before inserting it in the machine, it was that old. She still had it serviced by an equally ancient and long retired service man, who she dragooned into visiting her when it went wrong. On this machine Sally printed out the Quaker Universalist pamphlets that she edited, wrote herself or sold. In the office opposite she had a guillotine and stapler - all that was needed to be a small scale "publisher of truth".
The office also contained filing cabinets devoted to her other writing projects and tracts, shelves of neatly arranged finished product. it was a very busy place. The hallway housed a large library of Quaker books and pamphlets haphazardly arranged, but Sally could instantly find what she was looking for.
Sally was an unusual Quaker in that she was evangelical in her desire to tell people about Quakerism, but not to "convert" them. She just believed it had wonderful ways to allow people to lead better and more fulfilling lives. Always a presence at committee meetings and conferences she was devoted to what was called "Outreach". In Meeting for Worship she would always minister on whatever was on her mind at that time, a recent book, article conversation - explored in clear detail (and practiced, often on me, for many days before first day). She was a great believer in recording spoken ministry as early friends had done, and in the absence of anyone else doing it, she did it herself with a loose leaf box of cards. At one point they were going to be put in print, but sadly not yet - as they were always relevant pithy and awkward.
Sally always took an interest in my "love life" - often yelling out as she came into the bookshop on her many visits to Britain "Hows your love life?" (interestingly my "love life" in those days was with Wendy who now 36 years later I finally married).
But Sally didn't just ask about it. She must have noticed how well I got on with Lucy at a QUIP meeting at Charney Manor a 13th century retreat centre near Oxford, who ran the Quaker Bookshop in Philadelphia and proposed me as co clerk of QUIP so Lucy and I could meet more often.
She always claimed responsibility for our wedding and in due time the arrival of our son Simon. She was certainly a big voice on our marriage clearness committee and rather pressurized ?? to hold a prenuptial dinner in their wonderful home.
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| Our wedding, and our clearness committee. |
Sally Rickerman was born Sarah Ann Hinshaw in 1921. Her father was
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| David Hinshaw |
David Scull Hinshaw and her mother Augusta Clendining Wiggam.
She was very proud of her father and had a life size bust of him prominently displayed in her house, he managed the 1928 campaign for Herbert Hoover, worked with William Allen White and Theodore Roosevelt. His books were numerous and his wife wrote many magazine articles on progressive topics.
TO BE CONTINUED....
Sally married Eric Denvic Fraser III in 1947 and divorced in 1951. He was an engineering officer in the British Merchant Navy. Before the marriage she had recently completed a course in "Modern Photography" in New York.
She moved with him to Scotland and used her teaching diploma from the University of Arizona to get a teaching job working in challenging schools. She never mentioned either husband, to me but she did gain a deep love of Britain from those years. The marriage was brief, he was often at sea and in the divorce was said to have abandoned her in 1948, but she did tell me she was a "fiery person" in those days.
Some more of Sally writings:-
Growing Up Quaker And Universalist Too
Trust
My Experience of Quakerism's Greatest Gift
THE LIGHT UPON THE CANDLESTICK
Sally Rickerman's Quaker Memorial Meeting For Worship Set For 2PM Saturday At London Grove Friends Meeting
Many friends remember Sally. from her support of the local co-op to her activism saving the White Clay Creek.
Where Words Come From
To be able to hear where words come from entails the ability of me, as a listener, both to be likable and to be liked by myself. Without that capacity, I am blocked by my emotions from hearing with love. For it would be easy to become a combative duelist hindered by my own immaturity, so that I heard only through the haze of feeling, threatened and diminished.
This I know experimentally. These words are the essence of my very being. More than fifty years ago, I latched onto a quotation from an art appreciation course: "Art is not born of thought patterns, but of experiences." For me today, this could be extended to the art of living, the art of the relationship to the Divine, the Divine in others and in myself. The two important words are "I" and "experimentally", for my only understanding, illumination and enlightenment comes through myself and my experiences, as I trust them both to teach and inform me. This is the path that I know how to tread. It is the only path of which I have as full knowledge as is possible. I, alone, can feel that which helps me see, hear and understand, that which has touched the depths of my soul and that which resonates to the beat of my heart.
Also I have learned experimentally that if and when I give myself space and quiet, I can tap into unity with all creatures and all aspects of our earth and cosmos. The easiest place for me to do this is in meeting for worship, for it is in this location that I can most clearly hear from whence the words of others come, rather than permitting their spoken words to interfere with my unity with them.
I was thrilled recently to have these feelings validated when I read Geoffrey Hoyland's Use of Silence, where he says that God does not speak to any of us in words, that we are spoken to through grace, and the words that result, however deeply and truly they may be inspired, are still our words, human words from the human vocabulary of everyday life. And grace is what I strive to hear from others, rather than to be constricted by their words or by their particular theological understandings.
There are other special locations beyond the meeting-house, where I have this same sense of belonging to all others. These are where it is evident that those who have preceded me have themselves reached out to that which is universal and divine. These sites are those of the great cathedrals of Christianity, the Acropolis of the pagan Greeks, the olive tree under whose branches Socrates taught, the carefully currycombed Hindu ashram of Gandhi and the pre-Celt Stonehenge. I cannot believe since I feel such unity with those who created these places special to their faith, that their God and my God are not one and the same. We differ only in our interpretation and cultural understanding, not in grace.
The third class of location is the one which occurs in the midst of the indifferent vehemence of "natural" forces, when it seems as if I am no more than a mindless leaf tossing about in a violent storm. Here, I have felt at one with the universal Uniter, the Spirit able to lift us, up and beyond our limited selves, to the heights which we do not know that we can attain. For here, in these violences of "nature", I am whittled down to size, appearing to be as infinitesimal and insignificant as any trivial unit can possibly be. It is as if I were merely a single drop of water absorbed without trace in all the oceans of the world, one grain of sand merged, indistinguishable, with others on all the beaches on this earth, or the lone ant working in isolation in its towering hill.
Yet, even as I intellectually discern this apparent loss of separateness and uniqueness, I find in this loss that which is exhilarating, uplifting and quickening: my sense of universal unity with all. I find, in the experience, the knowledge that each drop of water is more than just a single isolated drop, for together with other drops, all necessary, they form magnificent oceans; that our vast land mass arises from the collection and unity of all grains of sand; and that even the huge and amazing ant hills of Africa depend on each and every ant for their size and efficient functioning.
"The raw material of thinking, imagery, dreams and fantasies must come from firsthand empirical experience of the external world." So states Ralph Hetherington in his 1975 Swarthmore Lecture. This reliance on the experimental is the basis of my Quakerism, my universalism and my Quaker universalism. With the gifts of genes, birth and environment, I was given the "I", the "experimentally" and the loving acceptance of a Quaker community. These in turn nurtured the gifts of an inquiring mind, an openness which has permitted me to hear the faint whispers of mysticism, and an opportunity to fan those whispers into a full blown, continual, beneficial breeze.
I cannot believe that these gifts and understandings were given to me, this universal unity with the All, so that I could, first, draw a boundary around myself and, then, put those who do not come packaged in a Judeo-Christian theology, beyond the pale. Neither of these things I can do. For in the very depths of my most inner being, I know that I am a part of the whole, of all times, all ages, all peoples and all expressions of the Divine.
