Who is this, quoted recently in The Church Times?
'It was all because of a girl that I had a life-changing religious experience.
While at Oxford, I had gone to her room, and there was this expectation that something would happen; but, for me, the erotic element was not there. Instead I found myself outside the door of a Quaker Meeting, which I joined, and a kind of inner conversion started.'

We have listened to a moving tale from Eileen Ambrose of Hardwick, Cambridge. Eileen recalled for us the first Christmas following the end of the second world war, a time of scarcity. Her neighbourhood was asked to entertain German POWs who had not yet been repatriated. The Ambroses invited three prisoners of war to share their fairly meagre Christmas lunch, and when they arrived there was an awkward silence. In broken English they introduced themselves - an elderly bearded soldier, a shopkeeper whose shop had been devastated by English bombing, and a young man with nothing to say.
The family's small children hid. Eileen takes up the story: 'I ran upstairs to fetch our third child, who was asleep, and brought him downstairs. In a moment the whole scene changed. Fritz, the elderly soldier, held out his arms to cuddle the baby. Hans, the little shopkeeper from Cologne, tickled his toes, and Franz, the lanky teenager, fished in his pocket for a snapshot of his girlfriend back in Germany.
'Suddenly we were caught up in a Christmas fantasy: war-time grub, but we managed to obtain a bottle of good Rhine wine. All three prisoners had brought home-made presents, not only for us but for our children as well. The ice had been broken. We sang British songs and German ones, including the famous 'Tannenbaum', and I was presented with a home-made brooch and my husband with a cigar - how they got hold of it we do not know. We danced around our small Christmas tree, exchanged photos and swung our two older children up to the ceiling. When at six o’clock the car arrived to fetch our visitors back, there were tears of happiness in more than one pair of eyes.
'After all these years I still have memories and momentoes of that first Christmas day. The war was over; it was peace again.'

Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, ecumenical and local choral singers all contributed at Wells next the Sea Meeting House on 26 November to a celebration of the Leavener's song book: Sing in the Spirit. Each group made its own choice (no duplications!) and seventy-five people had a joyful afternoon exploring the richness and diversity of songs in the new book. Are any other Meetings inviting their local church choirs to 'Sing in the Spirit'?

Being a computer guru, Eye wastes a fair amount of time on online quizzes. Some of you won't have seen these, but trust us, many a happy hour can be spent pigeonholing ourselves by answering a series of probing questions. We've found out which Star Wars character we are, which animal we are (above, from Quizila) and even which American president we are. Now it turns out you can find out which religion you are, and as we suspected, there are a lot of Quakers out there who never knew.
Beliefnet asks twenty questions and then tells you, in scientific percentage points, which religion you should be out of a possible twenty-six. In Eye's rather speedy study of a sample of results, thirty-five out of thirty-seven bloggers had liberal or orthodox Quakers as one of their top five results. Quite a few bloggers went to find out more as a result, others were surprised or unimpressed by the outcome. Christopher Francis of Tuscan, Arizona (source lost, sorry), said: 'The eighty-five per cent Quaker match intrigues me, and that indeed might be a better fit – except for their opposition to war'. And Shane Bertou writes: 'Here is what I, as the good Orthodox Quaker that I am, apparently believe. As I read through it, I’m left scratching my head at some things. (ie, my take on Creation is quite a bit more complicated than that and all this talk of "Divine Light" sort of creeps me out.) Now that I know what my true religious orientation is, I can finally pursue my lifelong dream of producing and selling my own brand of hand-churned butter!'
Eye thinks that any urge to argue with the result probably just confirms it. Welcome, Friends!
Check if you really are a Quaker at www.beliefnet.com.

Bernice Taylor has asked us to thank all those readers who responded so well to the Friend article (8 September 2005) about the 'Teddies on their travels'. She says: 'The response was, and is, wonderful! More than 1,000 have been sent on their way, this time to Chernobyl affected children in Belarus, who are still suffering so badly from the disaster which struck 10 years ago. Our house has become a "Teddy Port" prior to dispatch! Nearly every day there is a parcel at the door. I wish I could thank every knitter individually, but time has prevented this. Please Friends, know that your efforts are so worth while and I thank you all for your loving hard work.'

Rosalind Johnson has informed Eye that Richard Pennant (24 November) was an anti-abolitionist, slave-owning MP for Liverpool, but not in the late nineteenth century. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he became one of the two MPs for Liverpool in 1767. He was re-elected in 1768 and 1774. In 1780 he was defeated at Liverpool, but was elected again in 1784. He withdrew as a candidate in 1790, and died in 1808.

Eye would like to ask readers to help us write the Christmas Eye. Are there any jokes, anecdotes, amusing stories tucked away in your memories that will make our page sparkle? Only short offerings please – we’re not a big page, but we like to keep the rest of the magazine cheerful. Send them to us at editorial@thefriend.org

We see we have been nominated as a gay-friendly organisation in a national poll and our fellow nominees are the Met Police, Age Concern, Amnesty and Unison. Readers of the Pink Paper, a leading gay publication, put us up for this award because Quakers are seen as gay-friendly. Eye notes that there are, sadly, no other religious nominees, reflecting perhaps the feelings of the gay community towards faith bodies. But the readers may have missed something crucial about Quakers – they eschew competition. And some might not like it if we win!

Eye has received a rather perplexed message from a 'fairly basic Quaker' who is fascinated by James Nayler but was completely foxed by some parts of Ben Pink Dandelion's article on him (Friend 3 Nov). She says we need to put an 'academic article following' warning logo on such erudite pieces. The section which fazed our reader is:'‘It also made clear that Quakers then, unlike Liberal Friends today, did not maintain a doctrine of continuing revelation, but had received their dispensation which in and of itself brought unity. Only, as Doug Gwyn shows in his recently republished Covenant Crucified (Quaker Books, 2006), when covenant gave way to a more worldly sense of contract would the seeds of a more individualistic and rationally based Quakerism start to emerge'.

The A-level type questions our reader asks are:

1. What is meant by 'continuing revelation'?
2. What dispensation?
3. What covenant?



Eye asked our scholar if he could enlighten her (and us).

And he obligingly replied: 'Continuing revelation is the idea that we will know more of God's purposes for us over time. We take this for granted today but it is a twentieth century Liberal Quaker invention. George Fox rebuked some other early Friends for trying to change the early Quaker message on these grounds by claiming they had received their 'dispensation' - ie their sense of how the true Church was called to be. The covenant refers to the mutual and binding agreement, made without coercion, between God and humanity, which the first Quakers felt called into.'