The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
I am worried about my health (says the mind). I have had a niggling pain in my lower back for some time. I wonder if it is that old sports injury? Perhaps it is more serious. Perhaps it is my kidneys. It could be really serious. After all, I am about the age when….
Epiphany moments are rare, happening unexpectedly, like a drop of rain transformed to crystal when glanced upon by sunshine. They remain seared into one’s soul, reminders of the reasons for being in that place at that brief moment in time.
Material events like cancer or heart attack can come as real shocks. One’s perspective on day-to-day life changes rapidly. Such events can jolt and change our spiritual perspective, too. In 2012 I had an unforeseen diagnosis – cancer! Three months later, at Yearly Meeting in London, an event set in motion a profound development in my spiritual life.
My local history society recently had an article about the development of my area in Coventry in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, at the migrant centre where I volunteer, I was dealing with someone who had moved into a house in a street mentioned in the article, but found paying the rent a struggle.
Friends Career Center (FCC) was founded five years ago by five young Quakers in Rwanda. They wanted to support their community, and bridge the gap to successful careers and other opportunities.
Down here in the dust
under the choir stalls
it’s very quiet
and the flagstones are cold,
but the tiny carving
on the upturned bottom
of this seat
is smooth and warm.
If your appetite for Quaker history was whetted by the Stuart Masters’ Swarthmore Lecture, but you find history texts a bit dry, then this novel is a lively route into Quakerism as lived in 1814.
Simplicity, silence, stillness. How we long for all these! I live more simply, I feel more free, as I take unwanted books to the charity shop; in the quiet of our worship we relax mind and body; my soul enlarges as I sit peacefully looking at a flower. To do all of these, I just need to let go of what I’m clinging to, possessions, even beautiful ones, words, however important they may sound, restless activity, so helpfully distracting, and, as we all know, this isn’t easy.
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Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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