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As a teenager in the early 1990s, I visited my granny in Belfast. The agreement that ended armed conflict there was yet to be written. My granny served us soda bread, and my mum innocently asked if it was from Ed’s Bread, which we had passed earlier in the day. ‘Oh no!’ said Granny, indignant. ‘Ed is from the Falls Road!’ My dad’s family is Protestant. The Falls Road is a Catholic area. She would rather get on a bus and travel across town than buy her bread from a Catholic. This statement, or rather the sectarianism of which it was clear evidence, has guided my life choices for many years.
Many Friends must be deeply unhappy at the proposed increases in our armed forces and weapons manufacture, while wondering if we are trapped in a situation which peace-lovers have no way to influence. The international peace understandings that largely prevailed since the cold war are in disarray, thanks in large part to the USA, UK and other countries ignoring them when we decided it suited us. Russia is clearly hostile to our country and its interests, even if it is unlikely to make a conventional military attack on us.
Between the probable and the proved there yawns
A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,
Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,
Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns
Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe.
Sheldon Vanauken
A Severe Mercy, 1977
The topic of burnout appears to have surfaced more in the general media in recent years, highlighted by the pressures on key workers during the Covid pandemic (and more recently raised as an issue in the Covid-19 inquiry). Burnout is portrayed in these instances as almost entirely a product of extreme stress. It is rooted in definitions provided in the seminal work of Christina Maslach in the 1980s, which portrayed burnout as a psychological phenomenon creating physiological effects.
We began June’s Meeting with items common to many agendas. Those appointed from a good list of nominations included a group to plan for our 2028 Wales-wide residential.
In June 2018 I was on a cruise from Budapest to the Black Sea Delta. We stopped at the Croatian town of Vukovar to learn about the siege and massacre of 1991. What I learned in Vukovar was not simply about the brutality of war, but about the extraordinary capacity of ordinary people to live together again among the rubble and ashes.
How did you feel when you first heard about Quakers, or attended your first Meeting? Did you immediately ‘get’ what Quakerism is about? Geoffrey Durham takes us back to that uncomfortable and mysterious time, and provides pointers to make the process easier, clearer, and perhaps more joyful, for today’s newcomers.
Off camera, off duty so to speak,
it’s impossible to detect her spirit dressed
in the repair care clothes of Civvy Street.
Everything is given away,
we all turn to algae eventually.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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