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’ve been an athlete all my life. I learned to swim and use gym equipment in my pre-teen years, at the downtown Olympic Club in San Francisco, until my dad died, leaving no money to continue the family membership. Fortunately, at a public court near where we lived, I learned to play tennis, and went on to play on my school and university teams.
Readers familiar with Durham may remember the old Durham Light Infantry Museum, a stark, modernist white cube that sat in parkland near the old County Hall. County Hall is scheduled for demolition, but the museum has re-opened as The Light, with this highly-appropriate exhibition.
John Lampen is right (‘International disorder’, 14 August). Quakers and others who care about a demilitarised and just future need to respond to the changing international order with a thoughtfulness that does not retreat into utopian thinking.
When we consider membership, we usually see it primarily as an individual matter. But in our national and local communities, membership has several corporate functions, so we can usefully ask: ‘What does using membership in this way show about our community? Do we need this function? Could it be carried out differently, or better?’
Cymar is the overarching charity bringing together the various Quaker bodies in Wales and the Southern Marches. The speaker at its inaugural AGM as a functioning charity, held in Cardiff on 19 September, was Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury.
The question was very simple: ‘Do you take sugar?’ When Jennifer Kavanagh first began volunteering on tea runs in London, she knew very little about homelessness. But stepping up to a doorway and offering a hot cup of tea changed everything. In that quiet moment, a human relationship began. Looking at the person sitting on the pavement, she had a clear, sudden realisation: that could be me. There is no such thing as the other.
It arrives today –
Pellets like steel slicing into the dusty soil
Colours shifting, flowers shaking,
Spent leaves scattering like straw.
Roots that were spaghetti threads
Caked in a powdery mesh
Now reviving – sodden with lushness,
Decay and debris wielding to life.
Wind humming, branches shivering, birds flittering,
The soil becoming pitted with tiny caverns,
Scuttling bugs cavorting in the deluge.
I imagine worms breathing again,
And other microscopic creatures
Sighing with relief. It’s over. For now.
The summer’s swelter sliding away
As Nature retrenches its losses.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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