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.
It’s hard to hope these days, with the populist right on the rise throughout the world. Here in the UK, the constant drip of anti-migrant sentiment has morphed into a broader anti-immigrant sentiment. It seems the politics of grievance is doing very well.
On 28 June I was asked to attend the Leicester Area Business Meeting. On the agenda there was an item, and a draft Minute, concerning the Quaker Prison and Courts Register. This is a historic and ongoing list maintained by Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM). It documents the names of Quakers who have been arrested, tried, or imprisoned for matters of conscience – specifically when acting out their faith and values. As I was arrested last year for holding a sign in protest against the proscription of Palestine Action, I was asked if it would be possible for me to give the Meeting more information about this situation.
I like the story of Pentecost. I love its reversal of the Tower of Babel story – all those different languages now cause for celebration and solidarity, rather than discord, and no need to be ascending the heavens via a mighty tower, or even in a fiery chariot. Rather, it is a reason to gather gratuitously and defy the odds. Our ‘frail, travelling coincidence’ in spacetime is now a blessed moment, poised (as Philip Larkin suggests in his poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’) with incalculable promise.
Two disturbing reports were featured on Radio Scotland this morning, related to knife crime among young males. The first described how primary school children were concerned about knives, prompting calls for conflict resolution techniques to be introduced. The second reported on the jailing of three teenage males for the murder of a gang member. Such attacks are now so common that they are quickly forgotten. And the carrying of knives among teenage lads has become an epidemic.
‘Each of us is responsible for our own actions and our own reactions. We are not responsible for someone else’s actions and reactions’ – that’s Alice Wiser at the end of the United Nations Decade of Women (Quaker faith & practice 21.16).
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