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.
Practising presence helps me grow beyond my beginnings, towards realising what I was created for.
I was born into and educated in a hierarchical society. I was taught to obey, in order to reap the benefits that I would be denied if I didn’t. But among Quakers I have come to believe that there is that of God, or whatever It might be called, in each of us, including me; revelation continues, and we are each called to let our lives speak. All this requires acknowledging my beginnings not as limitations but as stepping stones from which I can practice openness to life-long learning. My stumbles become opportunity to learn.
Heat does things to people.
Ask anybody. Ask Benvolio in Shakespeare’s bloodbath, Romeo and Juliet. Ominously he warns, ‘The day is hot; the Capulets, abroad; And if we meet we shall not ‘scape a brawl, For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.’ He’s speaking to Mercutio, who is as mercurial and fiery as our twenty-first-century weather.
To step into Mount Street Meeting House in Manchester is to stand at the geographic crossroads of modern British Quaker history. Sixty years apart, this city (which will host Yearly Meeting this month) served as the stage for two seismic events that completely redefined the theological landscape of London Yearly Meeting (now Britain Yearly Meeting).
It was for me to give the monthly reading in Meeting last Sunday. The life of one of our members had been commemorated the Saturday before. My wife’s brother was to be commemorated the following day. With end of life in mind, I chose Quaker faith & practice 22.94: ‘Love bridges death. We are comrades of those who are gone; though death separate us, their work, their fortitude, their love shall be ours, and we will adventure with hope, and in the spirit and strength of our great comrade of Galilee, who was acquainted with grief and knew the shadows of Gethsemane, to fight the good fight of faith.’
Just before world war one, a group of girls left Mount School in York. They were determined to keep in touch, and, this being pre-email and Facebook, they did so by writing their news and thoughts in a hard-bound exercise book and posting it to each other. They called it ‘Omnium’, sometimes ‘DearOmni’, and referred to it as ‘he’. Over the next thirty years – spanning two world wars, women’s right to vote, and the beginnings of the welfare state – they developed a unique correspondence.
Greetings from the Quaker Music Network! This year our residential weekend took place at Cober Hill near Scarborough. We try to alternate between venues in the north and south of England, but even so travelling can be a challenge – made easier by lift sharing, where possible.
And when we had walked enough
rashly we set our blanket in the shade of
a fractured mulberry tree, and lay down together.
And looked up through the leaves and
watched the clouds drift across the June sky.
And welcomed the birds coming to have their fill of
the ripening fruit… young blackbirds
still with their speckled breast feathers.
A pair of jays. An already fat wood pigeon.
And we dozed.
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