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.
Back at Easter I was reminded of a Michael Leunig cartoon, in which a Jesus-figure, on his way to execution, suddenly stops… to happily sniff a flower (see left). His action is unexpected, so contrary to the drama of the Via Dolorosa. Seeing it, I was shocked into silence in which time stood still and the world was compelled to wait.
This week I launched my book The Fires That Lie, an upmarket psychological thriller inspired by a road trip I once took. When I came to draft it, starting all the way back in the Covid lockdown, my focus was more on trying to find an escape rather than writing something particularly worthy. In fact, with bad language, violence, inappropriate behaviour, and a rather grisly murder, it isn’t a very ‘Quakerly’ book at all – and yet it was definitely inspired by Quaker witness.
You’ve probably heard the term ‘artificial intelligence’ used to mean almost anything a computer does that seems clever. But that is too vague to be useful. Let us start with a plainer explanation.
Lydia Barrington was born in Dublin in 1729. She emigrated to the United States in 1753 after marrying her family’s tutor, William Darragh. They settled in Philadelphia, and her family became devout Quakers. But during the American revolutionary war (1775-1783) the family’s allegiance to pacifism was tested to the limit. They were not alone in this. The revolution divided US Quakers into two camps: some wanted nothing to do with it; others felt that God was asking them to take up arms. Lydia’s eldest son, Charles, left home to serve in Washington’s Continental Army.
Whether a member or an attender, we all have a relationship with Quakers, and a concept of what membership may mean. Note the ‘may’.
There is a missile,
or so I am told
with my name on it
ready to be sent via the air
from an Ayatollah in a distant land.
Netanyahu says it’s true.
They said Saddam Hussein had one too.
He never sent it.
It never arrived.
Remember how many died
while he cowered in a spider’s hole.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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