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.
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When I sat as an elder for the first time in my current Meeting, I had already been an elder elsewhere, so thought that I understood the job. I came out of worship wondering if I had truly done my best to ‘hold’ it in the Spirit, and whether some of the old-timers would have anything to say. One approached me, so I prepared myself to receive some gentle suggestions. She said, ‘Do you know where the loo rolls are kept?’
An art retreat in Provence sounded the perfect idea after a very fraught year, and I was correct. Maison Quaker de Congénies, in the Gard district of south France (Occitanie), is a 200-year-old country house. Honey-coloured buildings cluster around a large thirteenth-century church, now closed, from which a bell tolls every evening, beside the village pump, and where pale blue flowers and bright pink bougainvillea peep over archway walls. The ancient Occitan language is evident in some street names, such as Chemin de Negue Saume (a metaphor for a time when the area could be flooded, I was told).
Love, hope and imprisonment are all subjects I find fascinating, particularly when they co-exist. A chance conversation with Andy Hall one Sunday after Meeting recently led me to find out about his father (Ernest Hall (1921–2017)).
In Rufus Jones’s 1925 article republished in the Friend’s Quaker Week issue (‘Worship as a unifying force’, 26 September), he talks of open-hearted worship, including an ‘increase of the mystical aspect of religion in our public worship’, which he describes as much needed. In more modern language we can learn from experience how opening to silence and stillness can be gateways into present moment awareness, and into the timeless dimension of universal consciousness and oneness. This is a gift of grace perhaps, which comes when we are ready and sufficiently open. We cannot work towards it or earn it, of course, but to realise our ‘true nature’, and increasingly to allow it to ‘live through us’, is surely the essence of true spirituality.
Our government is placing great faith in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform our economy. As Quakers, we should be concerned.
My willow’s like a frozen hill
Of green waves, when the wind is still;
But when it blows, the waves unfreeze
And make a waterfall of leaves.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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