Thought for the week: recalling Harry Albright (1961-2025)

‘I have been privileged to serve Friends.’

‘What do you want to do with your life?’ I was asked this, aged fifteen, by the Quaker headteacher of the school I was applying to attend. I did know what I wanted to do, for a career at least, but somehow I thought that ‘journalist’ wasn’t what he wanted to hear. So I replied, ‘I don’t know, a doctor or a lawyer or something.’

‘That’s good,’ he replied. ‘Those jobs involve service to others. That is what we try to teach here.’ In retrospect, I could have said ‘journalist’. I know he was very happy for me when I was accepted to study journalism at university.

But those words stuck with me. Service is at the very core of Quakerism.

This is a religion with no priests, no formal hierarchy. We all serve each other in various ways, sometimes by taking on formal jobs within the Meeting, such as clerk, elder or overseer, or making the tea. We may take responsibility for various other aspects of running the Meeting, and we may serve at a regional or national level. Each of us has a role to play, and each will play different roles depending on our abilities and what we feel called to do at any given time – which may just involve being the faithful Friend on the bench every Sunday.

I have also been privileged to serve Friends in other ways. I spent seven-and-a-half years as editor of this magazine, and for the past almost four years, I have been working for the Friends World Committee for Consultation, helping, among other things, to organise next April’s World Conference of Friends. While Quakers have no paid clergy, it has always been the case that some Friends have been paid to do specific jobs for us, such as editing the Friend or serving, in a variety of ways, Friends (and others) in Britain and around the world. There is a recognition that these are full-time, professional jobs that people need to be released to do on our behalf.

But even this service is only temporary. Just as one must be alert to the call to do certain work, one must realise when the time has come either to lay the task itself down, or for another person to take up that particular torch. Among Friends, this is natural, as we seek to make use of all the varied gifts each of us has to offer.

The goal, of course, is to deepen our spiritual life, and move forward in our own faith journeys. George Fox taught that the inward Light of Christ is our guide in all the service that we give. It is up to us to be faithful to those promptings; although we are supported and nurtured by fellow seekers, we cannot rely on any other authority to set us on the right path.

Quakerism is not an easy religion. But the rewards it offers to me cannot be measured. This faith has shaped my life from my earliest memories, even at times when I have turned away from it. I am grateful for the opportunities that Quakerism has given me to be of service.

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Harry (1961-2025) edited the Friend from 1997-2004. This article appeared in the 30 September 2011 issue.

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