Letters - 15 August 2025
From finding the courage to playing with numbers
Finding the courage
For months I have been devastated to see how the terrible wars raging everywhere on our benighted planet are affecting little children. How little souls have never seen peace. How they must think that this is the norm. This is what life is.
And for weeks I have been summoning up courage to ask my Meeting to pray for them, to hold them in the Light, just to think hard about them for an hour. How to remember Save the Children when they pop a tenner in the box at the door.
But I am quite new to the Religious Society of Friends, and have never summoned up the courage to speak out. Who am I, old in years but young in Quakerism, to interrupt a silent Meeting for Worship?
And then, last Saturday, I had to do it. I just had to do it. I had read in Harvey Gillman’s book A Light That is Shining how the impulse to minister ‘often seems to force itself upon the speaker, and this may be accompanied by a quickening of the pulse’.
I leaned forward, clenched my fists, and closed my eyes. I pictured a boy of twelve or so, with no hands and bandaged arms, being fed by a nurse in a South Sudan hospital. And then another boy, lying in a field in the Sudan, wounded by shrapnel, who would slowly die.
And then by chance I saw a little girl, tended by strangers who didn’t know how to tell her that her mother was dead. She cried all day.
These three little kids then seemed to migrate in my mind to all the other war-struck countries to the north of Sudan. I mentioned them all, stopping for a while in Beirut, to see those three sample children again, in that beautiful city, the jewel of the Eastern Mediterranean.
In Iraq, I pictured long lines of white tents and lots of hungry thirsty children. And in Russia and the Ukraine, I saw boys in wheelchairs, looking with hate in their hearts at each other.
I hope that I helped a little towards a gathered stillness in our Meeting. For a magic few minutes, I was held firmly in the Light.
Michael Skuse
Missions to China
I was interested to read about the return of the Quaker scroll to China in the news section of 25 July.
Friends who are interested to know more about Quakers in China can find an account of their work and experiences in Friends to China: The Davidson brothers and the Friends’ Mission to China 1886 to 1939 by Charles Tyzack, which I have been reading recently and am willing to lend.
The book contains a photograph of Suining Hospital and several photographs of William Henry Davidson (known as Henry), including one of him and his wife Laura with hospital staff. William Gawan Sewell also went to China as part of the Friends Foreign Mission Association and taught in the Department of Chemistry at West China Union University, Chengdu, in Sichuan. He wrote several books about his experiences in China. I have two of them. Copies of the books can also be borrowed from university libraries via Open Library or World Cat.
Jane Wilde
