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.
I have good news for you. This is not the sort of news that you would get from the media, filled with hate-filled rhetoric. No, I need to tell you this: hatred is not normal. Neither is anger, prejudice, or spitefulness. They are all diseases of the mind. Furthermore, it is up to us to do something about it, by looking deeply at ourselves and removing them from our hearts and minds, and so from our character.
The compound was quiet in the afternoon heat. Then Barbara Clark heard the sound that every settler family dreaded during those troubled months of the 1950s: voices – many voices – shouting and approaching fast. Through her window, she watched fifty men running toward her home, their calls echoing across the Kenyan landscape.
When I was a child, my father refused to allow garlic in the house, believing the smell would contaminate everything else. Macaroni cheese was the only pasta we knew, and rice was for puddings. How things have changed! Over the years, we have accepted more variety in our diets, but novel ways of cultivating protein are still met with suspicion.
As Easter approached this year, I found myself thinking about the crucifixion story as a metaphor for what we are doing to the Earth:
If it is the Earth that is being crucified, then I guess we all know what it feels like to stand around the foot of the cross gambling over the last shreds of her garments.
Friends will know David Morris as one half of Journeymen Theatre. Since 2012, he and Lynn Morris have been performing plays at Quaker Meeting houses, and no one who has witnessed Lover of Souls, or Red Flag over Bermondsey, will fail to remember the power of Lynn’s Elizabeth Hooton, or her heart-rending portrait of Ada Salter. Although they have now announced their retirement, the plays are available for a future generation to rediscover.
My great-grandfather founded a local newspaper in Devizes. He wanted to promote nonconformist views. The question of who influences us in what we read each day is taken up in this timely short book, which surveys the power of those who control our media.
"If you truly want to be led you must put yourself in a position that allows following" (PYM)
Though written within a Quaker and Christian context, this book can be used by anyone of any religious faith or secular inclination. The only requirement is a desire to follow, to be guided by, to align with the richness of the ineffable, which this book calls "the Way". This book seeks nothing less than to aid readers in aligning their lives with the same power and richness that animated the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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