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.
On some level, none of us knows exactly what our life story is, even if we have lived consciously committed lives. We may be young Quakers setting forth on life’s journey, or Quakers at their century’s close, with a discipleship lived on countless continents.
Helen
Lesley I was thinking of that poem you shared a year or so ago, about a river finding its way to the sea.
Lesley
Oh yes, ‘The river cannot go back’ by Kahlil Gibran. It imagines the fear of the river as it approaches the sea, fearing it will be swallowed up, but finding that it hasn’t disappeared into the ocean, it’s actually become the ocean itself.
Doomscrolling is ‘the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories’. I do it more often than I should. The minutes turn to hours and time slips by imperceptibly as if in a dream. That’s the worst thing about it. Doomscrolling robs me of time I could have spent doing something meaningful. It is time wasted in a fear-filled reverie.
Wow. The radical, transformative experience of George Fox, which powered the beginnings of our Quaker movement, was brought right into my heart, thoughts and feelings at Central Manchester Meeting House last month.
We are encouraged in Advices & queries to take heed of the promptings of love and truth in our hearts. The Quaker poet Jane Pearn regards these promptings as signals. Dealing with signals requires the sensitivity to detect them, and the capacity to interpret them. Pearn is gifted with each of these abilities, as revealed by this fine collection, which faces up to many of truth’s challenges with courage, intelligence and humour.
"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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