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.
In the summer of 1972 in Moscow, my friend Tom and I joined a long queue hoping to buy a bottle of cold milk. Hot and thirsty, we slowly edged towards the deli counter. When at last we purchased the milk, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was from someone who introduced herself as Gaia. She was a teacher of English, and wanted to improve her language skills.
In October, Friends in Ghana will celebrate our official centenary. Hill House Meeting originates from a group of British Quakers who were recruited as staff for Achimota College and School. They established a Meeting in 1925, and in 1934 built the Hill House Meeting garden shelter on the school property (see image).
Charlotte Brontë knew a thing or two about keeping silence. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of her 1853 novel Villette, is an avatar of Brontë herself, and she presents silence as ‘indissoluble’ and capable of ‘baffling imagination’.
Earlier this year, Andrew Backhouse asked ‘What canst thou say?’ with regard to Quaker burial grounds (‘Down to earth’, 18 April).
I first heard of Ursula K LeGuin as a schoolboy in southeast Scotland. Friday morning was when my class made our weekly library choice. I can still see the sunlight streaming in onto the books as well as the posters on the walls, one of which promoted LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, on which a boy confronts a winged humanoid figure. I confess that the joys of the Doctor Who books distracted me from following up on the powerful tension swirling within myself when I considered that poster.
Her uncle holds her high like a holy text,
an icon, a sacred scroll of flesh.
He, like an imam, rabbi, priest of many griefs,
his clothes are rent in lamentation.
The blood of the child will not redeem the land.
Her silence is a call to worship
and we (the faithful?) weep, tear our clothes,
or lower our eyes in anger or despair.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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