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.
‘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.’
So far on this tour I’ve felt butterflies, goosebumps, and now shivers down the spine.
Let me explain. When trying to pin down a particular venue for my play The Mistake, I can spend huge amounts of time in emails and phone calls and Zoom meetings, only for all that effort to come to nothing. But then sometimes you can shoot off one speculative email – as I did just one month before leaving for the US, where I wanted to tour – and get an immediate positive response. Such was Chicago. I had tried for months to get a performance in the Windy City to no avail. Various promising options fell through. But that last speculative email of mine was to the chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago, Peter Littlewood. He responded that, yes, they’d love to host us, in the department lecture theatre. I was beyond thrilled.
One of the joys and responsibilities of Quakerism is that each generation has to renew its understanding of the sacred for its own changing times. Right now, I am finding my traditional Quaker responses to Trump/Ukraine/rearmament/climate/AI both true and underwhelming. My own comfortable life exists on one side of a pane of glass, the world’s great troubles on the other.
In 2010, at the Samara Diocese headquarters, Viktor Moiseyevich Poletkin, the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Samara and Syzran, opened an exhibition of watercolours and drawings by the British Quaker Richard Kilby. ‘Our brothers in faith, Quakers’, said the Russian clergyman at the opening, ‘saved hundreds of thousands of Russians from starving to death.’
My first murder said it all – a teenager, lurking behind his kitchen door with the family shotgun, killed both his parents as they came home. That night, in his prison cell, he broke down and wept bitterly. Even self-inflicted orphans miss their mum.
I was stacked to achieve fluency,
conversational speed, the new
Hippocrates with its large language model
was built into me with a trillion parameter
constellation system. In other words,
I can smile. I will speak.
"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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