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 was talking with a Friend about the darkness of our world, and how it can engulf us. The violence, misery and cruelty make one despair about humankind, while our shortsightedness, stupidity and greed are leading us to climate disaster. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but always remember: the darkness also calls forth the Light.’
Last year for the 400th anniversary of George Fox’s birth, Cornwall Friends were joined by Devon Friends and others in Launceston to celebrate Fox’s life. We visited Doomsdale, the name of the gaol at Launceston Castle where George and other early Friends were incarcerated. It was a nasty stinking place where few ever came out again, full of filthy excrement. Eighty years before Fox had been imprisoned there, Cuthbert Mayne a notable Catholic prisoner of conscience, had been taken from Doomsdale to be hanged, drawn and quartered in Launceston marketplace, for refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth as head of the English Church.
Present-day living, for us and for the greater part of the population of the affluent west, has never been better. We are safer, richer, more comfortable than any previous generation. We live longer, are healthier, die of illnesses our fathers seldom lived long enough, or richly enough, to contract. Our homes are cleaner and warmer than ever before; our food more varied and its supply more secure. And lest you think that I am taking a materialist view, we have the capacity to travel in search of man-made beauty or the solace of quiet places, our walls are lined with the great books of the world in paperback, we choose between gramophone records of magnificent music, much of which was once unplayed, in performances which the skill of the recording engineer have made nearly perfect (almost, sometimes, too perfect). Opera and ballet, the entertainments of princes, are widely enjoyed; and the younger staff in my office delight in skiing, once the sport of playboys.
The early Quaker movement was born amid persecution and profound loss. Yet it was through their encounters with death that George Fox and Margaret Fell demonstrated their deepest spiritual insights, showing how the Light within could illuminate even the darkest valleys of human experience.
Bertie, our six-year-old grandson, was with us last weekend. ‘I’m going to write my autobiography,’ he said.
In former days, they said,
bodies floated down the river
for burial in the Alyscamps.
Become a subscriber to enjoy unlimited access to our articles, dating back to 2009! Online subscribers get the Friend to their inbox each week, can comment on articles, and dive into our 1914-18 digital archive too!
Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
News | Views | Reviews
Written by and for Friends on the bench
Subscribe