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.
This Christmas I came by a book called Voices of History, an assembly of famous speeches compiled by Simon Sebag Montefiore. There was Churchill, Lincoln, Luther King Jnr, Hitler… I said to myself: this is old hat, I don’t need it. But inside I found passages that were deeply thought-changing. There is a world of difference between a talk that tells you something and a speech that turns your life around.
The judging mind is a fearful thing. Whenever it operates, it creates difference. Sometimes a ‘better than’ and sometimes a ‘worse than’, but always an ‘other than’. This is judgement’s attraction and its horror, its satisfaction and its worst error. Whenever it is used, it puffs up the ego, making the owner of the judging mind feel bigger, better. At other times, it can do the opposite and make them feel smaller or ‘less than’ – to the ego, the difference is irrelevant. The result is superiority or inferiority, but the effect is always the same: otherness.
Getting old can happen quite suddenly, and can require rapid change to our behaviour and independence. To enable one to continue to be self-supporting, we have to adapt our lifestyle and activities. How we make these drastic changes will make all the difference.
Philip Noel-Baker (1889-1982) left quite a legacy: an Olympic medal, a war medal for valour, and a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet his remarkable achievements did not come easy: his life was spent wrestling with profound challenges, meeting them with Quaker conviction.
There was a time when you would have
sunk down among cornflowers and white lilies
and laughed at the snow and ice.
Your homemade woollen hat pulled tight over
forehead and ears,
smiling eyes shaded from the winter sun.
All the killing fields of the USA,
as far away as JFK.
Middlemarch is my favourite English novel. I thought it would be interesting to re-read it, thinking specifically of its relevance to Quakers and to me as a Quaker.
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