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 have been studying the great classic text The Art of War by Sun Tzu, written in the fifth century BC. It is a text of such subtlety, such understanding of human nature, and, it must be said – of such deviousness – that it makes Niccolò Machiavelli look almost innocent. It is still studied at Sandhurst, Westpoint and other leading military academies.
It is hard enough to be a teenager today. But some young people in the area where West and North Belfast meet, near the Peace Line, are facing the usual challenges of schoolwork, peer pressure and worry for the future against a backdrop of crushing poverty, violence and division. Quakers, though, have become known as a source of love and practical support to turn things around for young people in one of the poorest communities in Britain.
When COP23 (conference of the parties) ended I had my usual post-COP experience: deep grief that I alone did not – could not – solve the climate crisis. But unlike past COP endings, with exhausting carbon-intensive flights, or a winter coat stolen (on the train from Paris), this time I rolled into bed, my Bonn house still afresh with the energy and creativity of Quakers, and colleagues sleeping in the attic, the office, on the floor or with nearby friends, and in our kitchen each day to enlighten and encourage, while my husband Robin cared for us all.
My journey to Elgin, for General Meeting for Scotland held on 18 November, started early, leaving in the dark from Brechin and boarding the train in Montrose to the clamour of the geese rising from Montrose Basin. Travelling on the train, the early sun shone in a blue sky showing the countryside at its best with views to Bennachie, a familiar sign of ‘home’ for many locals.
With my ‘serious’ Quaker ‘mind’ I snobbishly thought Strictly Come Dancing was an inconsequential frivolity – irrelevant in a deadly serious world.
Three years ago, however, I encountered an episode of the programme and was utterly seduced. Since that first encounter I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the weekly viewing experience, though I was still slightly embarrassed at doing so.
"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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