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.
Faith and scepticism – we need both – faith without scepticism is like trying to walk with one leg only – but, as I omitted to say, one has to have some impression, opinion or belief for scepticism to act on – scepticism is the leg that cannot exist on its own.
William Le Fevre
If we require evidence that Homo sapiens is not, in the nature of things, the topmost predator, we need look no further than the evolution of these counter-balancing virtues – faith and scepticism. Credulous gazelles that mistake a crouching lion for an anthill are easy prey, and nature, red in policy and performance, makes short work of the credulity gene.
During 2016 the Quaker way once again converged with the life and work of Leo Tolstoy, when Friends House Moscow (FHM) provided a grant to assist Irina Gordeeva, of the Russian State University for the Humanities, to preserve in electronic form the deteriorating paper records of the Chertkov archives in the Lenin Library.
Many Friends will have driven past Newark-on-Trent as they travel north or south along the A1. Newark though, as far as we can tell, has never had a regular Quaker Meeting. In the 1650s and 60s the villages to the north of Newark along the River Trent were hotbeds of Quakerism. Trentside Monthly Meeting was at one time the largest Monthly Meeting in the East Midlands, but of Newark there is little mention. The only record we have so far found is of two Meetings held in 1659…
I could have said being Quaker, being Christ, being fully human, but being, is fairly static. Life is flowing, forever changing. In each moment we are becoming: becoming angry, becoming happy, becoming worried, or becoming something else. So, what does becoming Quaker mean?
Now thou must die in the silence, to the fleshly wisdom, knowledge, reason, and understanding; so thou comest to feel that which brings thee to wait upon God; (thou must die from the other) that brings thee to feel the power of an endless life, and come to possess it.
- George Fox
Quakers often describe themselves as seekers, and in Meeting for Worship there is a sense of waiting on the Divine. As our thoughts calm down and our ordinary sense of self becomes more transparent we become aware of a wider and deeper reality that is in truth ever-present and eternal, and that some call ‘God’.
There is a light that shines from Terry Waite’s new book Out of the Silence. It is the light of hope – a light that sustained him throughout his prolonged period of captivity between 1987 and 1992. He was in solitary confinement for four of these years, often chained, beaten and blindfolded, and even subjected to the horror of mock execution.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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