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 learnt recently that Rabia Basri, the female Sufi saint of the eighth century, warned us not to complain. This advice spoke to my heart, but I had to think carefully about it. Did she want to stop us challenging injustice and disrespect? No. Judging by other sayings she did not mean ‘Don’t protest’, nor even ‘Don’t write a letter of complaint’. So, what was she telling me?
My small Local Meeting, like most others, gathers a varied collection of worshippers: a peace campaigner, a financier, a physiotherapist, a street pastor, the chair of a local housing association, a teacher and others. Each Sunday the living depth of our stillness gathers, lightens and heals our concerns, our failures and successes; as we separate, the silence flows into our weekday lives, into the nursery which uses our building, and into other faith and local groups which hire our rooms.
When our daughter was a little girl she asked me: ‘Daddy, is there a God?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘otherwise there would be no word for it.’ But as the philosopher Cyril E M Joad used to say on the radio programme The Brains Trust, it all depends what you mean by God.
Anyone who has a parent, or hopefully two, who are, let us say, getting on a bit, or are themselves in their later years, should find Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, written by American doctor Atul Gawande, compulsory reading.
Last year my friend, a Quaker, was admitted to hospital and it soon seemed likely that he would die. I visited him hoping, at best, to give comfort. Unlike others, I do not have any detailed idea of an afterlife or how it might happen. Even if we had such a picture as presented by the Bible, I could not see how to invoke blessings on him. Nor did I suspect choice readings from the Bible would especially help.
Heard the one about the bishop, the Turner Prize winner and the Quaker?
The Church of England has ‘jumped on a middle class bandwagon of horror at the Brexit vote’. So thunders Philip North, the bishop of Burnley, writing recently in the Church Times. There had been ‘an almighty cry of anger from a dispossessed and marginalised working class’.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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