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.
What can it mean to hold you in the Light?
It cannot change God’s Will, or Fate, or Chance,
The chain, the world-without-end linear dance
Of causes and effects, turn wrong to right.
I grew up among the beautiful fells in the English Pennines that form the ‘backbone’ of hills and mountains that stretch south from the Scottish border to Derbyshire. The distance between the two areas is perhaps 260 miles. It is not difficult to sense ‘the Beyond’ from the tops of these windswept hills that I climbed with joy as a boy. For seven years I went to schools in the shadow of Pendle Hill, which George Fox climbed in 1652 shortly after the devastating English civil war. On top of the hill, looking north to the distant Lune Valley where my mother was born, Fox had a mystical vision that led to the founding of the Quaker movement. I have been up Pendle Hill three times in his footsteps to think
and ponder.
‘What is most personal is most universal,’ said Carl Rogers, the well-known psychologist. We can discover the truth of this in the new play by Lynn and Dave Morris, The Bundle. It follows one woman’s journey from a heartless home and abusive marriage in Chechnya through her escape to Britain, her reception here and her struggle to get refugee status, and touches our hearts and enlarges our understanding more than pages of statistics. This is a deeply moving and highly professional production, which Lynn and Dave researched and wrote. It was commissioned from their company, Journeymen Theatre, by the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN).
Last year was undoubtedly one that left many Friends feeling speechless. Events of enormous significance – from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump; from the siege of Aleppo to record-shattering global temperatures – frequently found us searching for the right words to articulate our fears, our sorrows, our hopes and our faith.
In January 1965, as we were travelling by boat down the west coast of Africa, I put the antenna of my short wave radio out of the porthole and heard station after station celebrating Albert Schweitzer’s ninetieth birthday at his hospital at Lambarene in the West African territory of Gabon. At Cape Town we boarded the train to travel by rail across four countries to Malawi, where I was to teach physics to very bright African lads at a school in the Angoni Highlands on the edge of the Great Rift Valley.
‘But you have to go through darkness in order to see the light. If you’re always in light, you don’t see it anymore. And this is the whole element of struggle – the courage to go through darkness in order to achieve light – which is the same in music as it is in every psychoanalytic process, as it is in every political process, in everything.’
– Daniel Barenboim on Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony
"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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