The Friend

Coming full circle

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.

A bundle of insights

‘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).

Finding the right words

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.

Albert Schweitzer

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.

Embracing the darkness

‘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