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.
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I remember sitting ready for Meeting for Worship on the morning following the Dunblane massacre in 1996. I was in the quiet of the Meeting room and could hear Friends arriving, hanging up their coats and greeting one another in the foyer. One Friend, an active member of the peace group, said in a loud voice: ‘I just cannot understand the mentality of someone who does something like that.’ She was talking about the killings. I could. I’d not long come out of a very difficult marriage and had experienced many feelings towards my then husband that were murderous.
I recently unearthed these words in a greetings card from a children’s centre in the Philippines: ‘No one of us can light a fire to brighten the world’s darkness. No one of us can light a fire to warm all the world’s coldness. But we can open our hearts and our circle of love to include all those we meet.’
When George Lakey opened his heart to us in our opening session at the Yearly Meeting in Gathering at the University of Warwick, talking so movingly about his personal journey and the loss of his son, I thought my phrase for the week might be something to do with unconditional love. His story touched me deeply, as I know it did other Friends. I was reminded of the apocryphal story of the young child going through that phase of wanting to know what everything was ‘for’. Out of the blue, while engaged on some collaborative task with his father, he suddenly asked: ‘Daddy, what are people for?’ Taken somewhat aback at the philosophical depth of this question, father thought quickly, and looking down at his young son replied: ‘Tom, people are just for loving’.
‘There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.’
- Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood (1971)
Merchants of death are returning to London this September for the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), the world’s biggest arms fair. At DSEI planes, bombs, guns and bullets are sold to regimes accused of human rights abuses and indiscriminately killing innocents: children, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents.
I am one of those people who needs to know the history of everything. Even when I had an eye operation, years ago, I was tempted to waste the surgeon’s time by asking him who invented that particular type of operation. Not only can I not understand Quakerism without understanding its history, I find it hard to understand how anyone else can make sense of it without having a knowledge of events in England in the middle of the seventeenth century.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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