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.
Communing in the Spirit might be one way to describe Quaker worship. Individuals meet together mainly in silence, but the aim is to become a ‘gathered’ Meeting, to be in communion with one another and with ‘the Other’. The contrast with sung Eucharist or high mass is stark… no wordy liturgy, no music, smells or bells, no single celebrant or president, no bread, wafer, paten or wine or chalice. This is not the normal celebration of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion.
Dave (not his real name) was twenty minutes old when he ‘lost’ his parents. Social services took him into care at birth. I won’t say why, but you don’t have to be a genius to work out there were serious protection issues involved. By the time he was two months old he was on his third set of parents; at six months he was put into long-term foster care with the fourth – people who, a year later, adopted him and his elder brother.
None of us is going to escape death. Last year the Bamford Quaker Community, which is situated in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire, ran a workshop entitled: ‘When my time is up.’ The aim of the workshop was to help people talk about the end of their lives and how they might want to die. Part of the workshop was teasing out the things that mattered most, things people wanted to do before they died.
As I sat in the cell my mind wandered. What would be happening now? It was about eleven o’clock on Sunday morning – Quaker Meeting time! No wonder I felt so lifted up. People must know about our action by now and be praying for us. The orderly who opened the flap, peered in and enquired: ‘Ya alwight?’ He looked a bit surprised to be met by a smile and a ‘Never better.’
This week the High Court in London has been hearing a judicial review into the legality of UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia for use in the ongoing bombing of Yemen.
Herefordshire Friends joined protesters in Hereford on 1 February to express their concern about the first Herefordshire Defence and Security Expo being held in the Courtyard Theatre, Jim Wood told the Friend.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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