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An amazing number of insights are to be found in Rex Ambler’s Truth of the Heart. I have chosen a number of quotations he finds from George Fox, from around 360 years ago. But we need to put them into words of our century, from our experience of the state of our politics. The uncomfortable truth is that we are more open to radical change through shock.
Six years ago this month, a group of twenty-four Friends from all over mainland Britain, whose ages ranged from seventeen to well over seventy, were appointed to serve on the new Book of Discipline Revision Committee (BDRC). Together with our co-clerks and secretary, we gathered in Friends House in May 2019 to begin working together.
As a Friend from half a world away, my first experience of Britain Yearly Meeting, gathered in London, was open-eyed and appreciative. It also helped me further understand the challenges we face in Asia West Pacific Section, and what is needed to bridge the gap.
In summer 2009 my mother discovered that she had a fast-moving, incurable, form of lung cancer. She had lived in Switzerland for many years and she was appalled that assisted dying was not available in Canada.
A few years ago, a relative of mine was contacted by a man with whom he shared his surname. ‘We’re not related,’ the visitor explained, ‘but my ancestors worked on your ancestors’ plantations in Jamaica.’ The Caribbean visitor was a historian, and when I was a child in the 1960s it seemed that the only people in England who understood the transatlantic slave trade were historians.
Is Friends fled, or Love grown cold?
Do frozen Walls of Ice with-hold
Its Pearly Streams? O let the Sun,
That gave it being, shine upon
The brittle Fence! Or is some Skreen
Injuriously set up between
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