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.
The other day I passed by a garden on one of my local walks around the estates in which I live. I always enjoy looking in people’s gardens. That day I spotted a gorgeous rose overhanging the pavement. It was a deep peach colour. When I bent down to smell it a most wonderful fragrance wafted up towards me. Almost immediately my mind took me away from that rose into a multitude of thoughts. What type of rose was this? Where could I get one? I wanted one like that in my garden. Whereabouts would I put it?
In October Judith Moran, director of Quaker Social Action (QSA), won the Outstanding Individual Achievement award at the 2017 Charity Times Awards. The award came just two weeks after she was highly commended in the CEO of the Year category at the Third Sector Awards.
The Outstanding Achievement Award is given to the person who has demonstrated dedication, professionalism and integrity throughout their career, and who has produced an identifiably profound effect on the sector through their work and management over at least a twenty-year period. The award was presented during the 150th birthday of Quaker Social Action.
Death is an expensive business. An average funeral bill in the UK currently sits at £3,784, almost double what it was ten years ago. This dramatic inflation is having a devastating effect. According to insurance company SunLife’s research in 2017 up to one in seven families are facing significant financial concern and are often sent into debt after a bereavement.
The challenge this situation creates for those families prompted a response by Quaker Social Action (QSA) and since 2010 the charity has organised a national helpline for people worried about the costs of a funeral. Since 2014 they have also been running a campaign on this issue.
Horace Warner was a Quaker and a self-taught photographer born in 1871. He became Sunday school superintendent of the Bedford Institute Association, one of nine Quaker missions in London’s East End fighting alcoholism and prostitution, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began recording the lives and living conditions of poor children – the ‘Spitalfields Nippers’. His images are a unique historical record of part of London’s social history. The purpose of his photographs was to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute Association (the forerunner of Quaker Social Action), which was based in Quaker Street, Spitalfields, and his powerful images helped raise funds for the Institute.
Almost all the art works in this series have been either in churches or in public galleries. Last month’s was the nearest I could come to an image of Christ in an outside space. But I also wanted to point you towards one in a domestic space. And that’s what led me to Peckover House in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and an engraving of the image of Christ which is probably best known to Quakers:
J Doyle Penrose’s The Presence in the Midst.
At Yearly Meeting Gathering last summer a special meeting was held at which the Quaker Concern Around Dying and Death (QDD) passed its work over to Quaker Life. Quaker Life Central Committee has agreed to set up a Quaker Life Network ‘cluster’ on the theme of facing the end of life as a flexible way to continue the decade-long work of QDD.
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