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.
As I grow older, I realise that I know less and less. Perhaps it’s a sign of age that you understand that the world will not change overnight, that glimmers of light may be the grace you are given – not the great illumination which will put everything into context. You also realise that you have less time before you, and that this sense of your own mortality sharpens an awareness of the small things of life.
In Yearly Meeting 2015 an important theme was ‘sharing our surplus’. We talked about various ways of doing this: by contributing money, sharing a home, voluntary work for charities and in the community, and a range of other options. One of the odder possibilities was a different type of sharing: sharing good health by donating a live kidney. The person giving ministry (me) had a friend who had recently given one kidney in an altruistic donation to an unknown recipient.
Coming to terms with the ‘Out’ vote in the recent referendum on Europe takes a while. And how are we left?
Seventeen million Brits have revolted – bloodlessly, except for one tragedy for which we, as voting or non-voting citizens, all bear some responsibility. Jo Cox’s husband, the father of their children, has to learn how to live without his vibrant MP wife; and those children now have no ‘Mummy’.
‘This is not a place of protest, but a place of prayer’
Sioux elder, Standing Rock, North Dakota
Many Quakers have been following a David and Goliath story in the United States that involves Native Americans who are guarding their land and sacred sites from the desecration caused by an oil pipeline.
Perhaps, as never before, what the world needs is healing. Everywhere we look we see sadness, sickness, tragedy, starvation, homelessness and conflict – add to that the damage to the environment and it would be impossible to deny that the world, indeed, needs healing.
It is twenty minutes past seven on a balmy New Zealand Monday evening. People arrive in ones and twos and slowly the hexagonal ‘quiet room’ fills with ‘settlers’, who sit in silence until the clerk of the week welcomes all. So begins the weekly management meeting at the Quaker Settlement in Whanganui that, alongside the Sunday shared meal, provides a key community focus.
"If you truly want to be led you must put yourself in a position that allows following" (PYM)
Though written within a Quaker and Christian context, this book can be used by anyone of any religious faith or secular inclination. The only requirement is a desire to follow, to be guided by, to align with the richness of the ineffable, which this book calls "the Way". This book seeks nothing less than to aid readers in aligning their lives with the same power and richness that animated the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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