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.
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Do you recall a few years back when someone went into the Amish school and killed all those children? What amazed me was how the Amish community, including the parents of the victims, joined together and gave a public statement of forgiveness, refusing to resort to vengeance. They even attended the funeral of the man who killed their children, and brought food to the gunman’s family.
No one wants anyone to suffer the pain of suicide in prison and the terrible impact such a bleak death has on family, friends, fellow prisoners and prison staff. Everyone wants to turn back the rising tide of self-harm in our jails. And yet last year 113 men and twelve women took their own lives in custody in England and Wales and there were well over 40,000 incidents of self-harm – the worst figure ever recorded.
Michael Lambrix was executed by the state of Florida on 5 October. He had been on death row for thirty-three years. He and I had corresponded for twenty-six of those years. Only a handful of people in all human history have spent longer under sentence of death before execution than Mike.
When I first became a Quaker some eight years ago I found out about the ‘Quaker Campers’ – and then promptly forgot about them. Some years later, when I rediscovered camping – but of the more comfortable type suitable for campers with a well-worn body and needing frequent trips to the bathroom – I managed to combine these two loves and joined the Quaker Campers in their annual camp. This year the annual camp was held at Watlington on the edge of the Chilterns in Oxfordshire and I found a great feeling of Quaker camaraderie.
When I was planning this series of articles, however I framed them, this work by William Holman Hunt always kept turning up on the list. It is not because I think it’s a great work – I don’t. It’s clearly intended to be grotesque, but I think it only succeeds in being absurd, with the massively overcoloured background and the mangy goat. (This is the Manchester Art Gallery version; Holman Hunt also painted a larger version, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Ellesmere Port, in which the colours of both background and goat are slightly toned down.)
Meeting for Sufferings, held at Manchester Meeting House on Mount Street on Saturday 7 October, was asked, as part of the ongoing work on forced migration, to approve a ‘Sanctuary Everywhere Manifesto’. The Manifesto was part of the annual report of Quaker Peace & Social Witness Central Committee (QPSWCC). It was provisionally approved by the Committee but was subject to the approval of Meeting for Sufferings.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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