Photo: The Friend.
Eye - 04 April 2025
Eye invites Friends to with pen or pencil on familiar phrases, a tale from a Friend of Fat Cat, and a Quaker revival is urged from an unexpected source
Advices & queries
Eye invites you to consider select words from Advices & queries in with a pen or pencil, using colouring, doodling… whatever moves you, to bring a focus to familiar phrases. This week, Advices & queries 7: ‘Be aware of the spirit of God at work in the ordinary activities and experience of your daily life. Spiritual learning continues throughout life, and often in unexpected ways. There is inspiration to be found all
around us, in the natural world, in the sciences and arts, in our work and friendships, in our sorrows as well as in our joys. Are you open to new light, from whatever source it may come? Do you approach new ideas with discernment?’
Yes please!
Fat Cat, a cartoon penned by David Barnes in past issues of the Friend, put in an appearance in the sunshine pages of 14 February.
The response to ‘Shall Eye coax this charming moggie out of the archive in more sunshine pages this year?’ was a resounding ‘Yes please! Oh yes please!’
Diana Brockbank, of Forres Meeting, wrote in to say: ‘I have had the tea towel up on my wall for many years, and it went back up when I moved house. I so missed seeing Fat Cat in the Friend when it stopped.
‘One year at weekend Area Meeting in Aberdeen I made a great friend. She lived on the west coast of Scotland, Drimnin, just opposite Tobermory on Mull. She had a long journey home, including an overnight stay on the way. The first two hours on the train we talked almost non-stop. When we had Area Meeting here in Findhorn she stayed with me. I laughed with her about my Fat Cat tea towel. “That was my husband,” said Mary Barnes.’
Eye is very familiar with this tea towel, as we still have one in the Friend’s kitchenette! Eye has been prowling through our archive to find more feline treasures to share throughout the year!
Long-term value
‘We need a Quaker revival’ is a statement you might expect from a writer in the Friend, but in an interview with an advertising executive it’s a bit more surprising.
Alex O’Connor, who founded the Cosmic Skeptic YouTube channel, recently interviewed Rory Sutherland, advertising executive and author of Alchemy: The power of ideas that don’t make sense.
The full-length interview – entitled ‘Why Logical Thinking is Illogical’ – can be found here: https://bit.ly/CosmicRSfull. In it the pair consider philosophy, podcasting, AI, voting, the effectiveness of Just Stop Oil, and economics.
For those who prefer bite-size viewing, a seven-minute snippet – called ‘We need a Quaker revival’ – is also available (https://bit.ly/CosmicRSshort) and had over 12,000 views in just over a week!
In it Rory offers a swift but accurate overview of aspects of Quakerism, specifically in relation to business, the testimony to truth, and how this informs Friends’ approach: ‘If you have a very trustworthy human being with whom you have a repeated relationship… so they’re actually optimising for long-term value, not short-term transactional value, that person has a huge value in helping you navigate the digital world, which is all optimised for… well, it’s actually calibrated for very low levels of trust.’
Unfortunately, he also says ‘the trouble with the Quakers is they’re not very good at marketing’.
