‘I went on the climate demo on my own. In St James’s Park, as we settled for worship, another Friend approached me and said we had met before.' Photo: courtesy of Jo Hallett
Eye - 19 May 2023
From Collective nouns to On this day
Collective nouns
Eye’s challenge to find a collective noun for a Friendly flocking (28 April) has had some intriguing suggestions:
‘A Discernment of Quakers’
Helen Tyas
‘A Peculiarity of Friends’
Marie Noon
‘A Quirk of Quakers’
Anon
What say you, Friends? Any other offers?
Finding Friends
A solo jaunt had surprising results for Jo Hallett of Coventry Meeting. She writes: ‘I went on the climate demo on my own. In St James’s Park, as we settled for worship, another Friend approached me and said we had met before. Indeed we had – at the Saffron Walden Summer School in 1961! Sixty years ago! Heather Brayshaw, from Worthing Meeting, and I joined together for the protest, with a small group of Quakers. Here we are outside Westminster Abbey!’
Spiritual scrubbing
Sutton Meeting’s renovation of its smallest room (21 April) inspired Mo Rowcliffe-Quarry, of Gloucestershire Area Meeting, to share something: ‘Seeing the photo of the water-saving loo prompted me to share my latest spiritual practice – mindfully cleaning the loo every morning. This was inspired by a Japanese YouTube video, extolling the virtues of the practice for humility, discernment and appreciation. I love it now and look forward to it each day, and after all isn’t cleanliness next to Godliness?’
On this day
On 19 May 1972, when the Friend was published in daintier dimensions, H Dennis Compton penned a commentary about friendship: ‘I am often drawn to consider the elusiveness of the qualities we value most, and the impossibility of gaining them by direct approach.
The classic example is, of course, happiness and the truism that it can never be attained by searching for it…
‘The thought recurs to me at present because of the ardent wish of Friends in my Monthly Meeting “to get to know each other better”. They chafe at their isolation from each other in the “wasteland of suburbia” and yearn nostalgically for the close fellowship of early Friends. So they are now arranging a residential weekend…
‘The best culture-medium for friendship, I’ve always found, is a job well done together… Perhaps my Monthly Meeting Friends may spend their residential weekend discussing what communal action they can take in the “wasteland of suburbia” which will bring them together in the doing of it. For if we meet together with others’ needs and not our own in mind, we shall find we get to know each other in things eternal as well as in those practical and useful.’
What do you think, Friends?
