Outreach
I start the weekend with Love. I have been stressed, and arrive with my protective masks on. I meet one whose strong love is particularly beautiful – you know Quakers like this – and knowing I will be truly heard by her, I am able to take off my protective masks and...
Choosing love after violence
Last week a man killed himself and more than twenty other people at a metro station about 200 metres from Quaker House Brussels. Two other explosions at the airport killed eleven others. In total, more than 300 people were injured. These traumatic events will change their lives, and those of their families.
Letters - 1 April 2016
Grace-full Quakers The moment I read Rosalind Smith’s ‘Thought for the Week’ (4 March) ‘Grace-full Quakers’ I was instantly reminded of a hymn sung recently at a funeral/memorial service I attended. It is by Richard Gillard (born 1953) and goes like this: Brother, sister, let me serve you, Let me...
PeaceJam
‘It’s changed my life!’ This is not a phrase teenagers often use about a school trip connected with peace education. It’s Monday morning back in school after a weekend at the UK PeaceJam conference in Winchester, and students from The Mount and Sidcot schools are buzzing about their...
Treasure beneath the hearth
The Quaker approach to the Christian scriptures is a radical one, not well understood either among Friends, nor the wider Christian community. George Fox and Robert Barclay were always clear that they valued not so much the words of scripture, as the Spirit, the source from which those words sprang ...
What the mystics knew
Richard Rohr is a seventy-three-year-old American Franciscan. He has been writing about spirituality for a long time, and it’s beginning to show. He seems to have something like an ageing writer’s version of in vino veritas, which may be interpreted thus: ‘Damn it all! I’m going to...
Wholeness and oneness
Easter and the Resurrection is about being Whole. (I, as a Gestaltist, have only just realised that!) For Christmas is already Easter as the Incarnation is already Redemption. These are all Wholes – holistic Truths.
Sustainability concern brings Friends together
One hundred and five Friends met in Swanwick, Derbyshire, from 18 to 20 March for Britain Yearly Meeting’s sustainability gathering.
Jesus of Nazareth
He’d worked intensively to bring people to God consciousness with variable success. He must have known where his actions would lead. Was he tired depressed even at the magnitude of the task he had embraced?
Thought for the Week: Becoming whole
It is a natural tendency, as we get on in years, to take stock of our lives. This process inevitably involves both acknowledging what we have done and coming to terms with what we haven’t. The gaps in our achievements will vary: we may not have climbed Everest; won...