The peace of the place
Nick Tyldesley (23 August) asks ‘If our Meeting closed down would it really be missed by the outside community?’
Our historic Meeting house has been worshipped in since 1689. It has a deeply peaceful atmosphere in the ancient room we worship in each week.
Among the groups who hire the Meeting house are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
Both groups really value the peace of the place and missed it during Covid.
They certainly would miss it if we closed down.
Diana Lampen
Outreach
A book for teenagers has just been published about George Fox. George and the Flying Foxes ISBN 9781399962865). It had a positive review in the Friend of 5 July 2024.
It was written partly to modernise the small paperbacks published in 1974 by the Friends Education Council.
They were of eminent Friends such as George Fox, William Penn, Elizabeth Fry, John Woolman and were often blue with silhouettes of the Friends on the cover.
Remember them, Friends? We used them when I was convenor of Reading Children’s Meeting in the 1970s and 1980s, when we had 100 children on roll and five classes.
What an opportunity it would have been to make them available at the Quaker Bookshop at Yearly Meeting, but I have been informed that we don’t have the financial resources or staff time to make it available.
How very sad that we do not have finances for outreach – one of the main purposes of the book in question, especially in this year of the 400th anniversary [of George Fox’s birth].
No wonder our beloved Society of Friends is dwindling.
Christine Hayes
John Greenleaf Whittier
In the Friend of 23 August I was surprised and concerned to read that the renown of John Greenleaf Whittier had ‘understandably faded’ because his poetry ‘reflected the sensibilities of a bygone era’.
Is there any poetry more beautiful or spiritually relevant than that contained in the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’?
Or could we find any words more redolent of the mysteries of human existence than these from the poem ‘Questions of Life’:
I am: how little more I know!
Whence came I? Whither do I go?
A centred self, which feels and is;
A cry between the silences; …
Between the cradle and the shroud,
A meteor’s flight from cloud to cloud.
Many of the words of George Fox ‘reflect the sensibilities of a bygone era’. So do those of William Shakespeare. But we do not reject them on that account.
Jenny Webb
Comments
I am really missing the .pdf facility for saving and accessing The Friend. There are often situation (waiting rooms, travelling) when there is no functioning wifi or mobile. For example, I recently travelled down the Marches by train from Bangor to Bristol. (Two or three trains, one or two station transfers.) Previously, I would have had .pdf copies of The Friend saved to my laptop and could have enjoyed reading an attractive curated magazine during the journey when - as in most of it, including stations - there was no or negligible wifi or mobile signal. This time, before the journey, I had to spend over 40 minutes laboriously copying and pasting the text from the website into a word document that I could save to my laptop hard drive. I read these word documents during the journey with some interest but little enjoyment, shorn of the former attractive images and layout, lacking a curated magazine sequence. There may be some advantage editorially for the new format accessible only online but I truly cannot find it as a reader. Back and forth, back and forth, to find the ‘next’ article which is no longer next. I have some months to go before my subscription runs out, but currently I don’t feel likely to renew. Rather sad.
Frances Voelcker
By Frances V on 2024 09 06
I agree with Frances Voelker.
By Tolkny on 2024 09 06
Third. It’s borderline unusable compared to PDF in liquid mode
By Kmpmcnamara on 2024 09 09
I agree with the contents of this letter. I have just taken about ten minutes trying to find out how to read the magazine and whilst doing so remember the last time I tried and lost interest in it. There is no sense of it being a magazine anymore. Call me old fashinoned but for me it is now just a series of articles randomly placed without a contents list to browse, a beginning or an end. Bring back the pdf I say.
Wendy Meaford
By Wendy M on 2024 09 10
The use of Meeting Houses. In Bridgend we are selling our much-loved Meeting House, after nearly sixty years of worship there, because of the great burden of maintenance work that falls to a few Friends, who are ageing. We sahk meet in a local church hall, instead. We have provided meeting places for worthy groups, and indeed tenancies, in our spare rooms. But I fear that, with regard to lettings, the “tail” can “wag the dog”. Our first responsibility is to ourselves. David Harries.
By DavidH on 2024 09 17
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