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
