Issue 28-09-2018
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Being a Friend
Each year Quaker Week provides an opportunity to open doors and invite seekers, in a spirit of hospitality, to learn about and experience the Quaker way. What is this way? What makes it distinctive? What are its roots? Friends, at their best, are ‘practical mystics’ – committed to living a way...
Top stories
A spiritual journey
Some time ago I was asked if I had completely abandoned the Anglican Church of which I had been a member all my life. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but having become a member of the Society of Friends I might call myself a Quanglican!’ This half serious reply was truthful. I...
Staging a Meeting
How does your average audience member respond when they enter a theatre and find a Quaker Meeting in progress on the stage? They chat to their neighbour and fiddle with their phone, presumably. But no, apparently not. Rather, they fall silent and uphold the Meeting. And maybe, even, this reflective...
Voices of dissent
In the past few years English Heritage has been conserving and stabilising graffiti on the walls of the nineteenth century cell block at Richmond Castle in Yorkshire. It was written, drawn and scratched over many decades. Some, done during the first world war, are a precious resource in the story...
Room for more room
At the heart of the Quaker way is expanse; the expanse of the soul and the expanse of the mystery we experience in our attempt to nurture the human longing for divine encounter. This open-ended sense of space stretches before any spiritual seeker, both terrifying in its limitlessness and exciting...
Sharing stories
Differing beliefs within our Meetings are a source of disquiet for many Quakers. Some Friends worry that the loss of traditional Quaker beliefs is undermining our collective worship and testimony. For others, the persistence of Christian beliefs appears as an obstacle to Quakers’ relevance in the modern world.
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A quiet joy – or a turbulent delight?
Is the eternal about ‘universal absolutes’ that ‘cannot change’? Not for me. The only unchanging absolute in the universe is, I feel, change itself. The notion of immutable truth almost causes me to shudder. Immutability seems to me the characteristic of things that are cold and dead. The whole cosmos...
Room for more
The theme for this year’s Quaker Week, which runs from Saturday 29 September until Sunday 7 October, is ‘Room for more’.
Humility
Quakers talk of answering that of God in everyone – and we do mean everyone. Often when we talk of outreach, we assume that with our emphasis on equality everyone will be at home with us. Some of us are sure that if only ‘they’ knew about us, they would come...
A helping hand
Members of the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) engage with people seeking sanctuary in a wide variety of ways: working with others (local churches and mosques, for example), offering practical support, raising funds, campaigning to change the deeply flawed asylum system, and reaching out in friendship. Over the past...
Rachel’s story
How can our Quakerism support us in times of grave need? How do we respond spiritually when gripped with ill-health? Being diagnosed with a chronic illness can be a faith-testing time. Watching someone we love struggle with something unimaginable can provoke profound questions. At the same time, we need the...
My Old Execrable
And the earth gave way unexpectedly like a newly arthritic knee and left me
A matter of conscience
This month, in a Labour Club in Lincolnshire, a ninety-nine-year-old Quaker stood up and told an audience about his experiences in a pacifist farming community during the second world war.
Truth to tell
What is truth? How can we know? One of the early names that Friends who gathered together in the 1650s were known as was ‘Friends of the Truth’.
Poacher’s pilgrimage
Alastair McIntosh, a Scottish Quaker, writer, broadcaster and activist, records, in Poacher’s Pilgrimage, a twelve-day trek from the bottom of the Isle of Harris to the top of Lewis in the Hebrides.
From the archive: Faithful lives
What does it mean to be a Quaker? Since we believe that religion is not about what we say but about how we live, we can illustrate the meaning of our faith through telling stories of Friends who, in different ways and different circumstances, have led lives of faithful commitment....