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Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
In the first week of the school holidays I flew with my new husband, his two teenage sons, and my two adult children, to Crete, for a fortnight’s holiday (pause to allow the collective gasp of horror from Friends who have taken the decision not to fly (and maybe don’t own a car – sorry, I have one of those, too)). This is maybe the last holiday we’ll have all together as the younger generation build their own lives.
An old schoolfriend, who’s often challenged my religious and political affiliations, has recently been sweet enough to ask me about Quakers. I tend, rather immodestly, to present Quakerism as ‘the end of history’, rather in the way that Francis Fukuyama (in The End of History and the Last Man) presents parliamentary democracy. It is not, he says, inevitable, or utopian, but ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution’. That’s to say that it is sporadically occurring, and flawed, but, let’s face it, almost certainly the best that we can do. It is certainly better than coercion and obedience, or libertarian wilfulness and exploitation.
Unusually (for Marsden Friends) there were two pieces of vocal ministry on Sunday last.
Both spoke of resurrection; the first opened a door for the second.
Eighty years ago, I was thirteen years old, riding my bike to school in Dunedin.
I was worried. The morning news had told me that one single bomb, an atom bomb, had destroyed the city of Hiroshima. Of course I could not understand how that was possible. Maybe our physics teacher would explain. It was the second lesson of that day. Mr Roberts tried to help us to understand nuclear fusion, or was it fission? We didn’t really understand, and I still don’t. As he was leaving the classroom, he turned and said: ‘Boys, either we now abolish war, or war will abolish us.’
Down the narrow Meeting House Lane, about twelve miles south of Bristol, is a hidden gem of Quaker history.
Culture wars are nothing new. Nor is their ideology. They are always a reaction to something – a backlash, an oscillation between left and right, the tidal forces of political opinion going in and out, or mass psychology balancing itself.
I am the song that sings the bird,
the scent that starts the vole.
I am the chuckle that sings the stream,
the stillness that sounds the pool.
I am the juice that fleshes the pear,
the sweetness that also says tart.
I am the bell in the still air
that rings in the waiting heart.
"If you truly want to be led you must put yourself in a position that allows following" (PYM)
Though written within a Quaker and Christian context, this book can be used by anyone of any religious faith or secular inclination. The only requirement is a desire to follow, to be guided by, to align with the richness of the ineffable, which this book calls "the Way". This book seeks nothing less than to aid readers in aligning their lives with the same power and richness that animated the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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