The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
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.
Silence. You have to break it to talk about it. Elusive. Everywhere. Powerful.
Quakers are fortunate in being an apparently apolitical – but nonetheless dissenting and non-hierarchical – sect. Without vested interests or doctrinal red lines, we can readily be appraised and apprised by free-thinking people as representing ‘the way out of our difficulties’. Anti-clericalists, atheists, even anarchists find little to object to, and much to admire, in our blank Quaker rites. It’s of course possible to get quite cross with Quakers – there’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dangerously ‘enthusiastic’ Quakers, Herman Melville’s ‘Quakers with a vengeance’ in Moby Dick, and even Virginia Woolf’s mousey Quakeresses flocking thoughtlessly around her Quaker aunt Caroline Stephen – but generally this criticism derives from a perception that these Quakers aren’t being Quaker enough.
He looked old and wise, and I could not resist the smile he gave me. So I sat next to him and he talked. The conversation was all about beauty, wonder and laughter. Then he said, ‘You should read this book: Tuesday Is For World Peace.’ With that I seemed to wake from sleep. A sleep that had lasted the whole of my life.
In April I went to Finchley Reform Synagogue for the regular eve-of-Sabbath service. This was two days after the attempted arson attack, and I was there as a recently-joined member of Haringey Multifaith Forum, which had been invited to attend. People from many different faith groups were there to show support, including a group from the local Somali Bravanese Centre. This was particularly poignant as the Bravanese Centre had itself been destroyed in an arson attack some years ago, and the synagogue had given them space to use for about four years until they had a new building.
I place my trust in a universal spirit
of dynamic personhood,
which animates and sustains.
I happened to see the programme for this year’s Stratford Literary Festival. I’m not much of a reader but I was drawn to a talk by Andrew Graham-Dixon about Vermeer. With a grade ‘C’ in A-Level Art, I’m no art historian or connoisseur. But I had picked up that the only thing we know about Vermeer is that nobody knows much about Vermeer. He painted only about thirty-five pictures, and no drawings survive. How then could someone give an hour-long talk, let alone write a 300-page book, about the man’s life? More pertinently to readers of the Friend: why is Vermeer and his work relevant to Quakers today?
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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