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.
Drained, no doubt, by his life as an itinerant preacher and healer, Jesus sometimes felt the need to step aside to pray for the spiritual strength to continue his mission. In Luke 9:28-36, he wanted to be alone to do this. He asked certain disciples to keep watch, so that he might not be disturbed. Returning, he found that they had nodded off to sleep. He scolded them, but perhaps they too were justly wearied by the demanding life they led.
Helen Morgan Brooks may not be a name that British Quakers are familiar with, but her compelling life story, and affecting poetry, are sure to make a mark on anyone who takes time to acquaint themselves with her.
There must be loving remaining.
I believe in love
In spite of things said
And deeds done or hate.
There must be love
In the space of things–
Worlds turning and fixed Stars burning.
When Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist responsible for Crime and Punishment, wrote about ‘truth’, he meant, rather confusingly, something like ‘the political and ecclesiastical reality of nineteenth century Europe’, and not the truth that, say, early Quakers (Friends of Truth) were seeking and proclaiming. He wrote in a letter of 1854: ‘If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.’ This version of Christ, one can be fairly confident in saying, however, is reminiscent of ‘the inward Light’ or ‘the Seed’, offered up by George Fox. Both Dostoevsky and Fox were seeking to re-discover an authentic source of religious authority – a new religiosity. Both, it seems, were hard-pressed to distinguish themselves from the revolutionaries and ranters on the one side, and the royalists and theocrats on the other.
At Edinburgh Meeting House, the cheerful sounds of café life drifted through the windows on a warm sunny day. So it was on 8 March when sixty-six Friends attended General Meeting for Scotland (GMS), half of them online.
My interest lies in re-imagining Christianity in a way that embraces the truth that Jesus taught: that God equals Love, and that Love is present in the here and now. I am therefore always on the lookout for an idea – for a different way of looking at the teaching of Jesus – that espouses this truth.
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