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.
‘There are things that can be seen only with eyes that have cried.’
It’s all very well saying one must slow down – as I did in last week’s issue – but how does one do it? Most of us have a living to make, a family to support, bills to pay.
Quakers don’t talk about sin much these days. Ministry about someone’s personal – or the Meeting’s collective – sins would probably not be well received, however well intended.
I love a drag show. I’ve had a drag queen shower me with glitter in a club, witnessed a bizarre strip tease involving frankfurters and brown sauce, and even splashed around at a drag-hosted pool party. At their best, drag shows give me a taste of heaven. The queens and kings create joyous spaces of inclusion and affirmation in a world hostile to queer life. When I’m in the light of a glitter-ball singing along to Shirley Bassey, I feel a wholeness I wish would last forever. I find it easier to imagine heaven as a gay bar than the usual clouds and harps.
Each day I receive a quote from the Daily Quaker website. It’s a useful way to begin the day’s emails. But recently one sentence jumped out at me: ‘Gratitude is not a Quaker testimony.’ There was no suggestion that gratitude was in any way unQuakerly, only that it was not a ‘testimony’. Personally, I do not see testimonies simply as a list of social values, but rather a response in everyday life to a relationship with Spirit, so I have to question that statement. True, we may consider a ‘concern’ as something that arises from an individual or group, with a ‘testimony’ as something that has the formal backing of a Yearly Meeting, but I felt that there was something missing in the comment, and in the way we sometimes refer to testimonies in an entirely secular manner.
Our Meeting is the coming together of two local Quaker communities: Barnt Green and Redditch, once separate but now united as a single Meeting. Following the sale of Redditch Meeting House, Friends were glad to donate the proceeds to Coventry Meeting House in their refurbishment work – a small example of Friends helping Friends.
There we were, six wet but cheerful people, sitting at the back of a medieval church in Norfolk. We were enjoying warm drinks, having braved twelve miles in the worst that Storm Claudia could throw at us. Five more miles and we could stop for the night. We repeated the distance on the next day, with slightly less mileage the day after. We were on our way from the shrine of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic, to the shrine dedicated to Mary at Walsingham. It was a pilgrimage organised by an Anglo Catholic foundation attached to Julian’s shrine. We had already had two church services, including one blessing with holy water, which – as the presiding priest noted – was perhaps superfluous given the weather. A pattern of formal worship repeated each day.
A mellow evening, stretching
pieces of present layered across the past
in a palimpsest pattern of threadbare branch,
brittle leaves curled into parchment.
We sat by a fire burning trimmed Yew
and counting the stars that surround Orion.
Over and over we had wrapped scarves
around our heads to protect us against toxins
though the wood only smouldered a light
pungency, smoking the old scolded
bark beneath the bonnie.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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