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.
Early in the new year, many of us reflect on how we might change for the better. Often, coupled with a desire for physical change, comes a thirst for a spiritual or mental change, and the January media offers many tips for those in the pursuit of happiness.
As this George Fox anniversary year gets underway, those of us of a musical mind might find ourselves recalling a musical composition based on Fox’s life. It was called The Fire and the Hammer, and is a cantata with words by Alec Davison and music by Tony Biggin (readers might remembver them as the co-creators of The Gates of Greenham and Cry of the Earth).
Like many of us, I feel challenged and pained by the troubles and hurts around me, and the unbearable horrors we see acted out both nearby and in far away places. We can feel helpless, and pushed to act – but what to do and how to respond? A profound question, especially for those of us like Quakers on a spiritual path of silent opening and waiting in the Light.
Friends have rightly been wary of criminalisation as a means of addressing socially harmful behaviour when other forms of resolution can be used instead. We oppose criminalisation which uses state power to erode democracy and suppress dissent. But we are not against criminalisation when it is based on the gravity of a particular harm, and a desire to prevent it happening. For instance, we have welcomed recent laws against drink-driving, smoking in public buildings, stalking, and rape within marriage.
Edinburgh Quakers have said that a local foodbank where many Friends volunteer is struggling with donations for the first time.
In 2023 in the Friends Quarterly, we explored ‘feelings’, ‘preparation for Yearly Meeting’, ‘outreach’ and ‘grief’. Planning for 2024 is already underway. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll soon receive an issue with a focus on faith – faith as it is expressed and experienced in a variety of ways, within the Quaker community and without.
"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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