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.
We are in the season called Lent. Traditionally, this is when Christians fast for forty days, in preparation for Easter. This year, I am rediscovering my roots in that tradition. I am not going to cover myself with sackcloth and ashes, but I have decided to go without certain luxuries (my waistband and the bathroom scales have been crying out for this, too).
Our house group met recently to discuss ‘White privilege and social inclusion among Quakers’. We were happy to welcome Michael Wallace of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, who is a person of colour. In preparation we watched a talk that covered the history of Quakers in the US and the Caribbean (www.youtube.com/watch?v=wppumMN9RSg).
I first came across the organisation ‘Conscience: Taxes for Peace Not War’ in the early 1980s. This was around the time that cruise missiles were being stationed in Britain, and Ronald Reagan touted his theory of limited nuclear war. The organisation’s simple message struck home: we all pay for war through our taxes, and we have no choice about it; we are forced to participate in war and preparation for war. If you’re someone who would conscientiously object to military service, you surely have to consider whether paying for someone else to kill is also against your conscience. I am now a member of Conscience’s executive committee.
What is religion all about? The secular view says it is like living in an enclosure with thick walls and fake doors. People push and pull on the dummy doors, but they do not open. They cannot find a way to look out. Other people say that when they pull hard on these doors for a long time, they glimpse a chink of light. But nobody can agree on what is seen. ‘I saw a dragon,’ says one. ‘I saw a beautiful woman with a veil,’ says another. ‘I saw a high mountain’, offers a third. The theory goes that, when you keep pushing and pulling, you get exhausted and desperate, and then you get an illusion of a chink. But it’s not real. There is nothing there. This is the way for all pushers and pullers, they finally agree.
Refugees are the human face of international injustice. For two decades, the Quaker concern for this issue has been expressed through Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN). QARN does not run its own projects, but we network with many NGOs that are working on issues of migration and refugees. Many of our members are involved in activism, while others are more meditative, each according to their capacity. We offer support to Britain Yearly Meeting, and persist in reminding our Society of its minuted recognition that asylum is a concern.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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