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.
The spiritual disciplines that emerged from early Quaker experience continue to nourish me. These are not merely historical curiosities but living traditions. At the same time, I have come to understand Buddhism as a sophisticated exploration of the human heart and its capacity for both suffering and compassion.
It was at morning prayer in 2023, reciting Psalm 125 – ‘Peace be upon Israel!’ – that my personal journey with the rosary and Mary the mother of Jesus began. Like so many others, I was in despair and shedding tears over the war in Israel.
A few years ago, on a new morning after rainfall, I reread an account of why I was applying for Quaker membership. I’d been in attendance one way or another but this application was important to me. Quaker, yes, now owning it.
This is a hard confession for a Quaker to make, but I love Yom Kippur and its liturgy. By sunset I am exhausted from the fast begun the night before, worn down by the cycle of prayer and confession. I have wept at the courage and sacrifice of those I long to emulate, my ears filled with the raw cry of the shofar and the intoxicating music. It is an ecstatic experience: I am lifted out of myself and my everyday world. I stand with the congregation in worship and sing: ‘Our Creator, Our Sovereign / Be gracious and answer our prayers / For we have little to commend us / Deal kindly and gently with us / And save our people.’ The liturgy is like a polished stone in a riverbed, refined and enriched by millennia of devotion.
I remember it clearly: a regular attender stood up in ‘notices’ to give an impassioned plea for others to join in him in reading Waiting on God, by Simone Weil – a modern classic of spiritual seeking. That was in 2005, and the Friends that met in response to his plea… just kept going. Our Meeting already had a book group, so we called ourselves the Alternative Book Group (ABG).
It might seem a contradiction that stillness be put into form, yet amid these pieces, made of natural materials and carefully crafted to delicately hold space unobtrusively, then hypnotically a stillness is invoked. I fell into that deep quietness that is also found in Meeting. Mobiles, in sweeping curves, bring a mesmerising calm. In weavings, dandelion surfaces intricately twisted and entwined to present a beautiful array of colours and skill, and took my thoughts to our connection with the land.
Where do we find the divine – the source of peace?
Did Elijah hear God in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire?
No. It was only when silence fell, did ‘a still, small voice’ emerge.
Become a subscriber to enjoy unlimited access to our articles, dating back to 2009! Online subscribers get the Friend to their inbox each week, can comment on articles, and dive into our 1914-18 digital archive too!
Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
News | Views | Reviews
Written by and for Friends on the bench
Subscribe