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.
I was glad when a Friend at Meeting reminded us recently that our integrity has a lot to do with how well we integrate all of the parts of ourselves. This might take a lifetime. My Buddhist friends laugh with me: it might take many lifetimes… from gnat to giraffe to woman!
A few years ago, we planted a witch hazel (hamamelis) close to our living-room window. We needed more privacy from a road which runs close by, and during spring and summer the bush’s thick cloak of leaves has served that purpose well.
The 2025 Quaker Universalist Group (QUG) Conference, ‘Women’s Spiritual Voices’, met in April at High Leigh Conference Centre in Hertfordshire, and online; it attracted over fifty participants.
Traditionally, following a death in one of our Meetings, it has been common practice within the Religious Society of Friends to hold a Memorial Meeting to give thanks for the grace of God in the life of the deceased Friend. But it is now common for these Meetings to be defined in more limited terms, along the lines of giving thanks for the life of the deceased Friend. The word ‘God’ is now usually omitted.
The Quaker Music Network has been running choral and chamber music weekends for over twenty years. Our early venues were Charney Manor in Oxfordshire and Glenthorne Quaker Guest House in the Lake District. But we have long outgrown those two delightful buildings, and this year, in February, there were fifty-eight musicians registered at the Christian Conference Centre at High Leigh in Hoddesdon, near London.
Margot Schiemann’s ‘Riverbanks of Grief,’ an emotionally moving exhibition of sixteen mixed-media works, offers a narrative of a journey from brokenness to (partial) healing. The poetic fragments next to each picture are enticingly open-ended, and the pictures themselves are richly enigmatic, ranging from harsh jaggedness to explosive beauty.
I walk’d the fields at morning’s prime,
The grass was ripe for mowing;
The skylark sang his matin chime,
And all was brightly glowing.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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