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.
‘Did you wake up today? Then praise! Did you roll over and see the light? Then praise!’
The call and response ripples through the Baptist church of Mount Olive in Tidewater, Virginia. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jnr’s birthday. He would have been ninety-five. He was murdered at thirty-nine.
As we discussed in ‘Cracking a book’ (16 February), many Quakers are highly educated, but our knowledge of the Bible tends to be rather limited. Some of us studied the Bible at school, Sunday school, and church, but what we were taught may be misleading and incorrect. For example, we may have learned that Jewish people in the time of Jesus believed that they had to follow every detail of Jewish law to be saved, and this was very burdensome to them, causing much anxiety. Then, we were told, Jesus came, and taught that we are saved by grace, not by following the law, thus freeing Jewish people from this burden, and making it easier for non-Jews to join the congregation of the saved.
When we worship or pray, and when we behave in ways that uphold Quaker testimony, we are nourishing God’s work in the world, growing God’s kingdom. Conversely, if we engage with and condone things that are contrary to God’s will, then we are nourishing those things instead. Feeding idols!
Almost 1,000 people gathered at Friends House last month as it played host to a major climate festival.
On my way into the centre of Prague, I see from the bus window a sign painted in block letters half-a-metre high: PUTIN MURDERS CHILDREN. The truth behind the slogan had been confirmed that same morning by the news that Russian missiles had once more claimed the lives of children after a drone attack on the centre of Kharkiv. But children and other civilians have been dying since the first moments of the invasion. UN reports spoke of 1,300 civilian deaths in Mariupol during the three months of the siege.
Lovers of Anthony Trollope’s novels generally admire his skill in depicting the lives and feelings of young women. But you may not know that one of his last heroines is a Friend. Trollope did not always have a high opinion of Quakers, once writing of our ‘low character for commercial honesty and a certain flavour of pretentious hypocrisy’! But Marion Fay is depicted as a woman who is generous, principled, passionate – an example of the best a Quaker might be.
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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.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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