The Friend

‘Simple, radical, spiritual’? Keith Braithwaite reflects on the last of these three

There’s a passage from Paul that you’ll have heard many times before: ‘Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’ (1 Corinthians 13:4-7. NRSV).

Hold that thought.

Under the cover of darkness (part two): Jonathan Wooding takes a further look at Joseph Conrad

Quakers who know the scriptures may well remember what happened when Job, from the land of Uz, took it upon himself to rage against the raging elements and question the probity of God’s ways: ‘the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.’

A real whale of a time: Paul Hodgkin on an uncomfortable moment in Quaker history

The island of Nantucket is fourteen miles long and lies twenty-five miles off the coast of Massachusetts. From 1690 until the 1840s, Nantucket supplied most of the whale oil that lit the industrial revolution. People – mostly white, mostly European people, that is – worked longer, and studied harder, because of lamps filled with Nantucket whale oil. Beethoven performed his sonatas, and Jane Austen wrote her novels, by it. The story of Nantucket is the story of a spreading light enabled by daring sea faring, early feminism and Quakerism. It is also a story of genocide and ecocide.  

Can’t beat a retreat: Sue Nicholls on Rookhow

In 2021, thanks to an initial grant from the Quaker Mental Health Fund, the Rookhow charity in the Lake District set up a Retreat Away Fund, to help groups stay in its Bunkbarn. (As well as being a Meeting place for Quakers over the last 300 years, Rookhow’s Bunkbarn was converted from the original stables to provides simple and affordable accommodation for groups.) Three years on the scheme is thriving, with over 650 people from fifty groups having benefited, including: refugees; LGBTQ+ youth groups; people dealing with trauma and abuse; mental health support groups; drug and alcohol recovery groups; and organisations supporting families on low incomes.