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.
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Some people say ‘a way will open’ or ‘the way will open’, but I know this phrase simply as ‘way will open’, without a definite or indefinite article. There aren’t many ways forward, and nor is there just one and only perfect way. In Quaker phraseology we mean sitting with something that will need to change, or need to be done, but that the way forward isn’t clear yet. We sit with it, in the faith that clarity will come.
Having seized your attention with the title, and ensured that this is an article that everyone will read, let me proceed. If you don’t actually receive the Friend at home, but are reading it furtively at your local Meeting house, you might find a quiet corner where you can pretend to be reading more weighty articles, or the small ads.
In the displaced persons camps around Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there are about 460 Quakers – seventy-seven families; men, women and children. George Bani, a Quaker from Uvira in South Kivu, visited to report on the conditions, and what he found was very disturbing.
In mid-August 2024 I volunteered at Ramallah Friends School (RFS). Arriving at Tel Aviv airport I walked past a line of posters of loved ones lost in the 7 October assault. Within fifty yards of RFS, I walked past a similar line, but of those killed in the period since. There are no winners here.
This is a thoughtful consideration of Quaker Meetings for Worship. It’s a new addition to the Kindlers series of devotional booklets, aimed at the curious – regardless of how little or how much experience of such worship the reader might have. James McCarthy draws upon fifty years of ‘practice’ and still remains intrigued by its mysterious and compelling quality. (The reviewer is similarly captivated after only a year’s exposure.)
The end of 2024 brought a sense of accomplishment to a group of us at Friends House Meeting in London.
The year marked 350 years since the death of John Milton, and the publication of Paradise Lost, his long narrative poem of Satan, God, Adam, and Eve. It sprang from the same tumultuous period that produced Quakerism, and since Milton, as a Cromwellian Puritan, opposed the same hierarchies as early Friends, we decided to spend the year reading the poem together.
The idea is to turn the stick slowly, gentling the roundworm
onto it as it emerges, exiting from foot or leg.
The task is to ease the metre of nematode out
a little bit each day, to free the person from the disease.
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