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 find it’s easier to join a relationship of any kind than to leave it. There’s something velcro- like about leaving, a reluctance to let go, a stickiness of old hope remaining.
‘On the International Day of Nonviolence, 2 October 2024, we are gathered in the Oasis of Peace in the Kyiv University Botanical Garden for worship with silent prayer for peace in Ukraine.
As a child, I took several trips to France with my intrepid dad. These coincided with a festival my young ears heard as ‘Kanzoo’, and there were funfairs and happiness everywhere. It was a long time before I knew that it was ‘Quinze-Août’, 15 August – and even longer before I knew that this commemorated the assumption of the virgin Mary, one of the most important ‘Marian’ festivals for Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Later I learned that the assumption was when Mary was believed to have been taken up bodily to heaven, like Jesus before her.
Last week, Imi Hills called for more space for young Friends within Quaker structures, to support vital radicalism in our Religious Society (‘Long-term solutions’, 27 September).
Our dysfunctional prison system has been in the news recently. But neither the early prisoner releases nor the expedited new prisons resolve deep-seated problems.
On soil made sterile by history
tear gas canisters spent
but with the sickly smell of death
here where once a garden
bloomed.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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