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’m a Quaker who celebrates Christmas and loves gifts. My non-Quaker husband annually wonders aloud whether, this year, we should forego gift-giving. The answer’s always no. I love having something to open on Christmas Day. Does that make me a bad Quaker? Giving gifts for the sake of it does seem pretty wasteful. My family is materially comfortable, and so each year I find myself buying presents for people who already have everything. I see my nephews drowning in excess, overwhelmed by the mountain of gifts to the point that individual presents lose all meaning. Quakers might call this ‘cumber,’ that which weighs us down, which stifles our relationship with the Spirit and obstructs our ministry. Many Christmas gifts aren’t even gifts in the true sense, given freely with no expectation of return. Instead, they are mainly a reciprocal affair. The festive orgy of exchanging needless gifts-which-aren’t-gifts transgresses our Quaker commitments to both simplicity and truth.
I’ve always identified as a Universalist, but, at the first whiff of cardamom, the first snap of frost, the first jingle of ‘Deck the Halls’, and I suddenly transform into the most devout Christian on Earth. I love Christmas. Never mind the jarring consumerism and the hell of Sainsbury’s in mid December, I love the scents, the carols, the fairy lights, the tinsel. I love the re-runs of films I’ve watched a zillion times before. I love the mulled wine, Christmas pud, and all that stilton.
I will tell you what I know. I never speak about it, but because you have asked, I will tell you.
I was a shepherd on the hills that night. A small group of us were minding our sheep on the hills above Bethlehem. Suddenly a great light appeared before us, and we understood immediately that we should follow it down the hill to the small stable on the edge of town. I carried a young lamb on my shoulder as I felt that I should bring something.
Next week my soon-to-be five-year-old grandson, now in infant school, will take part in his first nativity play. I have been wondering about some parallels between what he might learn from it and how these lessons for him might apply equally to our lives as adult Quakers.
For Horace B Pointing, ‘the search in art’ matches the search in religion: ‘for the rhythms of relationships, for the unity, the urge, the mystery, the wonder of life that is presented’ (Quaker faith & practice 21.32). With that in mind we thought we’d ask some Friends you might recognise about what sustained them culturally over the last year.
It’s always cold for lambing, every year,
before a glimmer of Spring is even thought of,
but this seems worse than ever.
You can almost see the wind
scouring the sky. That moon doesn’t vary,
and old Orion’s seen it all over and over…
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