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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The astronauts on the recent Artemis mission, like the others before them, have recounted their feelings of awe when looking down on Earth. For several of them it was a truly religious experience. This sent me back to an earlier account: Dante’s description when he made the same journey imaginatively, 700 years ago, in The Divine Comedy. It is a masterpiece of science fiction as well as poetry.
Alongside last month’s special interest group Meetings (see report, 3 April), the new Yearly Meeting Agenda Committee scheduled four Preparation Sessions to help Friends get ready for Yearly Meeting (YM) in May.
When I was sixteen I joined a ballroom dancing class. I was not really interested in ballroom dancing – in fact I thought it was rather silly – but coming from a boys’ grammar school it seemed a good way of meeting girls. The teacher soon rumbled me. My reverse spin would have looked good on a music hall stage, but not on a dance floor. What I really needed was a dating agency.
In November last year, a statue of Mary Ann Macham was unveiled overlooking the River Tyne. Mary Ann escaped slavery in the US, before living for over sixty years in North Shields. Her story was recorded by the Spence family, well-known local Quakers, who heard it from Mary Ann herself. A letter written on her behalf to her mother has also recently been found.
Look well to the growing edge. All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! (Howard Thurman, The Growing Edge).
It sounds like a dark fairy tale written by Oscar Wilde.
Once there was a king who lived in a palace full of gold. Strangers were dazzled when they came to visit. But they grew jealous, came in force, scared the king away, took all the gold, and burned the palace. The king and his people were very sad: the palace and the gold that had been taken was very precious to them. But the strangers, really nothing more than thieves, came again and again, and took whatever they could find.
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