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.
In 1659, Thomas Ellwood met a group of old friends who, as was the custom of the time, greeted him with elaborate gestures and sentiments. He did not respond in kind, and this amazed them: ‘At length, the surgeon… clapping his hand in a familiar way upon my shoulder and smiling on me said, “What, Tom, a Quaker!” To which I readily, and cheerfully answered, “Yes, a Quaker.” And as the words passed out of my mouth, I felt joy spring in my heart, for I rejoiced that I had not been drawn out by them into a compliance with them, and that I had strength and boldness given me to confess myself to be one of that despised people’ (Quaker faith & practice 19.16). Ellwood experienced a defining or identifying moment, just as we occasionally do in our century.
A Quaker was one of two climate defenders who sprayed orange powder paint on Stonehenge on the eve of the summer solstice.
When I left school I chose to do a combined training in general and psychiatric nursing. One night, just after I started, a woman was admitted to my ward in hysterics, saying that she would die before morning. The staff nurse and senior student nurse said there was nothing wrong with her, and she must not waken the ward. As a new recruit, a teenager, I was not allowed an opinion. The woman and I were shut in a linen cupboard, on hard chairs, and I was told just to keep her quiet.
Finding Fox in Fenny Drayton
Rosemary Sturge, of Northamptonshire Area Meeting, reached out to tell Eye about a recent journey Friends undertook to mark an upcoming milestone.
She writes that: ‘Northamptonshire Area Meeting Quakers like to plan a social activity in June, and this year decided to celebrate the 400th anniversary of George Fox’s birth by visiting the village where he was born, Fenny Drayton, in Leicestershire.
‘The village church there contains mementoes of the Fox family and on the village street there is a monument to him. We were also able to see the spot where it is believed the Foxes’ family home stood.
‘We were made extremely welcome by church members at St Michael’s in Fenny Drayton and also in the nearby village of Hartshill where Hartshill Quakers shared the history of their Meeting. This dates back to George’s lifetime when relatives of his were “convinced” and founded what must have been one of the first Meetings for Worship, which was held in a local barn.’
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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