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.
A Friend with knowledge of Iceland tells me that Icelanders usually say ‘Bless, bless’ when bidding people farewell. She says it confers something wholesome and healing when wishing others peace, safety and wellbeing on their journey. ‘Bless, bless’ also reminds me of the Beatitudes, and how these particular blessings are best read with their biblical Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic versions in mind.
Prison and Court Register, and other draft minutes
The morning session of 6 December opened with some disruption, as online participants found their Zoom links were invalid. After some no-doubt frantic messaging, a new link was sent, and online participants were let virtually into the Benjamin Lay room at Friends House for opening worship. Friends heard a reading from Advices & queries 17: ‘Do you respect that of God in everyone, though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways and be difficult to discern?’
In October I attended the World Council of Churches’ Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, in Wadi el Natrun, Egypt. I went in my capacity as a member of the Faith and Order Commission, to which I was nominated by Friends World Committee for Consultation. The conference, which was timed to coincide with the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, took the theme ‘Where Now for Visible Unity?’ It brought together about 400 Christians from all over the world. I was one of three Quaker participants.
Friends from fourteen of the seventeen member organisations of the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) were joined by staff and the new Friend-in-residence at Maison Quaker for their second Meeting of 2025. We felt privileged to spend time together in this beautiful building in the heart of Brussels.
The early pages of this book are enlivened by an account of the life of Rosa May Billinghurst (1875-1953). Known as the ‘Cripple Suffragette’, May chained herself to railings and broke windows with the best of them, but childhood polio meant she had to do it from a wheelchair-tricycle. May, whom Charlton-Dailey calls ‘badass’, hid window-breaking stones under a blanket over her knees, and was even known to charge the police in her activist chariot.
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