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.
Four score and six years ago, I was brought into this life by power beyond myself, beyond my parents and the world I was born into. I have been maintained in life ever since by such power.
In the summer of 1953, as the Korean war drew to its devastating close, a young English woman stepped off a ship in Busan, South Korea. Mary Ingle Wright, just thirty years old, with a fresh medical degree, had volunteered to join the Friends Service Unit in one of the world’s most desolate places. What she found would shape her life, and plant seeds of Quaker faith that would flourish for generations.
My experience of the recent Friends Peace Team (FPT) training camp in Armenia was both harrowing and humbling. Harrowing, to hear about the incredibly difficult and growing zones of conflict and division in Europe, Africa and the Middle East; and humbling, to hear directly from the people working in those communities to help alleviate oppression, prejudice and untold human suffering.
We do not have a Children’s Meeting locally, although we do have all-age worship once a month. But recently an attender brought her young son along to one of our regular Meetings for Worship. She wanted her child to remain for the whole hour, but was told it was not permitted. The attender expressed criticism: she felt this was not very welcoming. I felt that I should uphold her and her son in this request. I put it to the Meeting: why was it not appropriate for a child to remain for the whole hour?
I have not had a bath for over thirty years. Before you get ‘the ick’, let me explain. I lived in mainland Europe for years, and got used to having showers. When I got back home I had a shower installed and never looked back. Using a shower is now just common sense, and I find the idea of stewing in a bath a little disgusting. In fact it gives me ‘the ick’.
(i)
Hello Pina, you are no longer dancing
in the Tao, not in the way you used to,
half lit in the thin gauze spaces staged in a good light.
"If you truly want to be led you must put yourself in a position that allows following" (PYM)
Though written within a Quaker and Christian context, this book can be used by anyone of any religious faith or secular inclination. The only requirement is a desire to follow, to be guided by, to align with the richness of the ineffable, which this book calls "the Way". This book seeks nothing less than to aid readers in aligning their lives with the same power and richness that animated the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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