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.
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A group of Friends were worshipping together just before a recent demonstration. One of them wondered whether, when they were holding the victims of the situation in the Light, they could also hold in the Light those who were causing it. Another Friend ministered with a firm ‘No!’
Non-routine business
Amid the early summer heatwave, representatives who made it to Friends House for the July session of Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) were pleased to find a cool, air-conditioned Benjamin Lay room waiting for them. The welcome from clerk Robert Card was as warm as ever, however, and after opening worship, in which Quaker faith & practice 10.01 was read (‘Our life is love and peace’), Friends settled into the agenda.
My time studying in Jordan was bookmarked by missiles flying overhead. Iran and Israel were exchanging missiles from 1585 km away. Beneath them were citizens otherwise uninvolved in the conflict of these foreign governments, living in Iraq, Syria and Jordan.
I’ve just returned from a month walking. I hiked 491 miles, to complete the Camino Frances, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, close to the north west Atlantic coast of Spain.
Ilan Pappe has been a hero of mine ever since I read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, one of his early acts of resistance against the Israeli government. Its publication cost him his job teaching history at the university in Haifa. He remains an Israeli citizen but is not allowed to speak in Israeli schools or colleges. He is now based at the University of Exeter, where he continues researching, writing and resisting.
He buries the tatty soapbox
containing what bits of his son’s body
can be found. Digs a pit beneath
the Obaideh, Merwah and Syrah vines
and throws the angst of his anger in there too.
What good does it do him to
drown in the tears that ferments his rage?
A belief in peace always marked
both father and son, nurturing the wine harvest
as well as each other.
At sunset he goes to tender
today’s crop, he has little choice
but to dead-head what dangles
on the wire that surrounds the
broken vineyard.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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