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.
There are those who say that our essence as human animals is comprised of consciousness, creative energy, and love. I have come to believe that my body came out of, and is maintained in this temporary life by, an eternal no-thing being: energy, the light to which I will return.
Part of my job is to talk to other churches, on behalf of international Quakers. On occasions in the lives of other world communions, I sometimes serve as a part of interchurch delegations. I am also often the contact point for multilateral processes. While Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) is not a member of the World Council of Churches, for example, we are invited to send observers, which we often do.
On 28 June 2024, the Occasional Music Orchestra & Viva Choir staged a concert in the Civic Hall in Totnes Devon, in aid of the charity War Child. Before the gig, I’d been talking to one of War Child’s representatives, who emphasised to me the terrible environmental destruction caused by bombing. Modern warfare destroys and maims whole communities, and murders the land people call home: fertile fields, flora and fauna, cypress trees and olive groves, rivers and forests. Water, precious water, oiled and polluted. War is a war on the macrobiotic infrastructure of life itself.
One of the pleasures of my electric car is that slowing down charges the battery, so I can go even further. Going slower also means I don’t have to suddenly hit the brakes for traffic lights, which can cause stress all round. I find that Meeting for Worship has the same slow, recharging effect. The unique quiet in which Friends let their minds hover allows the tiniest reminders, inspirations, memories to grow.
After years of attendance, I thought I knew a lot about Friends. But there are still yawning gaps; and one of them, until recently, was about worship sharing.
I didn’t set out to exchange letters with a woman on death row in Texas. I had been googling my mum’s name (a name we shared) a little while after she died. It was, I suppose, a consciously futile attempt to find her again.
Give us a creed, they begged.
Something tidy with four corners
that would fit into a box.
One that would fit nicely
into the cupboard we have constructed with care.
We could take it out at special times.
We could sit around and praise its elegance.
We could even show it to the neighbours
(well, specially chosen ones, of course).
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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