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.
Like every other living organism, we are in the grip of time. The simple truth is that we all have to die someday – we just don’t know the date. And that is our problem. We muddle through each day never thinking it might be our last, and we go to sleep with the unfounded expectation that we will wake up in the morning. We never face our mortality; we never ask how we are to spend the fleeting days we have on earth in a meaningful way.
For most of my life I was offered two sources of security at the international level. One was nuclear deterrence (‘the Cold War’) which I profoundly mistrusted because it opposed threat with threat and carried an immense risk of human error. The other was the system of international order, supported by the United Nations, with rules on how nations behaved to each other. This was buttressed by a number of instruments such as international conventions, declarations, treaties and bans; and also by trade agreements, alliances and so forth. The system claimed to be based on morality, and almost every state professed to be bound by it. There was hypocrisy, and there were violations and failures in many instances from arms trading to whaling to human rights, because of the folly of our own leaders as well the malice of others. But the system gave us a fairly stable framework within which states could talk to each other and come to agreement. A common language existed in which peacemakers could negotiate with leaders in conflict in the search for satisfactory outcomes.
Prisons Week has come round again in England and Wales, from October 12-18 (16-23 November in Scotland), providing an annual opportunity for Quakers in Criminal Justice (QICJ) to take stock of the situation in our prisons and decide what to highlight.
No one knows quite where this had its beginnings.
It seemed to ooze up from nowhere
started small, a trickle of whispers
kept in place by good firm banks.
But soon, there appeared several thin
streams converging one by one
each with their own lisp
of myth and maybe
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