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 word often used in Quaker circles is ‘vulnerability’. We are encouraged to be open and vulnerable to other people. I realise how prone I am to put on armour, to ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet’. Will what I say be accepted? Will I appear stupid or ignorant? Am I likeable? But to be preoccupied with such thoughts is an offence against truthfulness, and it also prevents me from being open to the other, to listening and understanding. The armour can also be used to defend myself against myself, to avoid catching myself out in my selfishness and arrogance, or, indeed, in some kind of false humility, which I may use to avoid taking on responsibilities or speaking out when circumstances call for it. The Light that Quakers invoke exists to reveal such stratagems and show me a way out of them. It’s hard going, but it doesn’t mean incessant breast-beating. Shedding my coat of armour may teach me to value myself as unique and precious.
We are different, my brain and I. Only recently did I learn this. You could say that this is a mentally disturbing realisation, but so is every new departure.
Listening to Joyce Trotman, our Friend from Croydon, has always been a fascinating experience. Born in 1927, she remembers every detail of her life and education in British Guiana. She can still sing the songs they were taught at school as ‘children of the empire’, and recounts how proud they felt to be British as they sang: ‘God bless the flag that so proudly waves over us / God bless the Empire, God save the King.’
Our annual trip to visit family in Chengdu often coincides with Easter, but also with the Chinese festival of Qingming (tomb cleaning), when ancestors are venerated not just by tidying up their graves but also by leaving gifts and setting off fire crackers, followed by a family meal. It is a complicated mix of folk religion and intergenerational conviviality.
The Quakers with Jewish Connections (QJC) group recently asked if one of us would like to join a subgroup, to consider the reception given to Britain Yearly Meeting’s ‘Challenging Antisemitism’ pack. I felt sure I could not take part in it. I am in turmoil over discussions on antisemitism in society at large, especially on social media, and in no way did I want to enter that particular minefield, even among Friends. Then some members of QJC organised a Zoom on the topic, and I was asked to be on the introductory panel. I found the invitation particularly challenging, so only with trepidation accepted. In the event, I had not really understood the brief I was given, so gave up on the headings I thought I would use, and spoke off the cuff. The turmoil surged forth again, and I realised how angry this subject makes me feel. My contribution may have been somewhat intemperate.
‘First let past the horses black and then let past the brown
Quickly run to the white steed and pull the rider down.’
Tam Lin (trad.)
When I was a child, we sung to
the Pearly Queen who hid
her horses by the river.
Our house held the floodgate
that opened to let high water
drain into marshland.
In the rainy season, the place looked
like a barge breaking a bow wave.
Inside, the rooms smelt waterlogged.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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