The Friend

Stepping up: Steve Day on the Silent Walking Vigil for Peace

In the aftermath, I receive message after message: ‘Hope you got back home okay. It was a remarkable experience.’

At one point, as the Silent Walking Vigil For Peace wound its slow way down to Downing Street, then back up the other side towards Trafalgar Square, it lined both sides of Whitehall. It did feel ‘remarkable’. Hundreds and hundreds dressed in white or wearing blue Quaker Peace t-shirts. The modest ‘count’ was 800 people, some say a thousand, all of us held in the Light by Quakers we’ve never known personally. This peace connection dives deep. So many people told me, ‘I’ve never done this sort of thing before.’ Nor me, not quite like this. 

First Light: An anonymous enquirer at a Quaker Meeting

It was my first time at a Quaker Meeting.

I had been to religious services before, but usually under circumstances in which the Almighty had been warned that I was coming and had arranged for somebody to explain what was going on. This was different. There was no priest, no altar, no organ, and absolutely no pictures of anyone nailed to anything.

No steeple just people: Tim Gee on where and why Quakers Meet

Earlier this week I spent an afternoon walking about by the Thames with my laptop and a microphone, recording a message to go out on the BBC at the beginning of Quaker Week. The reason for my itinerancy was partly that the house was too noisy to record in, and partly because the reading was going to be from the Parable of the Sower – a story Jesus delivered from a boat.

Pushing buttons: Dale Radcliffe’s story for children of all ages

Nobody knew where the button had come from. Maya found it one wet Wednesday afternoon, half-hidden beneath a radiator in the Meeting house, while she was waiting for her coat. It was a large, old-fashioned button, brown and shiny at the edges, with four holes in the middle. ‘It looks important,’ she said. Samir picked it up and held it to the light. ‘It just looks like a button.’ Maya ignored him. ‘Maybe it belonged to someone famous.’ ‘George Fox?’ suggested Samir. ‘He probably had better buttons than this.’ They carried it to Ruth, who was putting away the mugs after Meeting. She turned it over in her hand and said she had no idea where it came from. ‘Then we shall have to make up a story,’ said Maya.

Poem: Grief and buttons

hello, this is a poem about grief
but it’s also a poem about buttons
that slip seal your baggy mouth shut
and cardigans tucked into the backs of wardrobes
that have yet to renounce your scent