Issue 13-05-2022
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Body language: Ian Wright’s Thought for the Week
A Quaker friend and I were talking recently when he reminded me that our communion in coming together in Quaker Meeting for Worship is held by us all, in stillness and silence as we sit around. I had spoken to him about a visit I had made over Easter to...
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By the way: Jacquetta Megarry puts together a guidebook for Quaker walkers
It began with a phone call on 30 August 2019. Carole Nelson, indefatigable Quaker and owner of the Sleepy Elephant outdoor shop in Sedbergh, had somehow got hold of our number. Would we be interested in a publishing a guidebook to a route that celebrated the journey made by George Fox in 1652?...
Working wonders: Neil Morgan says Friends should pay attention to Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson’s writing is the literary equivalent of Marmite or Bovril: you love it or you hate it. Robinson, a US writer and academic, came to notice with her first novel Housekeeping, (1980) and earned a Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 novel, Gilead, about an aging pastor’s letters to his...
Travelling hopefully: Barrie Mahoney recounts a profound and personal Quaker journey
We celebrate our fifty-year anniversary next week! So it was over fifty years ago that I met my partner, lover and best friend, David, when we were both studying at teacher training college. Looking back over the years, I recall difficult times for gay men and women, and conclude that...
Quakers lead musical protest against HSBC
A Bristol Friend led a peaceful protest against the bank HSBC demanding that it stop fossil fuel investment. Quaker Jo Flanagan took part in the musical protest targeting the institute’s annual general meeting (AGM) on 29 April. Quaker Julia Bush told the Friend: ‘HSBC is the world’s sixth biggest...
Peace
The peace lily in my bathroom has one white flower: it bows down like a white flag. We have not known peace, do not know its contours, its colours, whether it is shaped like the earth, like the sky...
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Friends pledge $500,000 in slavery reparations
A US Quaker Meeting has said that it plans to give $500,000 as reparations to black neighbours over the next decade.
Quakers work to house more refugees
Quakers have been asked if they can sponsor a seventeen-year-old boy from Ukraine. A trusteee of the Friend, Peter Kennedy from Aberdeen Meeting, put out the call in the Edinburgh Quaker newsletter Terrace Talk. He said: ‘I have been asked by a friend of mine, Debra Storr, to see if...
Quakers discuss plans for George Fox’s 400th birthday
Friends came together last month to share ideas on how Quakers can celebrate George Fox’s 400th birthday in 2024. The co-founder of Quakerism was born in July 1624 in Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire.
Friends rally for ethical investment
Quakers have said that the government is trying to silence the ethical investment movement with a controversial ‘anti-boycott bill’.
Heart of the possible: David Brown is awakened
The experience of the divine is sometimes described as an awakening of the heart. Within Quaker history, one of the most touching descriptions of this is by Isaac Pennington, who says: ‘At last, after all my distresses, wanderings and sore travails, I met with some writings of this people called...
Letters - 13 May 2022
Compassion I read Clive Ashwin’s article about compassion on 15 April. I agree that compassion is ‘an attitude of mind’ but suggest that it is not found in formal structures but in the daily round of relationships we engage in. During lockdown, there was a huge, informal, spontaneous coming together...