Issue 20 & 27-12-2013
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Home
Homelessness is more than not having a roof over your head. A home provides a sense of place, safety, identity and belonging. These truths are never more evident than at Christmas. It is a time traditionally associated with the word. It is a time when families come together. It is...
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The hidden homeless
In Tunbridge Wells it’s not just dogs that get turfed onto the streets after Christmas, it’s children. Workers in the local housing department call it ‘the season of parental chuck-outs’. It was a bitterly cold February when Roisin, just fifteen, found herself homeless. Locked into an abusive...
Joseph’s story
We lived in what I can best describe as fictional wealth. On the outside my childhood home was a picture-book country house, on the inside it was a place of violence and crippling psychological repression. My father controlled everything and everyone. My mother and I were both beaten regularly: she...
A new Quakerism?
Is a new form of the Quaker Way emerging for the twenty-first century? Throughout our history British Quakers have been able to transform our Society when old forms no longer served as vehicles for the Spirit. Each period of Quaker history, from eighteenth-century Quietism to nineteenth-century Evangelicalism and twentieth-century Liberalism,...
Peace on earth
The message of the angels surfaces once a year: at Christmas. Peace finds its way into shop windows and on to Christmas cards. Everybody is in favour of peace, well… more or less, as long as it doesn’t include x, y and z, to name just a few. Most...
Times of waiting
Advent is a time of waiting – for the arrival of Light. Our tempo accelerates as the year ends. Though we try to keep it simple, many of us are tempted to rush, buy, eat and plan detailed holiday logistics. I had begun to reflect on times of waiting: pregnant...
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Saint Nicholas and truth
On the eve of 6 December German children would for once polish their shoes willingly. Otherwise saint Nicholas might put a bunch of rough twigs in them instead of sweets and fruit.
On generosity
At this time of year communities come together and we are entreated to think of those less fortunate than ourselves. Generosity is the glue that binds our communities together. Thankfully, in our Quaker communities, that glue-pot comes out more than just once a year. Building community happens all year round,...
Stories from the heart
Imagine. You are, let us say, Ruben, with an empty scroll on the desk before you. You are a scribe and your life has been turned upside down by stories and deeds that have shattered all you have been taught and believed about God and the faith of your fathers.
What the Youngest Angel Said
Oh how could I forget that amazing night? There were hundreds of us. It was my first flight. We sang to some shepherds just before dawn, Then flew on to the place where the child was born.
Indicators of hope
Transformation Something happened to that group of disciples, cowering together in the upper room; something transformed them into a group who could go out and convince others that an entirely different way of life was possible. If there had been no transformation, there would be no Christian church today....
All humanity
I am newly retired. Life’s transitions have their challenges: loss of regular contact with work colleagues; filling one’s day; adapting to a retirement income. But holidays can now be more than an oasis of peace in a busy working life.
Celebration of Light
Wellington Meeting House, in West Somerset, stands in the centre of the town. Its garden, an old burial ground, has been designated a Peace Garden and opened to townsfolk and visitors for several years now. It is a community garden and local groups, such as Wellington in Bloom, undertake the...
Set all the birds free
UA Fanthorpe, our modern English Quaker poet and ‘national treasure’, was, with her partner Rosie Bailey, a patron of Quaker Concern for Animals from 2006 until her death in April 2009. Christmas Poems (2002), which she and Rosie began sending to friends as Christmas cards in 1974, features numerous animals.
The Christian message
To know and love Jesus is, for me, to learn to live his way, the way that leads us into union with God, which is the Light within and the mainspring of our being. This is my calling: to share, in a small part, in the work of creation, evolution...
Letting go of letting go
The image I have is of a child with both feet in a bucket striving to lift itself – while a parent smilingly watches and waits for the futility of the effort to become apparent. After many years of religiously attending Meeting for Worship and sitting still, and mostly silent,...
A remarkable meeting
In January 1843 a new monthly journal for Quakers in Britain was launched. The Friend was founded by editors who were ‘influenced by the desire to furnish a channel through which all who are connected with the Society of Friends may derive information on such subjects of general importance to the...
Letters - 20 & 27 December 2013
The Light As a Quaker I want to send a measured letter showing due reflection and putting my points clearly. Having read page six of the Friend (13 December), I find that a challenge. My comments are based on not only years of service to the Religious Society of Friends but...