Issue 19-and-26-12-2014
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Seasons greetings?
I believe that most Quakers look forward to Christmas. Once the beautiful leaves have fallen, the end of autumn can be a depressing time. In northern lands, as the cold increases, there is a deep human need to gather round the fire and celebrate our family bonds, our closeness and...
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Food for the soul
Two hundred people, with varying degrees of patience, are waiting for lunch. They range from teenagers to seventy-somethings, encompassing several nationalities. A number are clearly struggling with mental health or addiction problems. From time to time, a woman becomes agitated, screaming incoherently. No one pays her much attention – they are...
Quakers and Christmas
At this time of year – perhaps more than at any other time – the question arises as to whether Friends should celebrate Christmas. Answers to this question elicit a variety of responses from Friends who may feel that all days are special and that the notion of Christmas as a unique...
The message of peace
In many ways the 1980s were a defining decade. The gaping gulf between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, social strife and enormous cultural upheaval played out against a backdrop of dance tunes, power dressing and paper lantern dreams of plenty remain with me from my childhood. Presiding over the grand...
Life and death
Christmas is an ambivalent time for many of us as Friends. It is not an occasion that we particularly mark, but inevitably we find ourselves caught up in it as a national midwinter festival. Perhaps we try to bring in an element of simplicity and to concentrate on the peace...
Open for transformation
This year’s Swarthmore Lecture, Open for transformation: Being Quaker, considers the symptoms of illness in a patient and offers some remedies in a clear and confident voice. It is a voice that, for some, contains traces of a dreaded word: preaching. Others discern leadership and a prophetic vision. The...
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From the archive: Christmas in wartime
The war had not finished by Christmas, as some had optimistically predicted, and its impact was being widely felt. It would be some years before Christmas was again a season of peace. Scarborough ‘Friends gathered for worship at Scarborough on Sunday morning under a solemn sense of fellowship in the...
Gift of love
I want to suggest a very special gift that, as Quakers, we can give, receive and share to help bring true joy at Christmas time. This gift needs no money, produces no stress, takes no physical effort, follows no rules and regulations and is suitable for all ages, classes and...
Martha or Mary
The spiritual life consists of a series of balances: of inner experience and outward witness; the life within and the outside world; being passive to God and active to the world; between withdrawal and engagement, being and doing. In Christianity, the story of Martha and Mary is familiar: the one...
The magi
What a fantastic story it is (Matthew 2:1-12): of wise men from the East journeying to Jerusalem and asking to know where the child is who has been born king of the Jews, so they could pay him homage. We have all known this and the other birth stories of...
Art gallery
The Night Before Christmas
(or ‘A Visit from St Paul’) (Not to be confused with ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ attributed to Clement Clarke Moore) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Friends House Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; Thanks to new insulation I heard not a thing Till...
Season’s greetings, without prejudice
I wanted to send some sort of holiday greeting to my friends and colleagues, but it is difficult in today’s world to know exactly what to say without offending someone. So, I consulted my lawyer yesterday, and on his/her advice I wish to say the following:
But what about the next day?
I first heard the story of the Christmas day truce of 1914 in a Methodist Sunday school, when I was about nine or ten. Even then I felt, instinctively, that this was an appalling tale, not the one of wonderful humanity that the teacher so obviously valued. Surely, normal human beings...