Welcome, Blake Jerome Everitt!

    In a way that no one could have foreseen, Palestine has become the ‘moral litmus test for the world’ (June Jordan). What does this mean for us as Friends of Truth? It means that the fierce tremor of the inward light is, or ought to be, especially active. More so if we are not to betray the tenderness within that awaits our response. If we are those who are coming to ‘know Christ their teacher, their counsellor, their shepherd to feed them, and their bishop to oversee them and their…

Our time has been a failure. We are called to ‘the revolution of tenderness’ (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, p48), but we largely fail to respond. Ours is the violence of indifference towards the cry of the earth, the cries of countless creatures condemned in factory farms, those of refugees, those of victims of the Western world’s addiction to arms sales, and many others.

What has this ‘post-Christian’ era proclaimed? A ‘society orphaned of transcendence’ (Erik Varden, The…

In the desert liturgy of obedience to the Lamb, wrought in the wilderness of the Spirit, the engrafted Word and immortal Seed grow, waging the Lamb’s War, there where neither smell nor scent of time, flesh, or reasonings remain; and here all things are made new and one drinks freely from the well of the water of life. This experience of an invasive, desolating, purging Light is signified by the repeated phrasing, ‘And he carryed me awaye into the wilderness in the sprete’ (p541). Untouched…

The Lamb was the Light guiding early Quakers in worship, belief and practice. The contemplative collective state, like the War fought against self ends, carnal reasoning, and concupiscence (intellectual, social, political, linguistic, etc.), was part of what John Punshon called the offensive of the Lamb. This formed a unity of prayer and worship with its behaviour as people in but not of the world.

The Book of Revelation provides a key to this experiential baptism in the Lamb’s…