HEALING AND PEACE

This issue covers a wide range of ways in which Quakers are reaching out to their local and international communities to bring healing and peace to a world that is riven with conflict.

One of the most important reflections by Maureen Donelly and Catherine Heywood presents the historic Victorian Treaty enactment that took place recently on unceded land of the Bunurong people.  This piece suggests how we can assist in the process of healing the gap between us and our Indigenous fellows- for which this Treaty is a milestone.

Globally, Valerie Joy invites us to listen to the important work that is being done by Quaker peace workers in Indonesia and Korea. This is an invitation for us to listen in to -and form friendships with- Friends Peace Teams. She quotes from Maggi Storr who responded recently to a Zoom presentation : ‘I knew about Friends Peace Teams and AVP, but I had no idea of the DEPTH of the work, especially the Peace Libraries, where children play in a happy environment, whilst gaining literacy, messages of peace and ways of dealing with conflict. Their parents are learning from their children as well’.

On a more local level Kaye Wright shares her extraordinary friendship, the pain and the joy, with Ann – an 85/6 year old dementia patient in her care until she died of bowel cancer. And Liz Field describes her extraordinary fruitful contacts with ‘Strangers’, who represented a cross-section of people doing it tough in our aggressively materialist world. Adding to this theme of work with the troubled and outcast is the poem by Francis Webb ‘Five Days Old’ which depicts the transformative moment in which a schizophrenic patient opens to the mystery and wonder in a five days old baby born just before Christmas. This a Christmas poem that can make our hearts sing with its sense of relevance to an age where Christmas has lost so much of its sacredness. Christmas in this poem is shorn of grandiosity and finds its true home in the ‘blown straw’ of an outcast manger. 

There are other poems and poetic pieces. There are Ivan Cole’s poems about Quaker practice and the joy of being connected with nature. There is David Evans  ‘A Poem for an Old Man’ with its painful and joyous reflections on the experiences that old age brings to us. Then there are two short prose pieces, that are almost poems in the intensity and beauty of what they depict: Kay Wright’s ‘White Roses’, an act of love for an unknown victim of a road accident, and Margaret Clark’s ‘Tread Softly’, her celebration of the rescue and eventual release of a damaged Snowy Owl.

Finally there are several pieces which illustrate and critique Quaker activity. Michael Corbett has pioneered Quaker podcasts on early Quakers and has found ways of promoting these in his visit to Friends World Committee for Consultation in Seoul, Korea. Kerstin Reimers in ‘The Flock’ has produced a wry, humorous dramatization of modern Quakers’ obsession with rules and regulations, in particular their worrisome way of trying to sort out Members from Attenders! Her drama draws us back to the kind of freedom and sense of equality that was part of the original Quakers. The final speaker in this ‘Flock’ of speaking birds, the Falcon, announces: ‘Speaking as a Fledgling, I encourage us to welcome change and look to a new and better future with faith and hope.’

There is a notice from Duncan Frewin about the QA Annual General Meeting and information about the January 2026 Yearly Meeting. Finally there is an extract from the latest QSA report which covers in particular, the work of the QSA in Cambodia. For the full report please see  https://www.qsa.org.au/about-us/annual-report/

Editor Michael Griffith