Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 22nd March 2026

Dear Friends,

Compassion means ‘suffering with’. Quaker Faith and Practice only mentions it in passing but in my experience Lewes Friends practise this partly through a good cause which we choose and promote on a monthly basis and partly through many individual  involvements in local, national, and international issues. Kindness, patience and generosity are often ways of showing compassion, and the more we love one another the more  this will happen.

From time to time as individuals we are on the receiving end of someone else’s compassion, and this makes it something we learn about experientially. I remember fairly soon after my mother died, my sister and I (not yet teenagers) were invited out to tea by someone we hardly knew, and during the course of our time in their house her husband mentioned that her mother had just died far away in another country. Sorrow is a genuine emotion and needs to be acknowledged. There are also great swathes of injustice in some places and small petty stuff too. How we deal with what comes our way shapes our personalities and the attitudes of those around us. We show compassion to one another within our Meeting, and in the communities where we live.

My understanding of the often-quoted beatitudes at the beginning of Matthew chapter 5 is that hard times can be a way to strengthen the personality. It depends how we face them, but they can be an opportunity to grow. Easy to say, but not exactly easy to do if you are homeless in Gaza, suffering starvation in South Sudan or being bombed by a superpower. On the plus side, it is good to know that there are some people of good will who are making the asylum seekers in Crowborough welcome.

Caroline Pybus

Quakers value diversity. We share this Friend’s message in the hope it will speak to others.

Pastoral Care and Eldership Team: Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Theresa Samms, Emily Slater.