Dancing with the Spirit

Rowena Loverance talks to an acclaimed Quaker poet

by Rowena Loverance 11th February 2010

‘Now, let’s have a barn dance!’ Not, you might think, the most obvious opening for outreach, but this was the line which Philip Gross credits with starting him on the road to Friends. It was his first time in a Meeting house, sometime in the early 1970s, at the end of a college friend’s Quaker wedding, and the chairs were being moved out of the way. ‘There was an astonishing feeling of people being in a circle, equal with each other’. When, over a decade later, Philip took his daughter to her first dancing class in a similar room, a different Meeting house, it felt somehow familiar. ‘I might always have been doing a dance with the Spirit.’