Eye - 05 July 2024

From Fox’s finery to On this day

Fox’s finery

Eye delights in hearing about Friends’ creativity for Fox400 celebrations!

Friend Frances Warns shared this photo of her granddaughter’s doll dressed as George Fox.

Frances writes: ‘It was the centre piece for our coffee morning which we had to celebrate the 400 years since his birth. We all brought George Fox readings and it was a good way to bring him into focus. Someone bought a birthday cake and we sang Sydney Carter’s song about George Fox with his shaggy shaggy locks.’

Has your Meeting featured any centrepieces or works of art that you’d like to share in the sunshine pages?

Finding Fox

‘Well, yeah, he was a little nutty. I mean, you don’t take your sandals off and wander through snow crying, “Woe to you, bloody city of Lichfield,” you know, for hours on end, without being a little tetched.’

So opens the June episode of Thee Quaker podcast about George Fox (https://bit.ly/GeorgeFoxTQP).

Hosts Jon Watts and Georgia Sparling hear from Max Carter, Rex Ambler, Damon Motz-Storey, and Mark Pratt-Russum as they explore the questions: ‘For a faith tradition that doesn’t honour creeds or hold up anyone as a hero, is Fox’s legacy even important? And do we know the real facts at all?’

Eye has spied some other resources to delight the ears of anyone who has had their interest in Fox piqued in this issue.

What could George Fox have sounded like? The Friend’s inaugural podcast episode asked historical linguist Judith Roads just that: https://bit.ly/TheFriendLive.

The BBC’s In Our Time (https://bit.ly/GeorgeFoxIOT), recorded in 2012, saw Melvyn Bragg discuss the origins of Quakerism with his guests.

Meanwhile, Ann Limb, then-chair of the Scout Association, nominated George Fox for the BBC’s Great Lives series (https://bit.ly/GeorgeFoxGL) in 2016.

For an evangelical Friend’s perspective, the Northwest Yearly Meeting’s podcast (https://bit.ly/GeorgeFoxNYM) interviewed Jim LeShana, the general superintendent of the Yearly Meeting and a Quaker historian. He and the hosts discuss the life of George Fox, early Friends, and lessons that can be learned for 2024.

On this day

After realising that an otherwise sombre Friend shared his love of the World Cup, Basil Donne-Smith penned a piece called ‘Day of small things’ in the issue of 5 July 1974.

‘Now it is probably true of very Early Friends that they were occupied to a far greater extent than we are with Sin and Judgment and what was going to happen to them when they pegged out.

‘One doubts very much if they ever took a real holiday from serious thinking. But then of course we have only their own written records to go by. No tapes or gramophone records, though even on those (human beings being by nature such incredible show-offs) there would I feel sure have been little or nothing of the unbuttoned.

‘No wonder they tended to go mad from time to time: like poor Thomas Sillitoe (of Hitchin Meeting) who came to the conclusion that he was a china teapot and would race across London Bridge in a terrible tizzy lest he should drop himself and be shattered in a thousand fragments…

‘But it is rude to laugh at the aberrations of a Friend whose madness was only more obviously remarkable than yours or mine: and who, incidentally, careered about Europe telling crowned heads what to do with a boldness that even Dr Kissinger would hesitate to exhibit.

‘People in the seventeenth century seem to have had to make little effort to be serious-minded. But nowadays, as Dr Johnson’s friend so truly said, “Cheerfulness is always breaking in.”

‘I have myself sometimes been overtaken by a kind of panic about the irresistible attraction of the absurdities one sees all around and which distract one from the proper contemplation of catastrophe…

‘We cannot, with the best will in the world, choose our deeply serious moments, ordering them up like a meal in a restaurant.

‘For some, moments of transport may be infrequent and overwhelming: for others they may be frequent and transient. Why should there be more to be said for quality than for quantity?…

‘It takes all sorts you know: so don’t be downhearted it you feel sometimes that you may be getting a little too light-headed.’

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