Eye - 08 July 2016

From wild flowers to a sweet reputation

Wells and wild flowers

Friends in Wells-next-the-Sea have been sowing seeds of outreach and reaping a harvest of donations for the Local Meeting and the homeless charity Emmaus.

‘A Bouquet of Songs’ was a concert that combined participation singing with some solo songs about flowers and trees. A local singer, John Bennett, was supported by Friends Gill Smith, on accompaniment, and David Saunders, who led the audience.

A weekend-long Wild Flower Festival saw the Meeting house ‘transformed… into a bower of greenery and way-side flowers’, artwork and photographs were also on display, and a poetry workshop ‘Words by the wayside’ was led by Aylsham Friend Bob Ward.

Pursuing a painting

Our faith in the future is a word picture that Britain Yearly Meeting produced in 2015 – a vision of what Quakers would like the Religious Society of Friends to be like in years to come.

Any Eye readers who have perused the pamphlet will have seen the beautiful fruits of Judith Bromley Nicholls playing with paint that accompany each aim.

In 2001-2 Judith was awarded a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellowship, which saw her introducing workshops she had developed on the spiritual aspects of creativity to groups throughout Britain.

The paintings that appear in Our faith in the future were inspired by and painted at Local Meetings she visited during that Fellowship. Now a project is underway to get high resolution scans done of each of the vibrant paintings so that Friends House can make larger images to accompany the texts for the corridor walls. However, efforts have been thwarted by ‘The Mystery of the Missing Painting’.

‘Rooted and routed together in the Spirit’ (see above) was painted on a sun-dappled day in the garden of Leighton Buzzard Meeting. However, it was sold many years ago and there is no record of who owns it.

Judith told Eye: ‘I’m very honoured to have been asked for the use of these little paintings I did so many years ago. Although the copyright always remains with the artist, we are very grateful to all the present owners of the watercolours for loaning the paintings and being happy for us to use the images. If you know who the mystery owner is, please contact me on askrigg@askrigg-studios.co.uk and/or Paul Grey on paulg@quaker.org.uk’.

Sweet reputation

A slightly glib passage in ‘How to choose a religion’ by Rose Macaulay caught the eye of Kate Macdonald, clerk of Belgium and Luxembourg Yearly Meeting. The article, published in 1924, casts a witty eye over a range of religions, including Quakerism.

Rose, tongue firmly in cheek, observes: ‘It is very nice to be a Quaker. Quakers have no creeds, so they can believe anything they like. They depend on the light of conscience. They have meetings, at which, if the spirit moves you, you can speak, and say what you like. For the rest of the time you can sit still and think, except when listening to the sayings of your fellow-members.

‘The drawback to being a Quaker is that you have to be very busy with causes and good works; you start funds for the distressed and food centres for the hungry (particularly in Central Europe and specially for those with whom your country has recently had differences), and try to get laws altered. When your country goes to war, as countries from time to time will, you are in an awkward position, and very unpopular, as you think it wrong to fight.

‘Quakers make the best chocolate…’ Rose went on to write three pages on attending a Quaker Meeting in her longer essay, ‘Church-going’, in 1935.

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