Eye - 17 July 2020
From Hitting the spot to The Slide
Hitting the spot
While Friends can’t meet in one room,
One option we’ve found is to Zoom.
This may hit the spot.
Then again, it may not,
The best way for all? Don’t assume.
Jackie Fowler
Mixed reviews
Meeting for Worship put in an appearance in the recent reading of Anne Watson, from Oxford Meeting, who shared a discovery with Eye.
The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton is the 1948 autobiography about the author’s journey towards becoming a Catholic monk. He began Meeting for Worship with a family connection: ‘One Sunday I went to the Quaker meeting house in Flushing, where Mother had once sat and meditated with the Friends.’
As the Meeting progressed he felt Friends were much like other denominations ‘except that they sat silent, waiting for the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. I liked that. I liked the silence. It was peaceful. In it, my shyness began to die down, and I ceased to look about and criticise the people, and entered, somewhat superficially, into my own soul, and some nebulous good resolutions began to take shape there’.
Unfortunately the first piece of ministry, about the Lion of Lucerne monument, put him off: ‘The Friends accepted it in patience, without enthusiasm or resentment. But I went out of the meeting house saying to myself: “They are like all the rest. In other churches it is the minister who hands out the commonplaces, and here it is liable to be just anybody.”’
He reflected: ‘I think that one could find much earnest and pure and humble worship of God and much sincere charity among the Quakers. Indeed, you are bound to find a little of this in every religion. But I have never seen any evidence of its rising above the natural order. They are full of natural virtues and some of them are contemplatives in a natural sense of the word. Nor are they excluded from God’s graces if He wills. For He loves them, and He will not withhold His light from good people anywhere. Yet I cannot see that they will ever be anything more than what they claim to be – a “Society of Friends”.’
The Slide
Eye was delighted to receive an exercise in strong verbs from Roger Baker, of Abingdon Meeting. He writes: ‘Paul Honigmann’s poem of written rhymes (Eye, 3 July) reminds me of a poem recited to me in the 1940s by my great-aunt, Alice Robson, in a deadpan voice, which she claimed was used by its author, a weighty Friend. I regret I cannot remember his name.’ Can trusty Eye readers help identify the person who penned this piece?
The butcher’s boy had made a slide in the middle of the road
It was the very longest slide that ever mortal slode.
The baker’s boy espied it, observed: ‘Now this is good,
I’ll have a go at that there slide’ and subsequently slood.
The village patriarch upon the slippery surface trod;
Most inadvertently and unintentionally he slod.
The Misses Smith, though middle-aged, felt youthful tastes renewed.
Glanced round, saw no one coming, and started off and slewed.
The curate passing down the street remembered that he had
Some skill in sliding as a boy and elegantly slad.
The doctor followed bravely with a cry of: ‘Who’s afraid?’
And suffered much from somersault – in agony he slade.
The constable remarked it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I never did,
I shall be sliding next myself,’ which having said, he slid.
The blacksmith’s girls, the twins, in cloaks of white and red,
Held hands while on the surface – in parallel they sled.
At the end of the slide they all came down on a heap of frozen mud
And sat there and were sorry that they had ever slud.
I did not love the boy who made – in the middle of the road –
The slide that was the longest slide that ever mortal slode.
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