Culture Articles
Gloria
A poetic meditation inspired by Isaac Pennington Submit to the light, they said. Open your eyes to its glory. It will show, purge, strengthen you; direct your feet. My friend, give over your willing, give over your desiring, sink to the seed, which God sows in your heart. It will...
The Prison Psychiatrist’s Wife, by Sue Johnson
This is a beautifully-written account of the experience of working creatively in a top security setting. It is a strongly-felt account, by our friend Sue Johnson, of what it was like to be alongside her ground-breaking psychiatrist husband Bob Johnson as they put original ideas of creativity, compassion, and challenge...
On the Level: Poems on living with multiple sclerosis, by Bryan Monte
What’s it really like living with a permanent disability that confines you to a wheelchair? Bryan Monte is a Quaker who lives in Amsterdam, where he formerly taught English in a university. He suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition that not only disables you but nags at you...
Rebellion
These dandelions – no show girls but they know how to pop up where they’re not wanted go on, do your worst on tarmac and paving stone Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge padlocked into earth with combination roots go on, arrest me not ashamed to flaunt the green rosette around their...
In defence of parental signifiers
Contaminated words like ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘God’ take on the sins of others: not their fault, but their cross to carry. We generously offer cups of soured breast milk and brew of yew tree needles, assuming they’ll bear everything.
On the quiet
No, not the stasis of the railway waiting room, people held between arrival and hopes for a departure, each coddling their isolation by nosing deeply in a paper or fingering restlessly the keypad on their phone, wondering why the train runs late ...
Quaker Shaped Christianity: How the Jesus story and the Quaker way fit together, by Mark Russ
All Quaker-shaped human beings should read Mark Russ’s book, please. Its title is intended to appeal, it seems, to Christians who are not Quakers and want to know why Quakerism has to be a thing at all. But it also serves to remind Christianity-phobic Friends that the ‘forgetting of...
Home to the harbour lights
Across the ink dark oily sludge, It could not be called water, Surely not, Muck that flowed slow As treacle from the dented Tin in our kitchen cupboard,
The amulet
‘I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.’ The judge echoed the queen, conscious of irony and the risk of own goals. In her domain, rhetoric flows. ‘We’ll pray for him; tell us his name.’
A Simple Faith in a Complicated World: One Quaker’s journey through doubt to faith, by Kate McNally
This book is an introduction to the Quaker way. Most of these are written by convinced Friends trying to make sense of this convincement. The usual dilemmas must be faced: the Quaker way is experiential, so each journey is personal and unique. The language used by Friends is tentative. The...