Culture Articles
Happier people healthier planet
Happier people healthier planet by Teresa Belton is a fascinating book that took me a lot longer to read than I expected. It is, a bit like Quaker faith & practice, a book that few would, I feel, want to read from cover to cover in a sitting. I think...
The Turning Circle
Janni first saw Alice when she was eight, but only briefly: ‘even as she looked, the girl began to look transparent, like a projected picture and then she faded away entirely’. Janni is a child of our time but Alice, who becomes her only real friend, lived in the same...
Open for transformation
This year’s Swarthmore Lecture, Open for transformation: Being Quaker, considers the symptoms of illness in a patient and offers some remedies in a clear and confident voice. It is a voice that, for some, contains traces of a dreaded word: preaching. Others discern leadership and a prophetic vision. The...
Art gallery
The Night Before Christmas
(or ‘A Visit from St Paul’) (Not to be confused with ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ attributed to Clement Clarke Moore) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Friends House Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; Thanks to new insulation I heard not a thing Till...
The Quaker way
Most of those who become Quakers today will have made a spiritual journey to arrive at this destination. We are now a Society of convinced Friends rather than cradle Quakers. Many daughters and sons of Friends continue their parents’ questing and move beyond the Society, even if holding to Quaker...
Hide and seek
We sit round the silence listening to space, concentrating; our thoughts circle the quiet centre of the room. A faint movement far within the darkness, a cry: there, in the pile of books? or in the vase of flowers? the sun’s flash on a gull, high over the sea....
Watford’s Quiet Heroes
On 15 June 1916 Howard Marten was led from a prison cell in Boulogne to stand in front of thousands of soldiers on a parade ground. Howard, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker from the Watford area, then heard an officer declare that he had been found guilty of disobeying an order while on active...
Living eldership
Elders are the arteries through which the spiritual life of the Yearly Meeting flows. Long neglected, they have, I believe, become hardened and thus restrict the flow of life. When Alastair Heron was clerk to Yearly Meeting elders he used his position to lead a group to clarify and publish...
Courtly gallantry
She was the love of my life. Made for each other everyone said. We made plans. Our world was full of promise. But to test me, like knights of centuries past,