Culture Articles
L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle (Dante)
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars And shows me, too, that those deep-seated scars Of separation, loss and hopelessness And wondering who I really am Can lead me to a deeper sense of holiness.
Quaker Meeting
Facing shafts of light without, within a brighter place we begin, to whisper then to shout fractures of the outer core dropping of the daily mask, conversations deep and raw… are offered to thee, yet…
Ways of seeing
Earlier this year my husband – after almost forty years in the field of law – decided to become an art dealer. He’d seek out prints and paintings by neglected artists, research into them, get some restoration done and create a website. Would I be his business partner? It’s normal...
Silence is
What is this silence in which we sit? Yes, a solemnly maintained sacrament, Yes, a strange keeping of the sabbath, But also, much more, Silence is the builder of HaMakom, a sacred temple in which we commune, Silence is a sanctuary for Shekinah, known to others as Huwa...
Ghost town
In 1981 I was a postgraduate student at the University of Warwick, living in Earlsdon, one of Coventry’s satellite villages, and periodically attending the lovely, modern Quaker Meeting on Hill Street. I was aware, through that spring and summer, of rising tensions between skinhead and Asian youths. There was an...
What the Youngest Angel Said
Oh how could I forget that amazing night? There were hundreds of us. It was my first flight. We sang to some shepherds just before dawn, Then flew on to the place where the child was born.
Set all the birds free
UA Fanthorpe, our modern English Quaker poet and ‘national treasure’, was, with her partner Rosie Bailey, a patron of Quaker Concern for Animals from 2006 until her death in April 2009. Christmas Poems (2002), which she and Rosie began sending to friends as Christmas cards in 1974, features numerous animals.
The Forty Rules of Love
The Forty Rules of Love is a fictionalised account of the encounter in the year 1244 between the Dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and the Turkish theologian Jalaluddin Rumi in Konya. The account is woven around the story of Ella Rubinstein, wife of David, a successful Massachusetts dentist, who comes to realise...
Bedside Beelzebub
*Niets is kostbaarder dan de tijd, Want hij is de prijs van de eeuwigheid. *Netherlands proverb: Nothing is more precious than time, For it is the price of eternity. Rapt in scarlet silence soft The digit-demon lurks. I hear no honest tick from his Deep necromantic works. Electron-imps cavort about ...
A speaking silence
Delight first, followed by analysis. A speaking silence: Quaker poets of today is a grand subtitle to a collection that is the first of its kind in Britain for more than a century. The anthology, which is edited by RV Bailey and Stevie Krayer, gives Friends a timely opportunity to...