Culture Articles
Balthasar
‘A cold coming they had of it’, Lancelot Andrewes, 25 December 1622
The faith
I need the Quaker faith, Need to hold onto the human race. I need to take a stand, Be a strong man.
The Journey of the Magi
It is December 1991. I am a sixth-form student enjoying my first year of A Level English Literature, delighting in a cornucopia of reading. As the Christmas holidays approach, I decide to treat myself to some wider reading and take out T S Eliot’s Ariel poems from my college library....
When poets go to war
When poets go to war, they tell a dreadful tale, They tell of crucifixion, nail on bloody nail. They tell the tale of Cain again, slaughtering his brother. They tell of orphaned children, and broken-hearted mother.
White poppies
White poppies, not red, Flowers without the blood.
War graves at Cabaret Rouge
Military beyond the last you wait in neat rows for the last trump. Orderly and regular headstones on parade you form a hollow square to look on the great stone altar where grateful nations tell you that your name will live for evermore.
Susanna’s sisters
One of my first experiences of Quakerism took place in a house full of triangular rooms in Clifton, the charming Georgian part of Bristol. The house was used as a university hall of residence. It had triangular rooms because it formed the elbow between two rows of townhouses that met...
A Meeting of Friends
We sit together in Silence let the quiet sink in settle into ourselves
What if?
Linda Hoy is a well-known children’s novelist – one of her books is a set text in schools – and a Friend. She is also an explorer who has presented us with a book – The Effect: Where science meets spirituality – that I can only describe as warm-hearted, imaginative, a mine of...
What’s in a word?
Teilhard de Chardin called them ‘diminishments’ – in common parlance ‘the disabilities of old age’: stark words for what is (when all’s said and done) a natural process.