Arts Articles
‘My ministry is the jokes and kittens’
Did you grow up Quaker? No no, not at all. I started going to Meeting probably about ten years ago. I’d just walked the Way of St James and I was looking for a spiritual community that did an equivalent thing – sharing a journey with people without having to...
Quibbles
You believe in the love of God. I believe in love as best I can. We both believe in love. Let’s not get heated.
Waiting on the Light
All photographers who use natural light, as I do, have to wait upon this source, and also upon particular qualities of light to determine the outcome of the picture. Light is the primary agency, forming colours and tones, composition and shadows, and also mood. The pictures record how the light...
‘Here we come a-carolling’
‘The universe is the song of God’, imagined the Quaker composer Donald Swann. He and his friend Sydney Carter were, I think, two of the greatest songwriters of the twentieth century, abundant in melody and memorable in lyric. They opened up the world of carols, not limiting them just to...
The Jesus ghost
When I was little Jesus lived behind sunbeam clouds, wearing a white nightie, like an angel who didn’t need wings. He sent my aunty a miracle baby and heard my prayers in Sunday School. I won a prize for a plasticine Joseph and Mary.
Some broader current?
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I realise some writers call this a bad question – certainly an annoying one, since it is so common. Yet it’s an honest one: a seeking after truth.
Fragments
And we are only justified in going on living if our futures manifest at every point and at all times a heroism equal to those killed in battle. The above words are based on the thoughts of Corder Catchpool in 1919 which Emily Feldberg uses in the concluding section of her...
Let your life speak
Sara Barnard has appeared in the Friend before – at the age of eleven her poem ‘See God’ was published in the magazine. Fast forward to today and the former attender at Winchmore Hill Children’s Meeting is a successful Young Adult writer on the shortlist for the coveted YA Book...
Wordless Knowing
I am eighty-eight years old And much has changed In my inner and outer life But what has not changed Is that from a very early age I sensed a wordless knowing That I am a small evolving part Of the Creative whole Of Inner and outer existence An existence...
Sing John Ball
I suggest that the phrase ‘Quakers believe everyone is equal’ needs the concluding words: ‘before God.’ It then stands as a fundamental Quaker belief. The problem in adding Jesus as a fundamental, I feel, is that we are straying into avoidable dogma, as some believe and some don’t. The...