Reviews Articles
Still Small Voice
It was a powerful experience to see the world premiere of a play about Bury St Edmunds Meeting House in that very Meeting house. The Still Small Voice is that of Margaret Kemp who, in the 1950s, insisted on keeping the Meeting house open in the face of quite reasonable...
Deepening the Life of the Spirit
Few Friends will be surprised that as Meeting co-clerk I get a lot of mail. Much of this needs sifting, sorting, being presented to an appropriate Friend or quietly filing away. One packet that was not for quiet filing was Ginny Wall’s new booklet Deepening the Life of the...
Her mother’s eyes
‘Faith makes one a pioneer, a trailblazer; it turns the traffic lights from amber to green. While we rely on the power of the self we are much more likely to dither or retire. Trusting in the Power Beyond means having a sense that all will be well. Our mission...
A healing grace
When Elaine Pryce was sixteen her four-year-old brother drowned. She blamed herself for this and so did her family. Her Pendle Hill pamphlet, Grief, forgiveness and redemption as a way of transformation, gives a most moving account of her journey ‘through a labyrinth of learnings… to forgiveness and acceptance’.
If you sit very still…
If You Sit Very Still explores the hidden area of traumatic loss, brutality and the restoration of the human spirit. In 1994, twenty-one years after her unexplained disappearance, Lucy Partington’s remains were discovered in the basement of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.
A Peace of Africa
We have been fed so many ‘disaster Africa’ images that it takes a conscious effort to look further and realize that there are many aspects of life there that are superior to those in the West – such as the way people cooperate to achieve things and families help each other...
Life Lines
Some things in life are just beyond our imagining. What it was like to be faced with the gas chambers and ovens of Buchenwald is, mercifully, not in our own experience and, for most of us, the nightmare belongs to past history. Yet the fact of the Holocaust, and the...
All fall down
In Sally Nicholls’ two previous books (Ways to Live Forever and Season of Secrets) the leading characters faced death, loss and terror. But both books had a lightness of touch that encouraged young readers to enjoy them, with laughter seasoning the serious issues. Her new novel has a different tone.
Deep Field
The first edition of the latest collection by our Friend Philip Gross sold out so fast that there were no copies left for the book launch and the publishers had to organise a hasty reprinting. What was it about a slim volume of modern poetry that, far from intimidating people,...
A Quaker at Sea
It is the ‘Great Depression’. Your father’s Scarborough high street business has gone bust. You are fifteen years old and must leave your Quaker school. You are offered an apprenticeship in the merchant navy, although no one in your family has a history of going to sea, and you...