Communion
In her letter about Meeting for Worship in the Friend of 6 December 2024, Shanthini Cawson wrote about the importance of connection. First of all, how modern life takes us into complexity, then how Meeting for Worship together can help us find our centre.
At our pre-Christmas meal in Congénies, we shared our experience of ‘communion’ which means ‘finding unity together’.
We saw three levels of communion: our interior life, often crazy but with the possibility of finding simplicity and depth; our life with others – again, there can be difficulties and differences but silence together, for instance, before a meal together, brings us to a new depth; and in Meeting for Worship, we are open to connection with the source of life.
I enjoy three different Zoom groups of Experiment with Light: a UK one led by Shanthini, once a month on a Tuesday afternoon; one very small weekly group from 10am till 11am every Friday; and one monthly meeting in French on the first Tuesday evening from 8pm till 9pm (French time).
If you are interested in joining the second or third groups, write to me at richardthompson1@gmail.com.
Richard Thompson
Unduly sensitive?
Are we in danger of becoming an unduly sensitive bunch (20/27 December 2024)? 1970s’ racism may not have been the first thing to come to mind on reading Linda Ewles’ poem, ‘God’s Biscuits’ (6 December 2024). Our subjective interpretations of any poem are our own; should we impose them on the poet? Does this smack of the dreaded cancel culture?
Similarly, Peter Bolwell’s response to an Aramaic Lord’s Prayer struck me as strange. The phrase ‘this Neil Douglas-Klotz (whoever he is)’ seems ill-chosen.
In his poetic, and deeply meditative, Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz explains his sources clearly; he does not claim to have discovered a new Aramaic text of the scriptures, still less to have found the original words of Jesus.
The website to which Peter Bolwell helpfully directs us, asserts that Neil Douglas-Klotz’s rendering is not the Lord’s Prayer. Agreed, and given the many decades that elapsed between the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew’s Gospel, who can say what is?
Peter Hart
