Culture Articles
Staying true
Lynn Waddington was a Huckleberry child. Her river was the Delaware, idling through South Jersey, shared with brother and sister and swimming muskrats. A child in a natural world, she wrote, ‘can hear the footsteps of beetles far away.’ The family home sat without neighbours for many years until the...
Elsie
A nursing home. At ninety-three, your memory almost gone, You wonder where your mother is, and where is brother Don? You do not know what place this is, nor whether you belong. Worst of all, you are aware of something sadly wrong.
Thoughts from the moon
He stepped on the moon And saw to his delight, The planet Earth, blue and beautiful, Hung in the sky. It evoked weightlessness Held by miraculous magnetism.
The Snettisham Saga
Beneath the tent an archaeologist mole is heard blindly tunnelling for worms building hills as he goes. A snuffling hedgehog cleans pots and pans, whilst trusty giant poplars await our return through a sneaky hole in the hedge shielding us from the icy blast.
Presence in the midst
The picture ‘The presence in the midst’ is one that I have seen in many Meeting houses. It depicts a deeply gathered Quaker Meeting of former years, with the genders segregated, and the filmy figure of Jesus as the otherwise unseen presence.
Wisdom
Is there any real place for wisdom in our frenetic, postmodern, quasi-apocalyptic, multi-tasking, dual- income, economically challenging world? This is one of the questions Stephen S Hall asks in Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. He maintains that among ordinary people there is a hunger for any excuse to raise their...
Religion for atheists
I looked forward to this book, hoping it might speak to those looking for a faith with no taint of dogma or superstition; wisdom without doctrine, as the author calls it.
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...
Poem for a newborn in Meeting
Gabrielle Octavia born on a Tuesday Sunday you came to meeting
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...