Arts Articles
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...
Staging a Meeting
How does your average audience member respond when they enter a theatre and find a Quaker Meeting in progress on the stage? They chat to their neighbour and fiddle with their phone, presumably. But no, apparently not. Rather, they fall silent and uphold the Meeting. And maybe, even, this reflective...
My Old Execrable
And the earth gave way unexpectedly like a newly arthritic knee and left me
Life in uncertainty
See here – a new born child Created by love into the world. Brought from timeless eternity Into uncertainty. The illusion of time and space Now fuels the human race, Needing an identity in every place, Creating uncertainty.
The email and the picture / The picture and the email
The email and the picture Aaaargghhhh! They’ve done it again! What a ridiculous email! Don’t they think about others?!! Why doesn’t someone speak to them?!!!