Arts Articles
The debate
Like those quotidian voices, And the child in the warm kitchen Clinging close to her father’s knee; Against that well-armed hot debate, In the shell blasts of emotion, By a chamber carried about On the batons of fear and hate, My small poems were swept away – They said, with...
Images of Christ: Standing at God’s right hand
Like Coventry Cathedral, the location of last month’s art work, Llandaff Cathedral in South Wales was heavily bombed during the second world war. When it was repaired in the 1950s, one unusual feature added to the twelfth century cathedral was a contemporary version of a medieval roodscreen, intended to...
Words and images in Glasgow
As part of Refugee Week 2017 Glasgow Meeting played host to two challenging plays. Journeymen Theatre performed a double bill: Feeding the Darkness, on state-sanctioned torture, and The Bundle, which tells the story of a woman negotiating the UK asylum system. Simultaneously, we welcomed This Light that Pushes Me, a photographic...
Images of Christ: Tablets of the law, tablets of the word
Words set in stone have a long history in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The first version of the Ten Commandments was believed to have been inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18). Funerary inscriptions from the Roman catacombs are among the earliest visual forms of Christian witness. They are characterised by...
Moment’s benediction
A moment takes place between seeing and knowing we’ve seen. A moment of awe, a small benediction as when I met a fox in the lane, and we paused and looked at the otherness of other.
Holiday or trespass
We pay our pot of gold To reach the sun But not the rainbow’s end There is no rain.
At the Quaker burial ground, Long Sutton
Beyond the window in the grassy burial ground the long-departed face the stars from which they came. Each modest headstone, laid out in total symmetry and modelled perfectly to fit some ancient template, proclaims the uniformity of all below. There are no crosses, angels or exotic slabs. The wording tells...
from ‘Written on Light’
Such a delicate cusp this evening: the sky, the sea and the barely discernible hinge between them. No, I don’t believe in Judgement but yes, we will be held ...
Images of Christ: Christ amid the cabbages
On 8 August 1932 a group of fifty Protestant fundamentalists descended on a small Cornish church – St Hilary’s, near Penzance – and proceeded to lock up the vicar and trash the church interior. It is a reminder of how recently Christian art was a subject of passionate feelings in Britain, for what...
To a refugee
Tell me your story, How you came all alone To this country.