Arts Articles
Thought for the Week: Sunday Meeting
A pocket of silence to slip into Where warmth and quietness rule Waiting for the fidgeting to subside. – The rustle of a raincoat – The creak of an old bench – The tick of the clock measuring...
Mykene
Summer morning come heat on the wine-field and the lizards crinkle understone. In olive groves cicadas chirr and the blunt lion-gate lies open to the horde. Those hills opposite were purple in the dawn, now fragments in a heat like...
Daisy
Daisy comes to Meeting, greets us as she enters with a throaty wruff, lifts her big body round to nose each person, fur softer than silk, eyes wet with doggy love. We sit in our silent circle.
The Meeting house plane tree
I looked at the tree with an upward glance When its thousands of leaves were in merry dance, Wrestling in joy with the boisterous breeze Like a sailing-ship on surging seas.
The Gates of Greenham
Thirty years ago, on Easter Monday 8 April 1985, what is reputed to be the largest gathering of Friends in the twentieth century assembled in the Royal Festival Hall, London. It was the premiere of a peace passion, The Gates of Greenham, to celebrate a four-year ongoing witness of the women’s...
The challenge of fiction
‘I am interested in what constitutes loneliness and in the difference between solitude and loneliness.’ Jennifer Kavanagh is best known for a series of thoughtful non-fiction works on subjects such as travel, spirituality, homelessness and aspects of Quakerism. The quote above gave an insight into the link between the authorâ€...
…In Everyone?

Much quoted among us, It’s our firm tenet: There is that of God In everyone.
A B B
Alfred Barratt Brown, my father, was born in 1887 to a family with long Quaker roots. ‘ABB’, as he was known, was immersed in the life of Friends from birth. His faith took practical expression and made him active in many causes: the No-Conscription Fellowship, the League of Nations, the Fabian...
At the Quaker Meeting

Contained by ivory walls, and an oval of wooden chairs, muted colours of the matt, flat cushions, high benches and this handsome, slatted wooden floor. On the central table, just a thick, glass, rectangular vase of startlingly white chrysanthemums. Again; in this quiet company of souls. We drift in one...
Mary’s Joy
Jeanmarie Simpson is an American Quaker actor and playwright. She is bringing her one woman show ‘Mary’s Joy’ to Europe this month and will be performing it in Britain and Europe from February until September. The play examines the life of Mary Dyer, who was the first colonial woman...