Arts Articles
Meeting for Worship
I lug this great laundry basket to Meeting Filled with damp twisted bundles of problems, tasks and commitments, And I shake them out one by one and peg them on the invisible line.
Meanings
There he was, standing among them, and they were startled and frightened and thought they were seeing a ghost (Luke 24:36-7). The risen Christ was not a disembodied spirit, in Luke’s view: he had the flesh and bone of a physical man; he could be touched, he could eat...
Words for the journey
On the face of it, if you want a verse for a corporate Christmas card, I’d be the last person to ask. The phrase ‘greetings card verse’ could sum up most things a serious working poet would want not to be. More than that, I’m a Quaker, and...
End of the roses, Quaker meeting
Her shadow on the carpet paler and paler, although no cloud has come over the sun; her hair thinner even than an hour ago when she was wheeled in. Although I did feel something coming over as I was arriving. It was the sky itself, a heavy silence, then this...
My life, my faith
Like many other Meetings, we wonder how we can get to know one another better. Every week after Meeting we drink tea together and talk. But there are lots of us and many things to attend to: meetings, rotas, you know the sort of thing. Then there is the important...
Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Halfway round the Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern, I stop in my tracks and smile broadly at the wall. On it hang three massive paintings of an overcast sky, each flecked by a pale puff of cloud. Is this, I wonder, what the James Turrell skyscape in the refurbished...
Vocable (for John)
Ninety now, you’re adrift on the vowel-stream, the crisp edge of all your five languages gone and we’re back to the least of language. It’s all one, your, his or my slight modulations of the bare vowel of animal need… though even there how they give us...
Voice of the morning
Thank you, Lord, for preventing me from bursting in on the day, like a bull in a china shop: instead, to have me sitting quietly, in the silence marking its beginning;
Quo vadis Libya?
No matter how much things change they remain the same, in Libya this is true. Tribe fights against tribe brutality is returned by more brutality.
The world of Joseph Wood
The publication this month of a full and unedited transcription of the large and small notebooks of Joseph Wood, a Yorkshire Quaker, will provide a significant new resource for those with an interest in Quaker history and genealogy. The hundred notebooks, written between 1773 and 1821, together with 647 letters and miscellaneous printed...