Page 141 - Eggs and Ashes pages

140 Eggs and Ashes

A story from Iona

On Iona, in the early days of the Iona Community, it was decided to commission a
well-known glassmaker to make six glass communion cups for use in the Abbey.
The craftsman was asked to engrave a suitable biblical text on each of the cups:
‘This the blood of the new covenant’, ‘This do in remembrance of me’, and so on.
Now this craftsman, as it happened, was not a churchman, although he was
sympathetic to ‘Christianity’. And when he received the commission he made one
request: Could he choose one of the texts to engrave on the cups? His request was
granted.
And when the cups were delivered, the folk on Iona were intrigued to discover
that the text he had chosen was from the arrest of Jesus in the garden of Gethse-
mane, when Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. And the text that he had engraved on
the cup was Jesus’s question to Judas: ‘Friend, wherefore art thou come?’

John Harvey

One man and his boss

(This piece is written for two voices. Speaker 1 is seen and heard counting out coins.)

One
This is a story about a man and his boss.
Two
Our man joined the firm with eleven others.
Three
They were all equal partners under one boss.
Four
The boss was a good man – they all trusted him.
Five
Our man was respected by the firm; they put him in charge
of finances.
Six
He kept a tight ship – he hated waste.
Seven
Occasionally, he was tempted to dip into the money for his own use – but that was
one of the perks of the job.
Eight
The firm travelled a lot, moving around the country.