Abstract
It is argued that retarded/advanced effects of gluon exchange must be taken into account when mesons consisting of light quarks are calculated within the bag model. Good results are obtained for mesons up to 1800 MeV using the coupling constant and the bag radius as the only two parameters. The Coulomb gauge is used to ensure that only transverse gluons can make a contribution. A significant quark-antiquark-gluon component is found in the meson wavefunctions.