I’m not much of a biblical literalist—you won’t catch me worrying about empty tombs, or wine from water, or broken bread that never runs out—but somehow the annunciation always catches me and makes me wonder. What I wonder is what it was really like. Films and novels always struggle here: is there a voice? a …
Yearly Archives: 1999
Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year A
We only see by not seeing. We have been learning from birth not to see. Not to see the full spectrum. Not to see the chaos of light that pours into our eyes. The art of vision is exclusion. To learn not to see everything at once so that we can see anything at all. …
Sunday Week 3 of Lent Year A
When Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, is wandering in the wilderness thirsty he comes across a well and as he waits to quench his thirst he is met by a foreign woman come to draw water. She is Rebecca who will love him and be his wife. Many years later, Isaac’s son, Jacob, …
Thursday Week 2 of Lent
When I was a teenager I read a book that shaped my life. The book itself wasn’t much but it had a poem, a Shakespeare sonnet, right on its front page. And that poem seemed to capture an adolescent ideal that with an adolescent naivety I thought might save me: They that have power to …
Sunday Week 1 of Lent Year A
It might not be completely true, that you are what you wear, but you sure can tell a lot about someone from how they dress. For example, wearing purple is a sure sign that you are gay—especially if you are a British import and wear a triangle on your head like Tinky Winky the Teletubby. …
Ash Wednesday Year A
Lent is a journey with Jesus toward Jerusalem, the city of his longing, the city of his dying, the city of his new birth. Lent looks to Easter. Whatever we do in Lent we do to get to that place of rebirth. We are heading for Easter and new life, and hope fulfilled, and dreams …
Friday Week 5 Year I
What was God thinking about to leave such a deadly tree lying around in Eden? Just standing there, dangerous, desirable. Do you ever wonder if God doesn’t have second thoughts about the whole Adam and Eve affair: “if only I’d made that snake a little bit dumber, or the earth creatures a bit smarter, or …
Sunday Week 5 Year A
1942: A poem from the doomed uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. Starving Jews fighting back against their Christian oppressors. The refrain: “the meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting! The meat in full cry…” The meat defiant and unwilling to be consumed. 1999: An essay at the back of this morning’s New York Times …
St Thomas Aquinas
For a dumb ox Thomas has been enormously influential, in and out of his lifetime: doctor of the church, synonymous with a whole way of doing theology, a way that has been both lifted up as the ideal and hated as the worst imitation of real knowledge. I like it that we are given the …
Sunday Week 3 Year A
Q&A: Who were the first disciples? (Peter, etc. but what do they all have in common? … Yes, they were fishers, yes, they were men, yes, they followed without hesitation, but perhaps above all they were Galileans. People of the Galilee.) Imagine, with me, Jesus emerging from the desert where he has been since his …