The trouble with walls, as the angel says, is that they never can be more than provisional. Fix the walls of Jerusalem and she can never contain the unforeseen multitudes of God’s vision. Fix the walls of your heart or mind and God’s own angels will be left in the cold… Here’s a statement to …
Yearly Archives: 2003
Friday Week 25 Year I
‘Jesus was praying alone in the presence of his disciples’… isn’t that a strange phrase … ‘alone in the presence of his disciples’. There’s a horizontal oddness about it as you try and imagine what the scene would have looked like: Jesus alone yet among his disciples… but there’s a vertical oddness too: how could …
Monday Week 25 Year I
‘Take care how you hear’. Isn’t that a strange thing to say? I guess I don’t usually think of hearing as something I have much choice over. I hear what’s there to be heard. It feels pretty passive to me. But as soon as I say that I realise its not. Hearing is more than …
Thursday Week 24 Year I
Isn’t there a contrast between those two readings? Listen… Noble, respectable, impeccable, responsible, reliable, moderate, sober, temperate, discreet, courteous—what a list of requirements—how many can you tick off for yourself? How many of Jesus’ disciples could lay claim to those qualities? You know what the writer is saying—it’s not that it doesn’t make sense to …
Wednesday Week 23 Year I
I may be imagining it but I sense a touch of frustration from the writer to the Colossians. How are we to be transformed? How are we to become holy? How are we to be made over in the image of Christ? The metaphor Paul is using is a stark one: our old life is …
Tuesday Week 22 Year I
What I want to know is when did Jesus practice? I can understand his ability to teach with authority—I can imagine it all honed and hoarded from years of listening, thinking, living, all that good Jewish disputation, decades of pondering Torah and sitting in lonely places face to face with his God. … That he …
St Clare
Bear with me… Listen to what theologian and naturalist Annie Dillard has to say about experiencing a total eclipse: “… I heard screams. People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at …
Tuesday Week 18 Year I
Readings like the first one put you in a dilemma. They don’t sit easily—at least I hope they don’t sit easily—with what experience and personal history has taught us each about God and our relationship with God. I hope we each know God well enough to have got beyond the fear of opening our mouths …
Saturday Week 15 Year I
Four hundred and thirty years. Four hundred and thirty years to the day. That’s a big anniversary. Something worth celebrating. The day Israel’s God brings the people out of bondage, liberates them from oppression, and sets them free from all that has diminished them and diminished their hopes. It’s a new beginning. But it’s a …
St Thomas the Apostle
I’ve long believed that doubt is a virtue and that certainty, when it offers itself, is almost certainly an illusion. Our great glory as human beings is that we are fallible and we know it; we make mistakes about as often as we draw breath, and that’s no bad thing so long as we remember …