Maybe it’s just been a busy seminar but that first reading exhausted me. It feels like high pressure, high action, high energy Christianity. Listen to it: Nothing; Only; All; Everything. Running; Captured; Strain; Racing; Upwards; Prize. Perfect; perfect; perfect. It’s quite beautiful in its own way, quite enticing, certainly inspiring but to be honest I’m …
Yearly Archives: 2004
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
There’s a serious contradiction between our two readings today. If I might paraphrase, the first says choose life and the second choose death. That’s pretty stark. The first is offering a long life, a long stay in the land, and long prosperity. The gospel can only offer pain and death but with them companionship … …
Wednesday Week 6 Year II
Isn’t it a relief to know that, where God is concerned, not all change is instant? It is to me anyway. Otherwise I’d be looking at my life and wondering hard. This bit has been tidied up nicely. That bit I’m proud of. But over there, hidden behind the other stuff, well those bits are …
Ss Cyril and Methodius (Valentine too)
Why do we celebrate two Greek brothers from the 9th Century as patrons of Christian Europe? Because they pushed the gospel where it hadn’t been before and because they weren’t above trying something completely new to get it there. Even abandoning the language of faith. They wanted to speak the word of God in a …
Saturday Week 4 Year II
Why do we come on retreat? Maybe we think it will do us good. Maybe like Jesus and the apostles we are exhausted with the demands of those around us and need a rest. Maybe like Solomon we are embarking on a new venture and seeking guidance. Or maybe our reasons are even now half …
Friday Week 2 Year II
Why this bunch of stragglers? Why! I wonder? You’d think the Son of Man could have his pick … skim the cream of the crop … select only the best and brightest. So why these slow-witted, cowardly, divided, wrangling rag-bag? Maybe these were all the choice he had? Maybe the good ones had already gone …
Epiphany
‘A cold coming we had of it: the worst time of year for a journey and such a long journey—the ways deep and the weather sharp—the very dead of winter.’ Eliot’s poetry brings the journey of the magi alive in our imagination. No quick jaunt in search of spiritual thrills but a deep longing, long …