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. …
Category Archives: Berkeley
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 …
Sunday Week 2 Year A
“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It’s struck me this week as I’ve thought about this phrase that I really haven’t thought much about it before: just taken it for granted as another strange thing in John’s gospel—which is full of strange things. It’s also been easy to …
Epiphany Sunday Year A
(Enter messenger hurriedly …) Lord Balthasar! (Hands over a scroll … B reads, ponders, dismisses the messenger, puts down the scroll, turns to congregation ) Buried with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes … I had almost forgotten him … God knows I’ve tried! Nothing has been quite right since that fool’s errand thirty …
Sunday Week 4 of Advent Year A
Have you ever trusted a dream enough to act on it when you wake up? I don’t know about you but some of the things I dream about are not fit for the light of day. We do things in dreams we just wouldn’t dream of doing in daylight. And most of our dreams don’t …
December 17
“It was the best of times and the worst of times…” that’s the way to start a book. “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit” isn’t bad either, though my favourite is probably, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” From out here in front I could see …