Trinity Sunday, 12th June 2022 Upon those who step into the same rivers different and different waters flow. This is Adam Nicholson’s translation of a famous quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Now, Adam Nicholson has had great fun in recent years creating a succession of rock pools on the …
Pentecost Sunday, 5th June 2022 Today completes the Pascal Mystery: the great reversal of our fortunes brought about by Christ: the undoing of the devil’s work one might say, begun in that garden so long ago when fallen humanity is sent out to labour in the world without ultimate success; …
Ascension Day, 26th May 2022 Luke seems to use time in a very plastic way here, moulding it to suit his purposes, placing the Ascension on Easter Day at the end of his gospel account of Jesus’ time with his disciples, and then placing it also forty days later at …
Easter Sunday It’s alarming at times how sin clings so closely to us, old memories and old enmities suddenly surfacing as if from nowhere – confessed and thought of as forgotten but a part of our fabric that, one press of a button, and there they are again in all …
Saint Frances of Rome, 9th March 2022 One of the great things about a foreign war is that we can define ourselves over and against another – ‘them and us’. But we are always far more mixed than that, as Putin is perhaps finding out, with Ukrainian Russians not so …
Saint Scholastica, 10th February 2022 Perhaps Benedict has become too proud. Fallen in love, perhaps, with the routine and smooth running of his monastery, with the rules he himself has gradually formulated, after many years experience of the trials of monastic living. Perhaps he’s spent too little time with women, …
The Epiphany of the Lord, 6th January 2022 Physiotherapists encourage people experiencing relentless post-viral fatigue to gently push at the limits of what they can do in terms of physical effort. They’ve found that if those limits are not tested, then the realm of the possible begins to shrink – …
Mary, Mother of God, 1st January 2022 As pickpockets see only pockets so birdwatchers see only birds, or so it may seem but where we place our attention matters, Consider this wonderful passage from Iris Murdoch: I am looking out of my window in an anxious state of mind, oblivious …
Mass of Christmas Day I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.What hours. What black hours we have spentThis night! What sights you, heart, saw, ways you went!And more must, in yet longer lights’ delay. From the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who struggled much with depression and read …
Midnight Mass, 2021 We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Joan Didion, an American writer, of whom I’m woefully ignorant, but who I know has just died and, whatever her intentions or religious persuasion, has left us with a quote worth pondering in the light of today’s great feast, …
