Sunday 20A, 16th August 2020 Jesus is impressed by words: remember the reply of the Centurion when Jesus is willing to come to him and heal his servant: Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; just give the word and my servant too will be cured. …
Assumption of Our Lady, 15th August 2020 We are in a time of trial – have we ever not been ? – caught between heaven and earth. It will be a long time yet before we can fully process what has been happening to us – both individually and collectively …
Saint Lawrence, 10th August 2020 St. Lawrence famously gives away the Church’s possessions for the sake of the poor and when challenged to return this treasure by the civil authorities returns with ‘the destitute, the orphans the blind and the lame’ – the Church’s true treasure. But the sacrifice he …
Sunday 19A, 9th August 2020 It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Don’t be fooled by the gentle breeze: Elijah is being commissioned to wreak havoc on Israel’s enemies. When the Godfather speaks quietly his Mafia underlings know they have to listen! That’s perhaps …
Feast of the Transfiguration, 6th August 2020 Visions and dreams have been with us always, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of trying to understand them, both universally and in each of our own particular circumstances. The ‘Son of Man’ phrase, which links the passage from David with the Transfiguration …
Sunday 18A, 2nd August 2020 We live in a superabundant time. The harvest is rich. This is the time when the young birds can begin to find food for themselves and the parents can at least begin to let them go. The unkempt corners of the garden compete with those …
Martha, Mary and Lazarus, 29th July 2020 Lord, the man you love is ill –this said as if Jesus does not love others, or others so much. And we could say this of the whole family of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, singled out, it seems for Jesus’ special love. But …
Sunday 17A, 26th July 2020 There’s a wonderful moment in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his passage through Europe in 1934 when he comes across a party of loggers deep in a forest in the Carpathian uplands. He’s been without human contact, high in the mountains, for a couple of …
Saint James, 25th July 2020 The exercise of power carries terrifying responsibility – not least to oneself. When one looks at our present national and international leadership one can see how power in the wrong hands can have devastating effects on others and yet seem to leave the leaders themselves …
Saint Mary Magdalene, 22nd July 2020 In an Easter sermon from 2003, Rowan Williams describes this encounter as one of the most devastatingly moving moments of the whole Bible. And it is – there, at the heart of our own Easter Vigil, when Mother Prioress sings the words to us, …
