Lent Sunday 2A We ought to know that faith, like other aspects of our humanity, grows and changes. Faith is not something inhuman. It is bound up with our human emotions and experiences, and therefore the concrete sense of faith is not something on which we can place excessive reliance. …
Lent Sunday 1A When Jonathan Raban visits the Badlands of Montana, the vast, almost desert, landscape of the Arizona plains, he’s overwhelmed by the distances and the far horizons but, as a sailor, he feels at home – he know how to see it and to navigate his way across. …
Ash Wednesday For our sake God made the sinless into sin, so that in Him we might become the goodness of God. That’s a very striking statement – almost too good to be true. How can we ever claim to be, or aspire to be, the goodness of God? Other …
Sunday 7A, 23rd February 2020 What God is after, in this most difficult of passages, is our coming to full maturity in Christ: we’re being told that it’s time to grow up, to realise and release God as our inner principle – the power at the centre of our lives …
The See of Saint Peter, 22nd February 2020 When a rock has been exposed to the elements for a couple of thousand years it tends to show a bit of wear and tear – indeed, to the point of being unrecognisable in some respects to its original onlookers – but …
Sunday 6A, 16th February 2020 When confronted with Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount we can often feel overwhelmed. It’s too much, this standard of perfection – and exclusive. Who can belong when the expectations are so high? If the Law was a burden surely this is even more so. And …
Saints Cyril and Methodius, 14th February 2020 Disunity within Christendom and, indeed, within Christianity, has always been with us – a reflection, indeed, of the forever tension at the heart of our own constitution as human beings, torn between good and evil. But this is a dynamic tension which always …
Saint Scholastica, 10 February 2020 ‘I have discovered,’ said Blaise Pascal, that all human evil comes from this, (our) being unable to sit still in a room.’ Pensées no.139 Pensées no.139 Rather than see Martha and Mary as two orders of being in rivalry, the contemplative and the active, it …
Sunday 5A, 9th February 2020 On this day of extreme high winds you will not be comforted to know that one climatologist recently declared that there is now ‘no natural weather left’, that everything we now experience in terms of weather is the result of human decision or, better, action, …
Presentation of the Lord, 2nd February 2020 George Herbert, as one would expect of a priest, puts public prayer first, although being unable to resist confessing the enchantments of private prayer. The latter are frequently quoted, the former rarely, but we would do well to read what he said for …
