Saint Stephen, 26th December 2019 We move rapidly, now, from imaging a child to imaging an adult; from the claim that an infant face makes on us, to the claim that any human face is a claim on us. Stephen is closely imaging Christ here, though he may never have …
Christmas Day 2019 They say that nostalgia ‘isn’t what it used to be’ but it’s a perennial attraction. Here’s a taste of it in Peter Hennessy’s account of the 1950s through the lens, literally, of a film, made in Blackpool by British Transport Films, called ‘Holiday’ – you get the …
Christmas Vigil Mass, 24th December 2019 It was comforting to see a crib yesterday in the centre of the Milton Keynes shopping arcade, just in front of the funfair but dwarfed by the merry-go-round behind, and indeed, by all the razzmatazz of Christmas. No different, perhaps, than it was in …
Advent Sunday 4A, 22nd December 2019 There’s a sense of dread around, today, that I’ve never known before. And if you think Brexit is bad and the present series of governments the worst we’ve ever seen, just listen to this: It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness …
Advent Sunday 3A, 15th December 2019 Somebody once observed to the eminent philosopher Wittgenstein how stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been that they could have looked at the sky and thought that the sun was circling the earth. Surely a modicum of astronomical good …
The Immaculate Conception, 9th December 2019 Why are the real things, the important things, so easily mislaid underneath the things that hardly matter at all? (Christmas Days: Jeanette Winterson p.25) This is Jeanette Winterson concluding a delightful story of the Christ child on the true and, mostly forgotten, meaning of …
Advent Sunday 2A, 8th December 2019 John the Baptist is a serious prophet – not a person one would like to meet unexpectedly, perhaps; a shock to the system; a challenge to the way we are and yet only a foretaste of what is to come in the person of …
Advent Sunday 1A, 1st December 2019 Advent: when we approach Christmas with both joy and trepidation – as we do with all days of birth and death. This is birth and death correlated so closely that it’s hard to be sure which is really happening, to tell them apart. When …
