Sunday 18B, 1st August 2021 We are beginning to circle around the meaning of the eucharist. On one side of my desk, as I think I’ve said before, I have an article entitled ‘What are you doing up there?’ which can be read in many different ways, and on the …
Sunday 17B, 25th July 2021 My theology is a bit rusty nowadays, but I remember a maxim which went vaguely like this: the Church makes the eucharist and the eucharist makes the Church – or was it the other way round? And does it matter? I’ve always taken this to …
Saint Mary Magdalene, 22nd July 2021 What is love? In our somewhat restrained celibate life as monks and nuns, we can readily forget the passions which fuel human love: we keep them in check and we can also keep our passion for Christ, for God, in check as passion turns …
Sunday 16B, 18th July 2021 In the cool of this church we find rest from the heat. We’ve just heard one of our most oft quoted psalms – The Lord is My Shepherd – with ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of deep darkness (or death) …
Solemnity of Saint Benedict, 11th July 2021 We are always people of our time. It’s not possible to exist in any other. And time changes us and we change time. This thought was prompted by a page from the Daily Mail discovered recently in the house of a neighbour, Dawn …
Sunday 14B, 4th July 2021 Not everything is as it seems: Jesus goes to his own people and is rejected, finds no faith, no willingness, that is, to see things as they really are – to see himself as prophetic of God. This is not an uncommon occurrence: the lazy …
Saint Thomas, 3rd July 2021 We live in a world of spin. It’s become obvious recently that climate change is with us and there’s no going back. But this possibility has been known for well over fifty years and obscured by spin, by the fossil-fuel companies and interests muddying the …
Saints Peter and Paul, 29th June 2021 In a rare moment of self-indulgence (ahem!), I recently watched a film on D-Day from a French perspective: the Americans and Canadians and the French themselves, and even the Germans, came out of it rather well, but the British, or more particularly the …
Sunday 13B, 27th June 2021 We are faced here with the meaning of life in the face of death, or just as well, the meaning of death in the face of life. Does one negate the other? And one comes immediately to the fact of resurrection, that is, to the …
Birthday of Saint John the Baptist, 24th June 2021 We heard last night of Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet and today we hear of this call to Isaiah and, albeit briefly, to David and, principally of course, to John the Baptist, even in the womb. The Oxford Dictionary of …
