The Baptism of the Lord, 12th January 2020 To become a good craftsman you must meet and love your material. There has to be this epiphany. For me, it is stone. For other people it will be wood, clay, metals, leather, glass…Each of these will have a particular resonance . …
Second Sunday after Christmas, 5th January Then, like lightning, it happened. I saw a scare go into the cloud of birds, and they opened their wings and began to rise up off the ground, and in that split second, from behind the house and from over my roof, a hawk …
Mary Mother of God, 1st January 2020 Harrold Macmillan once compared running the economy with driving a car: there is a need for both a break and an accelerator. He had the tension between full employment, driving inflation, and deflation, driving unemployment, in mind. When he spoke of our never …
Holy Family, 29th December 2019 Overheard in Waterstones in Milton Keynes recently, full of people in a desperate search for presents at the last moment: a father to a young teenage daughter: ‘We are not giving your mother a book entitled How to Think like a Dog. I’ve been married …
Holy Innocents, 28th December 2019 How wise the Church is to follow Christmas Day with the Feast of St. Stephen and the Feast of St. John with the feast of the Holy Innocents. Light and shadow racing across the landscape. No rest here for the good or the wicked. My …
Saint John the Evangelist, 27th December 2019 How to speak without the possibility of being misunderstood? Impossible – apart from very occasional moments of grace. This, perhaps, is the sense of mystery that surrounds us all, in which we live and move and have our being. I wonder whether communion …
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 …
