Passing Saint Benedict, 21st March 2020 I have never before been asked to say Mass on my own – even the ‘I’ at the beginning of this seems offensive, and the rebel in me would do otherwise, and there, perhaps, lies a clue to the true nature of priesthood, as …
Saint Joseph, 19 March 2020 And so we wait. Many years ago we took our garden scythe to the blacksmiths in Stagsden to be mended. He offered to bring it back, never having visited Turvey Abbey before and intrigued by the thought of visiting a working monastery. Unfortunately, he came …
Lent Sunday 3A, 15th March 2020 The Dominican theologian Brian Davies wrote an interesting article some years ago based on a lecture in which he argues that Thomas Aquinas can be deservedly described as an academic. I suspect most of us would not have thought otherwise. But he bases his …
Saint Frances of Rome, 9th March 2020 In these several accounts of widowhood we pass from prayer to activity to prayer again in a ceaseless manner. Each widow has a character formed by prayer and this character forms and informs whatever they do. Each is true, not only to their …
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 …
