Sunday 3A, 26th January 2020 There are many forms of darkness. Do you remember that dark room that you could never enter as a child alone? For myself it was the darkness at the top of a flight of stairs – the way to bed – but I had a …
Conversion of Saint Paul, 25 January 2020 In a very comprehensive article by Adrian Hastings, published in our ecumenical journal One in Christ almost fifty years ago, there was a table outlining the possible situations in which other Christians could receive communion at Catholic altars and Catholics could receive communion …
Mass for Christian Unity, 22nd January 2020 I’ve been wondering whether ecumenism isn’t our default position – just like prayer, and happiness and the sacred. It’s not something attained by addition but attained by taking away all the hindrances – all the sin that obscures that spontaneity and kindness which …
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 . …
The Epiphany of the Lord, 6th January 2020 We come to Church to find God but, as we heard yesterday, and hear again today, God can be found anywhere and everywhere, in the least of people as well as the greatest, in the least of places as well as the …
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 …
