Category: Consciousness
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160. Let your soul be your pilot
Insight came strangely out of what at first seemed unconnected things. In my recent blog ‘158 Rhosilli Bay’ I found myself mulling on how I can stay rooted in what has already been revealed to me by God in my world, while being open to the Great Mystery of the God of a multitude of…
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159 “An Immense World”
The mystery about all these other worlds is even bigger, and its right under our noses. Read this long quotation from ‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong. “Imagine an elephant in a room. This elephant is not the proverbial weighty issue but an actual weighty mammal. Imagine the room is spacious enough to accommodate it;…
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157 Who does God know?
I recently wrote a blog entitled ‘An Awesome Fact’ in which I reflected on a wonderful poem by the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska, in which she draws our attention to how utterly unique we each are at birth. More recently I bought a birthday card for a friend who was celebrating his 70th birthday. It…
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152. In the beginning
My 80th birthday in April has turned out to be a more significant milestone than I had expected. In March a series of synchronistic events led me to find and re-read my Priest’s Exam papers of July 1971. In Southwark Diocese you had to sit this in the summer after you’d been ordained Deacon, and…
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150. An Awesome Fact
I recently visited Krakow in Poland with my daughter Hannah, as part of the celebrations of my 80th birthday. Her Polish friend Joanna had recommended Krakow, and so I asked Hannah if her friend might suggest a book or two that would give me a feel for Polish culture before we went there. She suggested…
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143 The painting behind the painting.
Recently I went with my friend James to an art gallery to see a small exhibition of just three paintings. One of them we both knew well, the other two less so. We spent a long time looking & talking about each painting in turn, and the more we looked the more we saw, and…
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142 The Power of Love
In one of her excellent newsletters [newsletter@themarginalian.org] Maria Popova wrote some words that touched me deeply not least because they appear to me to be profoundly true. I quote them here, not in full but without further comment from me.. She wrote: “Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different…
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130. Just Knowing or Revelation?
Earlier this summer I read that Alice Oswald had been elected as the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. I recognised her name but wasn’t familiar with her poetry, so on a whim I went to BBC Sounds and on entering her name came upon a programme in which she had been interviewed. I…
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128. Just Knowing
A picture of geese flying in formation. I met recently with a friend who is having to rest and recover through the summer & into the autumn, after a spell in hospital suffering from a debilitating illness. The strange thing was, he said, that he’d planned some months before to clear his diary for those…
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93. A failure of the Imagination
March 2021 We see a painting entitled ‘The Dead Christ’ by Ercole de Roberti, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. The article goes on to describe the painting. I have been drawn to this painting by Ercole de Roberti in The National Gallery, for many years, but Chloe Reddaway in an excellent short…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 