Category: Everyday Life
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149 Our Vocation
One of my favourite films is entitled ‘Mail for Pastor Jacob’, which is set in the 1970s. It’s about a blind elderly Finnish Lutheran minister, who amongst other things has a ministry in what we might call ‘spiritual direction’ although that phrase is never used in the film. Every morning the mailman cycles up the path,…
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148 Holy Week and Easter
One way of looking at the Bible is to see it as a description of the many ways that God spoke to a people over a long period of time. To do that is to quickly realise that God is able and willing to speak to us through any and every thing. The challenge then…
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147 A Hidden Life
Being alive is a complicated business. Each of us has a ‘public life’ which is what the world sees of us, and a ‘private inner life’ which nobody sees apart from ourselves. Beyond then both is a ‘hidden life’, a dimension of life over which we have no conscious control, but that we sometimes glimpse…
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144 The Artist’s Room
I was recently in Sheffield with my daughter Lizzie, and we visited the Graves Gallery hoping to see a favourite painting of mine by Gwen John, ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’. It was out on loan, so I bought a postcard instead. It is a remarkable image. It captures what R S…
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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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141 Early Morning Walk
I woke early one morning last week, and being wide awake, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to doze off again, I got up and performed my usual morning tasks before getting dressed and going out for my morning walk. It was quieter than usual, and I saw nobody. I decided on a whim, that…
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140 A Spiritual Conversation
Increasingly I feel uncomfortable with the term ‘spiritual direction’, with its implication of a one-sided meeting with an authoritative person. Instead, I prefer to talk of a ‘spiritual conversation’ which implies to me a mutual meeting of friends. Both terms are concerned with a meeting in which God is felt to be present. An obvious…
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138 Vote for Jesus
We are soon to have an election, and many people are pressing that it should be about policies and not personalities. I think that Jesus would agree with that. His preaching was not about himself, [He claimed no title save the that of ‘the son of man’] but about what He had learnt of God…
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136 Revelation
Regular readers will know that I like John Henry Newman’s words: “No revelation can be complete and systematic, from the weakness of the human intellect; so far as it is not such, it is mysterious … The religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 