Category: Everyday Life
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124 In Defence of Angels
June 2023 The Church has a tendency to make simple things difficult, like prayer & faith, both of which are simple in principle but challenging in practice. Society has a tendency to trivialise important things like miracles and angels. I’ve written about ’Everyday Miracles’, so now I’m going to write “In defence of Angels”. School…
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108. Whittling
June 2022 It started with the gift of some whittling knives, that I used to strip the bark from sticks, revealing something beautiful, which in turn connected me with ancestors who’d worked with wood, one 40,000 years ago. I made a holding cross for myself, and then many holding crosses that I gave away, before being…
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94. New Life within
March 2021 My friend Colin and I have met regularly to talk over many years. He retired early as his wife Joy was not well, and as her illness progressed and she was confined to her bed, he became her full-time carer. As he could no longer visit me I started to visit him at…
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84. Where’s the gift in Covid?
May 2020 With churches closed Lockdown provides us with an opportunity to explore new spiritual resources. Church services online are a resource for some, but apart from that we’re on our own, left to our own devices. Some may choose to do nothing, others reach out for a pre packaged pattern from the internet. My instinct is…
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83. Our search for Meaning
May 2020 The current Lockdown presents everybody with a massive change of life style, the like of which most of us have never experienced before. Some of us are facing death, our own or that of others, more sharply than before. Some of us are having our working lives turned upside down. Some of us are…
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79. Rest
January 2020 I recently read a book entitled ‘The Art of Rest’ by Claudia Hammond in which she writes about a global survey, ‘The Rest Test’, completed by 18,000 people across 135 countries in which they were asked to name the three activities they find most restful. They were accessed through two BBC Radio shows,…
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62. The Scapegoat
November 2018 Some Conservative MPs want to assassinate the Prime Minister. Not literally of course, they don’t wish her dead. But they do wish her gone. ‘If only we can get rid of her, then our problems will be resolved. It is all her fault.’ That is their view. No matter that most people point out…
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57. Everyday Miracles
May 2018 When I get up in the morning I like to make myself a cup of tea, and a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon for my wife, and then spend time in prayer. Usually that means walking down to my shed in the garden, but earlier this year the weather didn’t…
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47. Beauty
September 2017 Some years ago, in 2011, I read an article in the summer edition of the National Trust Magazine, by the philosopher A. C. Grayling, on Beauty. He was writing primarily about natural beauty, but went on to say that: “There is beauty in ideas, in the effects of sound (think of music, laughter, falling…
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39. Words for the turning of the year: Christian Bobin
December 2016 My friend Keith recently introduced me to a french writer, Christian Bobin, and I have been stimulated by reading an anthology of his writings, translated into English, and entitled ‘The Eighth Day of Creation.’ Somewhere in it he writes: “ I should like to know how to pray. I should like to know how…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 