Category: Feral
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156. Isn’t it easy to believe in God
My friend Keith Griffin has sent me an article he’s written. I’ve found it an exciting & hopeful read and he’s agreed that I can add it to this blog. Thank you Keith. “In thirty years of parish ministry what I valued most of all was the freedom to work across a whole range of…
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155 Thy Kingdom comes
What has God revealed to me so far through my prayer and life experience? I am ambivalent about writing these words, who am I to do so? We each have unique insights to share with others. I have a friend who can tell what’s wrong with the engine of a car simply by listening to…
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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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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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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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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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134. Jesus Calling: a shorter version
John the Baptist preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus went to John to be baptised so he must have had something to repent of. After his baptism, Jesus had a powerful spiritual experience in which God spoke to him. The baptism & the spiritual experience were separate events. The latter…
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133. The Calling of Jesus
This piece has been some time in its gestation, it’s something that I sense has been revealed to me over a period of time, and that it’s now time to share it. I sense that there is truth in it. I might of course be wrong, or there might simply be bits of truth in it.…
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131 Happy Christmas
I sense gloom and despondency in the air. Partly it’s directed at our government which seems burnt out & out of control, busy making the mess it’s created worse. Partly it’s despair at the situation in Gaza and Israel, where two sides each with a legitimate cause, their ownership of their land, seem intent in…
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126. Was Jesus feral?
Autumn 2022 I think that you can make a good case for Jesus being feral. If feral means that something/somebody has returned to a natural state from one of captivity or domestication, then I reckon that Jesus fits. Consider this: I think that you could make a similar case for Paul, Francis, and other significant…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 