Category: Spiritual Life
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171 What is before Birth and after Death?
My personal experience Many years ago at a time of personal crisis, I woke from sleep one night, and I’m sure that I stayed on the bed, but it felt as if I was held above the bed, and as sure as day, God spoke to me. I don’t imagine that anyone else awake in…
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170 Elif Shafak ‘On the deep human need for a homeland’
In Sunday’s “Observer” there was an article by Elif Shafak: ‘We are not rootless. We are each others roots.’ The novelist on the deep human need for a homeland and how storytelling can help to unite people in an age of displacement.’ It caught my eye because I’m a fan of her novels, but also…
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169 Loneliness
I’m a big fan of the American novelist Elizabeth Strout, and her latest book ‘The Things we never say’ does not disappoint. Before the story begins there is a quotation from Jung: “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself,…
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168 Women, Spurs and God
When I was in my mid teens I used to walk, most often on a Sunday morning, on the edge of Epping Forest, not far from where we lived. I greatly valued those times of being alone, and the memories stay with me. Amidst the beauty of the trees, the views, and the silence &…
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167 ‘Up and Away’ The Ascension of Jesus
I’ve never been able to engage easily with the story of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven. I remember as a young curate declining to take an Ascension-tide service for the local junior school because I couldn’t see what the story could helpfully mean to a group of young children. Artists have usually portrayed The Ascension as…
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166 Nourish your soul
The likelihood of life on this tiny insignificant little planet is remote, human life even more so, and yet here I am. My life came as a gift to my parents They were involved in that happening, but not in control of it. They might have intended it, or not They might have hoped for…
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165 Why Jesus had to be abandoned by God
In my previous blog “God plays hide and seek” I wrote that “My experience is that when God appears to have disappeared it has been for one or two reasons: maybe both. Either in order to invite me to deepen my trust in God’s reality and love, despite the seeming lack of evidence. Or to…
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164 God plays hide and seek
I recently came across some words that I’d noted ages ago and then forgotten, as one does! They’re from a Japanese source named as Ryōkan, I’m not sure if that is an individual or a ‘school’ or maybe both. It doesn’t matter, what does is whether what is being said is true or not. I…
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163. God in Community
I have a friend who came to his Christian faith, as a young man, in a fundamentalist brethren church many years ago. He had been going through a painful personal crisis and found this church to be a place of warmth, acceptance and love, which was what he desperately needed. He also came to know…
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162. God’s Vision for the New Year
During Christmas I re-discovered some words that spoke to me and which seemed to belong together. Words of St John of the Cross, that I had unconsciously echoed in “Midwife God this Christmas” “If you want the Virgin will come walking down the road pregnant with the holy, and say, “I need shelter for the…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 