Category: Spiritual Life
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154 How are you?
I’m doubtful about coincidences. My experience is that when several seemingly separate but similar things occur in close proximity to each other, then the likelihood is that they are connected. Some years ago I wrote a prayer exercise that was included in a book “The God you already know’ that my friend Roy Gregory and I…
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153 A Feral Icon?
The Bible has significant references to boats. The most familiar being the Ark into which Noah and his family took two of every species of animal to survive the Flood and then repopulate the Earth. It was a place of refuge & renewal. Boats feature in the Gospels too. Jesus called some of His first…
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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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151 A Polish-Jewish Gift
A Polish Jewish Gift On our visit to Krakow Hannah and I visited the Jewish quarter and in particular the Jewish Museum. During the Second World War Germany invaded Poland and six million Poles were killed, including three million Polish Jews. Almost all traces of the existence of the Jewish community were destroyed. More recently there…
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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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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…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 