Category: Spiritual Life
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103. A Year of Wonder
January 2022 I’ve become a grateful fan of Clemency Burton-Hill and her book ‘A Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Everyday’ ever since I bought a copy several years ago. In it she offers a piece of music for every day of the year, and a brief commentary that helps to open up the piece…
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96. Top up or bottom down
May 2021 I was talking with a friend recently, and he mentioned the vision that Julian of Norwich had in which she saw God as a Lord and human beings as the Lord’s servants. I had to admit that while I understand that image of God in my head it doesn’t engage with either my…
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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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93. A failure of the Imagination
March 2021 We see a painting entitled ‘The Dead Christ’ by Ercole de Roberti, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. The article goes on to describe the painting. I have been drawn to this painting by Ercole de Roberti in The National Gallery, for many years, but Chloe Reddaway in an excellent short…
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88. Revelation
September 2020 I recently came across a quotation of John Henry Newman, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, which I recognised as having truth in it. He wrote: “No revelation can be complete and systematic, [because of] the weakness of the human intellect; so far as it is not such, it is mysterious … The religious truth…
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87. Mulling
August 2020 Yesterday morning was a busy one, and after lunch I was looking forward to relaxing in my shed with a pipe and the chance to finish a novel. But once my pipe was lit I had a change of heart: reading wasn’t right. I played some music and instead sat and mulled. It’s a…
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86. Light on dark matter
June 2020 I’m going to wander well outside my areas of competence here, armed only with my curiosity and intuition. I’m going to do so because there are several areas of enquiry that have been engaging me, some of them for some time, and I’m beginning to wonder whether they might be connected. Astrophysicists suggest…
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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,…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 