Category: Spiritual Life
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65 Lost and Found
June 2019 Sylvia, my wife, is assiduous in putting food out for the birds in our back garden. In the winter, when its cold and food is scarce, its like Heathrow outside our back door as our feathered friends fly in from all directions, to take on nourishment from a reliable source. Sitting in the…
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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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54. Memories of Home
October 2017 Some years ago Roy Gregory and I edited a book entitled ‘The God you already know’. The thrust of the book was that most people with whom we came into contact, in a spiritual direction setting, deep down knew already what they needed to know about God. They mostly didn’t need new information.…
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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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46. An ‘Other World’ 2
September 2017 I had a synchronistic moment in a bookshop in Sheffield this summer. I had a book token and was browsing. I noticed a book by an author I’d recently enjoyed and thought I’d get it, but continued browsing and having picked up a couple of other books went back to the one that…
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45. An ‘Other World’ 1
September 2017 A friend of mine is embarking upon a sabbatical, I say ‘embarking’ quite deliberately as he is taking his sabbatical on his narrowboat, sailing the rivers and canals of England. I went into Worcester yesterday evening to see him and to wish him well as he prepared to set off. I left my car…
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38. Words for the turning of the year: Jenny Gaffin
December 2016 One of the significant pluses of a ministry in spiritual direction is that I frequently find myself having fascinating conversations with wise and interesting people, who inevitably, sometimes, in the course of our talking, mention words, music etc that have spoken deeply to them and which in turn I find speaking deeply to…
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25. Listening and Deciding
May 2016 I’ve just had my first dose of chemotherapy. I was initially quite opposed to the idea of chemo. I consider my body to be a valued and trusted friend, and he had just gone through a hard time. He had been in pain for some months and then faced major surgery from which he seemed…
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23. God speaks in many languages too
April 2016 God of course addresses us in an astonishing range of languages, but most of us only hear a few of them. Let us start by going back to the five ‘love languages’ we humans use. It is an obvious but often not recognised truth, that God speaks most obviously and often through the…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 