Category: Suffering and Death
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127. Life and death
We.see a painting of a dark table with an upturned skull on it, and a lit white candle.. The background is a pale colour, there is a dark strip down the left hand side, and a less clear dark strip down the lower part of the right hand side. This painting “Skull and Candle”is by…
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59. Reflections on my daughter’s death
May 2018 Sarah, one of my daughters, died suddenly about two months ago. Amongst other things she suffered from epilepsy and died unexpectedly one night after an epileptic seizure caused heart and respiratory failure. Its an unusual way to die, but it does sometimes happen, it always seems to be without apparent warning, and nobody…
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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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35. The end of a course of Chemotherapy
November 2016 I found myself struck by a paradox recently: and paradoxes are to be welcomed with open arms I reckon. On the one hand I am delighted that the chemotherapy is coming to an end, indeed I have now had my last dose, and that source of giftedness is therefore now largely behind me.…
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34. What have I learnt?
August 2016 I’m just over half way through my course of chemotherapy, and having determined to try and use these six months as a sabbatical space, as best I could, found myself wondering what this time has taught me so far. I then broadened the question so that it became ‘what has life taught me…
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33. The Resurrection of Jesus
August 2016 I’ve been brought up as a Christian, I committed myself to follow Christ in my teens, I felt called called by God to be a Christian priest and was duly ordained. The Christian faith is the star that I have sought to follow all my life, and central to it, its foundation stone, is…
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32. Why Life after death 3
August 2016 Most religions have practices whereby worshippers invoke the aid of the dead, their ancestors, and sometimes sense their active presence in their lives. There is a recognition that individual worshippers stand in a tradition that they have inherited and that needs to be honoured and passed on to future generations. Gratitude is expressed to…
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31. Why Life after death 2
August 2016 Recent surveys have shown that between 10-25% of people who recover from a cardiac arrest report they have had an experience during it that is now called a ‘Temporary Death Experience’, a TDE, because they were clinically dead at the time. These TDEs have a number of common features: A sense of entering into…
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30. Why Life after death 1
August 2016 A recent brush with cancer, that may not yet be over, together with the deaths of family members, and my own advancing years, have led me to consider my own mortality and to think again about what I believe lies beyond death, if indeed anything does. I take this to be a healthy exercise and…
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29. What’s before birth
June 2016 I have for a long time been puzzled by a number of what I consider to be related questions. The first is ‘What happens after death’, which is something some people do wonder about; the second is ‘Where do we come from? or Where were we before birth?’ which hardly anybody gives any…
A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY 