Shiny, Happy Half-Term Ahoy! – On reading the Transfiguration Gospel and beginning Lent

I am told by experts that a shiny Pokémon is a thing of significant value. I suppose like many things considered treasure (and not just by Gollum), its brightness is its beauty; the fact that it glisters almost as important as whether or not it’s gold. Jesus is not the only character in the Bible…

What tale will your wrinkles tell? A question for Candlemas

One of the few pleasures of confinement to the computer keyboard is the accessibility of art – the Googlability of great works that marginally surpass in beauty even the initialled discs brought to our screens by an alliance of Microsoft Teams and camera-shy pupils. I particularly enjoy the pages of the BP portrait-painting competition. There…

Certainty and the Straw Man – Saul of Tarsus and Thomas Aquinas

We hear every day how we’re living in uncertain times; and it’s true: in a thousand ways we are circumscribed by a great murmuration of unknowns that flock as far as eye can see, jabbering and spreading panic from here to Timbuctoo. But, then, the times are always uncertain! We like to think we’ve banished…

Tales of Hope: Nathanael of Cana and the promise of the unpromising

Nathanael of Cana , whom we meet only twice – in the first and twenty-first chapters of St John’s Gospel – might not quite qualify as one of the great cameo roles of the New Testament, yet his opening question does count as one of the most memorable and misguided in the entire Bible. Informed…

Wisdom and the Cross in Dr Johnson

As the commemorations of Samuel Johnson and John of the Cross fall next week, I have found this old homily, a reminder of a man whose pain and kindness are so moving, whose struggle with faith in God and despair in himself so ever-present and contemporary. May the fruit of the life-giving Tree bring us…

Like a Lily Among Thorns — A thought on St Mary Magdalen’s Day

I love school mottoes, their distillation of hope and history into a few syllables. Our own at MCS is a fine example: Sicut lilium: ‘like a Lily’. Not one of Madonna’s abandoned early lyrics; not even, as it happens, a reference to the ‘lilies of the field’ held up for inspection by Jesus in Matthew…

Getting Closure – on churches in a time of Covid

This closed churches thing gnaws away at me – for which I do apologise. I have the following questions and views: 1. If the ‘ban’ on the use of churches for private prayer is ‘guidance’ only and not a contradiction of the canonic requirement to recite the Offices in church, why can’t it simply be…

A New Year poem what I wrote and a gift to my patient Twitter followers, wishing them a very happy ZUZU.

Not in the dry click of new numerals,

appearing in turn

like tumbling dominoes, for all

the Auld Lang Synes and fireworks, lighting

night skies with hope’s elemental writing;

not in the budding of bare branches, limbs

chilled a deep dark winter;

not in the hungry bleat of lambs;

or piercing counterpoint of strutting cocks,

announcing April’s ‘thousand natural shocks’.

The year turns when hearts turn and learn, renewed,

to excavate old hate

and, finding brighter seams, to hew

a fairer future, planted by Love’s hand,

till Truth and Mercy mend the broken land.

Abingdon

31 December 2019

Truth through the cracks: Michaelmas and National Poetry Day

A homily for Magdalen College School  Genesis 28.10-17; John 1.47-51 Olav Hauge: Don’t give me the whole truth   The truth is in short supply and under constant threat. We are indeed a ‘post-truth society’, in which fact is dismissed as opinion and opinion presents itself as fact. The ubiquitous term ‘fake news’ is used…

Limbering up for Cemetery Road

September dawns and it’s back to school. We’re all a year older, stronger, wiser and more capable. Summer’s annual ripening into autumn quickens our self-understanding as those who live in time, who grow towards a day when … When we can drive a car, buy a car, afford a flat, a house, a bigger house…