By Peter Paul Rubens – Art UK, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91917906 It is likely that at some time you will have heard the phrase, ‘A Damascus Road experience.’ In everyday usage this means a crucial point in life where ‘a profound change or reversal of ideas or beliefs occurs.’ There are few of us who can…
Reading through today’s gospel passage (Luke 5:12-16) I remembered that when I was younger I was infuriated by the comment, ‘I won’t bother’. I knew someone who used it a lot. At the time I thought he was very lazy, but it was only years later that I realised he lacked confidence and may often…
Our holiday in the Lake District in the Autumn of 2020 was memorable. It was very wet. While we were there the Prime Minister announced the second lockdown which started. But we were heartily thankful to be able to get away at all. On a walk up the Copper Mines Valley to Levers Water we…
The weeks immediately after 21st December are notable for dark mornings. Even as the evenings grow slightly lighter it takes longer for the mornings to brighten. I am not making that up, it is a fact. I like to get out for a walk after breakfast and before I go back up to my study,…
Today is a terrible day in the liturgical calendar. This is when we remember the other side of the story; after the adoration of the Christ child comes King Herod’s instruction to slaughter innocent baby boys in an irrational attempt to take out his opposition by firing grapeshot. This was the first time Jesus got…
The latter part of the prophesy of Isaiah is directed to a nation returned from exile to their own country but still sometimes inclined to indifference. Indifference is fuelled by boredom and over familiarity amongst other things. Today’s passage from Chapter sixty-two (Isaiah 62:1-12) starts, ‘I will not keep silent’. I have attended many concerts…
The rogues gallery on our landing shows five generations of the family on one side or the other. A dive into a cupboard could get me back a little further and a what a range of achievements and views, long and short lives, successes and failures, there are. All people who were and are loved…
Earlier in the year the famous sycamore tree beside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland was deliberately and illegally felled. It was a sad act of vandalism but there is the chance that the stump may sprout again, and all may not be lost, even if it is completely different. I first wrote one of these thoughts…
How many times, I wonder, when on our holidays or out for walks in the country, do we stop and look at the alluring site of the babbling brook. Running water, stones, riverbank plants and trees and the buzzing of insects. Tranquil and lovely. Many years ago, a little willow sapling began its journey to…
One of my grandmothers had a particularly robust view of God’s will. I struggled with its idiosyncrasies from an early age. It went along the lines that bad things are God’s will so it cannot be changed, and as good things are bound to fail soon it never pays to be optimistic. Generally, I have…