It is quite likely that a church near you will be celebrating Harvest Thanksgiving sometime in late September or early October. Despite the all-year-round nature of harvest the traditional celebration is fixed following the end of the cereal harvest. Raspberries, potatoes, fish and fuel are all very well but the place of bread in the…
Today’s reading is Joshua 24:19-24 It may not be your experience but making choices can be difficult. The more indecisive we are, the longer we spend looking at arguments on both hands. ‘On the one hand this and on the other hand that’ goes the dilemma. People who have found their way to faith in…
A river in flood is powerful and daunting; to cross safely is risky and requires good local knowledge. According to the bible, as the leadership of Moses gave way to that of Joshua one of the new leaders first tasks was to get the people across the Jordan into Canaan, their ‘Promised Land.’ The vision…
I am not sure why, but I have always subconsciously categorised bees as good, wasps as irritating and hornets as outright dangerous. I am irrational; bees are lethal to those who react badly to stings, wasps are important pollinators as are hornets, which also have a part to play in balancing other insect populations. They…
In today’s reading [Colossians 1:21-23], we find Saint Paul writing about alienation from God because of what he calls our ‘evil behaviour’ (NIV(UK)). The way we think, act, live, our instincts and everything are a problem in our relationship with God. We are our own worst enemies in making it difficult to see and hear…
The Prayer Handbook points out that today is kept, in the Catholic Church particularly, as the Assumption of The Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the day when the mother of Jesus ‘fell asleep’ and of her bodily assumption into heaven. That language is outside my comfort zone and for years would have deterred me from…
An unexpected benefit of spending weekends with our daughter and son-in-law is getting to see new places. They are not new of course, just new to me. The latest discovery was walking by the river Darent and discovering a great viaduct, towering over a country lane. Later in the following week I caught up with…
God is in heaven! At the time of writing at least, the weather is lovely. This morning the sun was already strong at 7:30am. The cereals in the fields are already starting the ripening process, the first night of Proms is imminent and it is only a week until the opening ceremony for the Olympic…
A colleague from a different country across the ocean told me recently that he could not understand the British obsession with the weather until he started working here regularly. The grey summers and the need to switch from T-shirt to overcoat are confusing to someone used to consistently hot temperatures without variation. Similarly, here we…
Late last month we visited Saint Alban’s cathedral at Saint Albans. Did you know that the spelling of the name of the place came about because of an error in the application to become a city in 1877 when a Parliamentary Draughtsman accidentally omitted the apostrophe. Whether that error would matter to the saint after…