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“Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” Jesus tells Pilate to which Pilate responds: “What is truth?” Indeed that question seems particularly relevant for our world today. What does it mean to belong to the truth?

When I was in year 4, school was really only about one thing. That one thing was the football game we played at break time. One day the ball got kicked onto the school roof by mistake. My friends and I faced the unthinkable prospect of 45 minutes’ break time with no ball to entertain us. Can you imagine?

Four addresses given at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 11, 2018

In 1915 the American physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon coined the term ‘fight or flight’ to describe how the nervous system of an animal’s body responds to threats. Quickly the insight was applied to human reactions in a much wider context.

Today marks the centenary of the Armistice, the moment when 100 years ago the hostilities of the First World War came to an end and peace was made after four long devastating years of war.  More than ¾ million British men and women were killed and countless others were maimed, wounded or emotionally destroyed.

Two years ago in the Brexit referendum this country was divided between leavers and remainers. In truth few remainers believed the European Union was the fount of every blessing, while few leavers really thought Britain would finally realise its eternal destiny the moment it left the EU.

I wonder, when you lie on your bed, how long it takes you to get to sleep. There’s something extraordinarily vulnerable about lying down with your eyes closed not knowing what will happen next. It puts us on touch with our isolation.

A clergy friend of mine was a chaplain for a few years supporting lawyers in the City and was attached to St Paul’s Cathedral. Her role, the cathedral said, was the equivalent to that of a minor canon. The only point about this she said seemed to be that it meant she’d know her place in the clergy processions in and out of the cathedral for services.

I don’t really like the term practical theology. I don’t like it because for me all theology is practical. So to employ the term practical theology is to suggest two things that in my view are mistaken. The first is that theology is abstract and arcane, and that practical theology is the part that brings it down to earth.