Showing everything tagged as 2017

If you’re a geologist, you have an extensive vocabulary for circumscribing what the rest of us generally call ‘a very long time.’ For geologists there’s an age, and bigger than that there’s an epoch, and beyond that there’s a period; but that’s not all.

In the flower shops you can already buy yellow spring daffodils. But I never buy them in winter. Not because I don’t like them but because I believe deep down you have to go through the winter waiting before you can reach those yellow and golds of spring and appreciate them for what they are.

In the service for the ordination of priests we hear these words. “Priests are called to be shepherds and servants among the people to whom they are sent, they are to proclaim the word of the Lord and watch for the signs of God’s new creation”.

There’s two common assumptions about Christianity. One is that’s it’s a theory about how things are – how things began and how the world goes round. The other is that it’s basically a moral code.

When Geoffrey Brown and colleagues established the enterprise at St Martin’s in 1987, they did it in a spirit of ‘Never waste a good crisis.’

My grandfather wasn’t a hero, he didn’t hate foreigners, and he wasn’t a psychopath. But on 5th October, 1915, the day after his 21st birthday, he signed up as a private in the Queen’s Westminster Rifles to fight in the First World War.

I was in a helicopter flying over mountain ranges in Kosovo. My father was alongside me. Also alongside were relatives from other bereaved families.

Have you ever met someone who you thought was holy or even a saint? Following this last week in British political and national life it seems hardly surprising that we have all grown a little wary of those who set themselves up as role models or representatives of virtue.

Four weeks after my ordination as a deacon I knocked on the door of a family who were mourning the loss of their father. This was to be the second funeral I’d ever taken.