Showing everything tagged as Revd Dr Sam Wells

To be street homeless – to be a person who sleeps outside – is to face many challenges every day. The day probably begins early: the patch on which you’re sleeping is likely to be needed as an access door, or your presence is challenged by a park attendant or security guard.

January 18-25 marks the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The week began in 1908 among an Anglo-Catholic strand of the Episcopal Church in New York State. The founders wanted to extend the notion of atonement from reconciliation with God to reconciliation of the churches.

The Grenfell Tower disaster clustered together what’s terrifyingly and horrifyingly amiss about our society and showed us so many kinds of wrong. But it also showed us the meaning of Christmas.

There are two kinds of things: those that abide forever; and those that last for a limited period. The things that abide forever we call essence; the things that last for a limited period we call existence.

‘I know you’re in a hurry.’ I wonder if you’ve ever said that, asking for a person’s attention, when it’s clear they’re rushing to something else. And you could simply say, ‘Don’t worry, we can talk about it later, I’ll send you an email, it’s not urgent,’ and permanently or temporarily fade into the background of their life.

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.