Showing everything tagged as Thought for the week

Last year my partner, Christos, and I attended the baptism of our friends’ daughter at St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Bayswater.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Those words, with which Charles Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities, sum up our experience of the last ten weeks at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

A painting by the Polish Jesuit philosopher and artist Vyacheslav Okun depicts Jesus in the emergency room, as a person suffering from the virus.

Lockdown has its challenges. One of mine has been teaching my grandson, aged 12, to solve ever more complex simultaneous equations over Whatsapp.

Until a few months ago, the ubiquitous “Keep calm and carry on” slogans with the many variations felt very hackneyed and irrelevant. In the light of our current circumstances, I’m reconsidering my view.

At the end of Acts 2, we read an inspiring account of the church immediately following Pentecost… It’s often dismissed a rather idyllic picture, impossible to replicate.

For me, Sunday worship now takes place in the kitchen, where candles and palm cross have joined the salt and pepper and unopened post on the table.

The sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld has a major exhibition at Canary Wharf that opened shortly before lockdown.

For decades, even centuries, the battle raged in the early Church. Did Jesus rise bodily from the dead? Was the tomb empty?