Showing everything tagged as Thought for the week

I write this listening to a blackbird sing outside my living room window.

This old adage couldn’t be more relevant, when daily images on the news express plainly what words alone cannot fathom.

I’m writing this from my beloved and broken Minneapolis.

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.