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Kneeling at our feet
To quote Malcom Guite one more time, here’s an excerpt from his poem ‘Maundy Thursday’, also published in The Word in the Wilderness: In vain we search the heavens high above, The God of love is...
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Two poets on the burning bush
… Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as...
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Crocodiles optional?
… the only hammer in the house belongs to Tony, and for anything other than simple nail-pounding she looks in the Yellow Pages. Why risk your life? … She has never seen the point of lawns. Given the...
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Tsimtsum and the coming into being of the other
Henri Nouwen, in The Wounder Healer, quotes James Hillman, who talks about the Jewish mystical doctrine of Tsimtsum, noting that God as omnipresent and omnipotent was everywhere. He filled the universe...
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A profoundly disruptive prophetic ‘presence-in-the-world’
In a world where the Church no longer dominates Western culture and where ‘strong’ dogmatic statements are no longer heeded, the Christian is left to bear witness by faithfully following the way of...
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Drunk with flowers of rebellion
The fields will laugh, the woods will be drunk with flowers of rebellion, the night will make every fool sing in his sleep, and the morning will make him stand up in the sun and cover himself with...
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Being very careful not to say what he does not mean
No matter where in the world he may be, no matter what may be his power of protest, or his means of expression, the poet finds himself ultimately where I am. Alone, silent, with the obligation of being...
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Women (according to Mary)
Women come off pretty badly in Christianity. Through Original Sin they are held responsible for everything in the world since the Garden of Eden. Women are weak, unclean, condemned to bear children in...
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The forgotten astonishment
the invisible walls, the rotten masks that divide one man from another, one man from himself, they crumble for one enormous moment and we glimpse the unity that we lost, the desolation of being man,...
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Building home together
The only thing far away In this country, Jamaica is not quite as far as you might think. Walking through Peckham in London, West Moss Road in Manchester, you pass green and yellow shops where...
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Of astonishment and the necessity of exile
I was struck by these two thoughts of Anne Dufourmantelle today: Her talking about ‘the audacity that leads a philosophical utterance to make us desert those dwellings of the mind where reason lives as...
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Litmus test
Nick Spencer, in his book Asylum and Immigration: A Christian Perspective on a Polarised Debate, talks about compassion for the vulnerable being the critical litmus test of a society’s social health –...
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Achtsamkeit für die Sprache
Ich vermisse heute bei vielen Predigten und bei der Gestaltung von Gottesdiensten die Achtsamkeit für die Sprache. Da spürt man oft nicht mehr das Bemühen für die Schönheit. (Anselm Grün, Schönheit:...
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The ones standing on your cape
There’ll be days like this, my mama said … when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly, and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape From Sarah Kay, B Tagged: poetry,...
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Greeting the day
We greet the morning sun each day with our to-do lists, while the monk greets the sun with prayer and silence. Lonni Collins Pratt with Daniel Homan, Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love Tagged:...
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The one and only test
The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience or devotional practice [is] that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the...
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The storm did not lessen the least
late in evening the sky bruised ringed them ugly and full the sea moiled, black with heaving feverish and wild the rimless sky flickered with lightning thunder padded and prowled the wind woke, came...
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You opened the door to another world for me
Some thoughts from André Gorz’s book Letter to D: A Love Story. On love and life together: I understood that pleasure is not something you give or take. It’s a way of giving yourself and calling forth...
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Democracy ceases to be an objective fact: Thomas Merton read post-Brexit
Writing sometime in the 1950s or 60s (hence the non-gender-inclusive language), Thomas Merton had this to say about democracy: … democracy assumes that the citizen knows what is going on, understands...
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Not all of them can hear the howling in the same way you do, some of them...
Having re-read Margaret Atwood’s book of ‘fictional essays’ The Tent, I was particularly struck by the eponymous essay ‘The Tent’, which I have reproduced below. Even though it was published over ten...
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