Magazine Letter for December 2023
December 3rd is Advent Sunday. The season of Advent is all about waiting. But there is more than one sort of waiting – there is the kind of waiting when you know something’s going to happen and you know when it’s going to happen. Like Christmas, we all know when it is so we know how long we have to wait; and there are things that you wait for that you don’t know quite when they going to happen just that they will. Like catching the ball, you know that someone’s going to throw it to you, but you don’t know quite when so you have to stay ready, just in case – fielding in cricket is exactly like that. And we all know that life is like a game of cricket.
Magazine letter November 2023
I write this on 19th October, given the need for submission deadlines it has to be rather ahead of publication date. Usually such a lead time would be no difficulty, none of our three parish magazines is designed to convey national, let alone international news – and certainly not the Rector’s letter. Yet as the world stands at the moment I can’t help thinking that the context of all our thoughts is desperately subject to change in disturbing ways.
October 2023 Magazine letter
There is a parable that could have been written specially for a post-Covid church. It goes…
‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”‘
Magazine letter for September 2023
There are many opinions on prayer, but long gone is the idea that it matters what the proper physical attitude is. In fact, it is probably true that prayer is little thought of at all, even by those who do it! We who do pray tend not to think too much about the why or the how, we pray because we pray, for us to stop praying would be like removing a leg from a three-legged stool. Do we get answers to our prayers? It would be impossible to say empirically, but then it is not at all about getting answers.
Magazine letter for August 2023
This is the month of the great British get-a-way. The children have broken up and the family holidays begin. Whether it is to accompany a long flight, or for something to do by the poolside – many of us will take a novel to accompany our travels. I love stories, I can’t get enough of them – short stories, long stories, stories with a moral, stories without a moral, stories on the radio, stories on television, stories in a book. I don’t think I’m alone, human beings just respond to stories, made-up sequences of events, made-up characters, pure invention or supposed reality, it doesn’t really much matter, we just like stories.
Magazine letter July 2023
Despite being in midsummer there are many reasons to be feeling low. You only have to listen to the news to become depressed about the state of the world and the nature of mankind. Psalm 77, for example, makes that very clear, but also suggests a remedy. Read it for yourself, it’s not long – just type Psalm 77 into Google if you haven’t a Bible to hand.
Magazine letter June 2023
As I write, parts of northern Italy have been struggling under almost unprecedented levels of floodwater. We can recall the appalling floods in Pakistan last year, and in other places across the world in recent years.