Blog

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Comings and goings

A few days have made such a difference to the countryside. Walking Washpond Lane yesterday, all the signs of nature catching up after such a cold start to Spring are there, simply bursting out with what reads as a collective and expressive…
Sunday, April 15, 2018

A damp retreat!

A few days in an Irish monastery have been my retreat this year, and I got back last night. The Holy Cross Monastery in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains is a place of peace and reconciliation - and silence! No conversation in corrido…
Monday, April 9, 2018

A visit to Lambeth Palace

For someone born in London, I have a great reluctance to go into the centre of this great city. I feel energy draining from me from the very moment of stepping off the train, and being swept along by the tide of humanity that swirls around …
Friday, April 6, 2018

What's in a memory?

I am reading an anthology based on “Memory” - which is such a powerful part of our lives, and something that we often reflect on, probably without realising it. Recently there was a meeting in St Mary’s to discuss the formation of a weekda…
Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Tuesday of Easter Week

A damp and cool Easter with some dry weather, but the picture of Swanage visitors with hats and gloves on and coats done up to their necks is the abiding memory. That, and the sadness over the accident on the seafront, and the death of a m…
Friday, March 30, 2018

Good Friday

Last night we left St Mary’s Church having experienced about two minutes of complete darkness after the Maundy Thursday Eucharist and the stripping of the altars to the plainsong of Psalm 22.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Holy Week and Easter in Five Objects

A single school assembly in Holy Week presents us with a problem of choice. There is so much to tell; there is every opportunity to confuse - especially young children. I imagine that clergy and others leading collective worship in school…
Friday, March 23, 2018

Journeying into Holy Week

The weeks of Lent seem to disappear so quickly and here we are on the verge of Holy Week. It is at the point of tiptoeing into the Palm Sunday weekend that fills me with the thought of needing to take things a day at a time.....
Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Paul and Corinth, and our Holy Communion in the open air.

Unlike our day in Athens, the hours we spent in Corinth were quiet, and we were largely on our own. We found a beautiful spot to celebrate Holy Communion in the open air, and read from Acts 18 of Paul’s ministry with Priscilla and Aquila, …
Sunday, March 18, 2018

St Paul and the Areopagus

The day that we spent in Athens yesterday relocated our pilgrimage to Paul’s second missionary journey. He had needed to leave Beroea and he travelled to Athens by ship, before moving on to Corinth. Most people think primarily of Paul’s p…
Saturday, March 17, 2018

En route to Athens

Yesterday was a day of travelling through Greece from the town of Kalambaka just below the Meteora rocks all the way to Athens. St Paul moved from Beroea to Athens by sea; we drove for six and a half hours by luxury air-conditioned coach, …
Thursday, March 15, 2018

The wonderful Meteora

Rising above the town of Kalambaka the majestic rock formations of the Meteora have been the home of many Greek Orthodox Monasteries since the fourteenth century. Six remain, and all can be visited, some by many steps, others more easily..…
Thursday, March 15, 2018

St Paul at Beroea and an Orthodox Monastery

A short way from the hotel is the place where Paul preached at the synagogue in Beroea to those “more noble than those in Thessalonica” and including “not a few women of high standing as well as men”. They are pictured at the spot today in…
Wednesday, March 14, 2018

With St Paul at Philippi

We travelled yesterday from Kavala (Neapolis) following the route that St Paul would have take from the coast to Philippi along the Egnatian Way. We visited the beautiful area of the stream where Paul met Lydia on the Sabbath day and spoke…
Tuesday, March 13, 2018

St Paul's call to Macedonia

Travelling to Greece in the footsteps of St Paul is an interesting pilgrimage taking in both the early missionary journey of the Apostle into Europe and spending time learning something of the Greek Orthodox Church and the history of this r…
Friday, March 9, 2018

What a difference a week makes!

What a difference a week makes! Last Friday morning it took me twenty minutes to reach St Mary’s Church as I, and others, inched their way with shovel and salt down the few yards of Church Hill and encountered a sheet of ice. Today Spring…
Wednesday, March 7, 2018

A lovely clear sky

A lovely clear sky this morning heralding what is bound to be a beautiful day. The new team web-site should be going live on this day too, thanks to the work of Andy Mutter and the representatives of the four churches making their essential…
Monday, March 5, 2018

What a morning for ice

What a morning for ice! I couldn’t reach the Church for Morning Prayer until I had cleared a path-way across the road with salt and spade to hand, inching a safe route. But people always come together in adversity and, in the snow and ice, …
Thursday, February 22, 2018

New website, new blog

For three and a half years I wrote a twice-weekly blog for the St Anne’s Cathedral website. In it I reflected on things that were happening in the cathedral, and anything else that took my fancy from a few lines of poetry to some amazing si…