It’s a part – an important part – of the practice of our faith to find peace and stillness. It’s hopefully easy to find, we are open all day just so that people can come in and find peace. As Christians, we associate peace with the presence of God. The still quiet places are where we expect to find God, and the Spirit in particular is associated with peace. We go on pilgrimage to find stillness and peace, and it’s very possible to find it with other people as well, as we shar

Christ tells us in today’s gospel, “There are many rooms in my Father’s house”. We often hear this reading at funerals – and rightly so, for it is comforting and true, and puts into context the promises made to us and for us at our Baptism, that there is a place for us in the world yet to come and that we belong in the heart of God, indeed that there is a place individually prepared by Christ for each one of us, which may seem to bear little relation to the place where we are

The nonrecognition of Jesus by the Disciples can seem unusual, difficult to understand. Context is of course important to any recognition – if you’re in what is thought to be the ‘wrong’ place or in the ‘wrong’ clothes, it might be easier to be uncertain who you are. When I lived in London, this was telling – it’s a big place and you might catch a glimpse of someone and not be sure who it was, and if you are to be confused anywhere, a busy capital city with millions of people

I’m sure at some time or another we have all had a beautiful piece of pottery or ceramic or porcelain which has been dropped and broken. Heartbreaking. Devastating, especially if said item was an heirloom or a piece of nostalgia. We try to get the pieces back together, align them just right, use minimal glue, but strong glue, and hope that the join is invisible. That the item looks as it was before the break. I’ve done that, for sure. A number of times, with, I have to say, l

Alleluia. Christ is risen. There is something deeply familiar about Easter morning. The lilies. The music. The brightness of the church after the restraint of Lent. For many of us, Easter carries layers of memory, childhood Easters with Chocolate gifts & Easter eggs, family gatherings, new clothes, perhaps the echo of voices now silent but once singing beside us. Easter connects us not only to an event in Jerusalem, but to our own story, to Easter Sundays of years gone by. An

It can be harder to get a new message through to those who are comfortable with how things are than to those who suffer at the hands of a...

It might not feel it, this beautiful morning in the beautiful season of Easter, but in the Gospel it is a dark night, and the darkest of...

This Sunday we call ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’ and for good reason, but it is also sometimes reduced to a plea for clerical vocations, which...

The setting is familiar, the Sea of Galilee, a place that echoes with memories of the disciples’ first call. Yet now, they are in a very...

Have you ever been asked to do something that you felt eminently unqualified to do? Maybe a step up in a job or a massive project upon...