Truth Telling Dear friends, Going through some old university memorabilia a couple of weeks ago I found a “Michaelmas Term 1983” edition of the college student magazine. One of the contributors to this light hearted and sharply scurrilous organ was Chris Lambe, who was in the year below me. She is still writing, almost forty years on, having become one of the…

Something ridiculous Dear friends, The late theologian Hans Kung, in his vast work “Does God Exist?” sagely wrote that “any talk of God which does not begin, or end, in silence, knows nothing.”  Those of us whose daily work revolves around words – their use, their arrangement, their creation, know that periods of inactivity, and revival are crucial to the engines of…

Tortoise Tales Dear friends, “Like a mighty tortoise, moves the Church of God.”  Sometimes said in exasperation, sometimes in resigned affection. But the thing about the humble tortoise is that, although slow by some measures, it is tough, strong, determined, and long-lived. They are incredible objects of fascination, relics of wonder in the natural world. They are both animal, and reptile. We…

The White Spider No, really, there is such a creature. Although if you’d asked me before Sunday I would have doubted it. No more. Picking dessert gooseberries in the weekend early morning, to beat the heat, there it was, peeping out at me from under a bright green gooseberry leaf. I had to stop and stare. It was big – about a…

The destruction layer. Dear friends, I must confess, it’s been a difficult week. My planned trip to the Isle of Man to visit a dying friend was cancelled, as he passed away before I could reach him – the travel has now morphed into a visit for his funeral at St German’s Cathedral next week. Let us do good while we may,…

A new Law Dear friends, Fifty days after the Passover festival, the disciples were gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Shavuot. This is the celebration of the wheat harvest, and is used to remember the giving of the Torah – the ten commandments – to Moses on Mount Sinai. They were being faithful to Jesus’ instruction to “wait in Jerusalem”…