Month: June 2023

The Church has a tendency to make simple things difficult, like prayer & faith, both of which are simple in principle but challenging in practice. Society has a tendency to trivialise important things like miracles and angels. I’ve written about ’Everyday Miracles’, so now I’m going to write “In defence of Angels”.

School nativity plays have not served us well here, but they are only copying much great art. The problem is easy to state but less easy to resolve. How do you visually depict an angel appearing to Mary or Joseph or a group of shepherds, without appearing ridiculous?

I remember, many years ago reading a poem by David Whyte entitled ‘Faith’:

I want to write about faith
About the way the moon rises
Over cold snow, night after night.
Faithful even as it fades from fullness
Slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
Sliver of light before the final darkness.
But I have no faith myself
I refuse it the smallest entry.
Let this then, my small poem
Like a new moon, slender and barely open
Be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

I was in conversation with a friend recently and, in passing, she said of me “You’ve left the church”, and I was taken aback & immediately said to myself “No I haven’t”,

But quickly responded “But I can see why she might think that.  I rarely attend worship in church, I’ve returned my ‘Permission to Officiate’ to the Bishop so I am no longer authorised to lead worship in church, and I’ve gone ‘feral’.  But I still don’t think that I’ve “left the church”. So why not?