to help you discover the God you already know
In Passiontide of this year, I found myself on a flight to Tel Aviv, heading to Bethlehem to take part in an icon painting workshop. This was no ‘holy holiday’, but rather the next step in a long process of discernment and learning.
Continue readingSaturday 11th December 2021 OR Wednesday 15th December 2021
10am to 4pm
O Wisdom, proceeding from the Most High,
filling all the world and ordering all things
with strength and gentleness:
Come and teach us the way of truth.
In the Old Testament, we read that Wisdom was ‘…uttered by the mouth of the Most High..’ (Ecclesiasticus 24:3). Ideas around ‘Wisdom’ and the ‘Word’ are closely associated and have influenced the way that the coming of Christ has been understood.
Continue readingThursday 2nd or Saturday 4th December 2021
Continue readingIf you want,
St John of the Cross
the Virgin will come walking down the road
pregnant with the holy,
and say,
“I need shelter for the night,
please take me inside your heart,
my time is so close.”
When we take up occupation of the site of our bodies in stillness before God, we are granted a place to be, simply in virtue of being there as material beings made by God.
Rowan Williams: Lear and Eurydice
The truth is that we are always home. On this retreat day, we will explore coming home to our bodies, to ourselves, to the present, our own presence and The Presence, and to our place and purpose in the world. I will offer what I consider to be some important landscapes for exploration, but the journey and the destination are yours.
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If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday V
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
In lockdown, we are not allowed to go ‘out’: how may we allow ourselves to go ‘in’?
How can lockdown be an opportunity to enter more deeply into Lent?
How may we hear the silent Word at the centre of our unstilled world?
I am offering a day of prayer and reflection as we enter the journey of Lent.
Continue readinga review and an invitation
In September 2010, I started on an 8-week, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) class. My father had died on Easter Day, I was struggling to hold it together as a hospital chaplain, and, though I was blind to it then, my marriage was about to end. I had long wanted to do one of these courses since dipping into Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, but when I signed up for it two months earlier, I had not anticipated that this course would frame the nexus of disintegration that brought 2010 to an end.
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As a counter to the turmoil depicted in my last piece, I have painted a view of Godrevy lighthouse and beach on a beautiful calm day. It is a very spacious beach, about three miles long, and the tide goes out a long way, revealing golden wet sands that reflect the sky and landscape. It all invites me to stop, and be…to ‘Breathe Peace’ in my body, mind and soul.
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Continue readingI will arise and go now, for always night and day
WB Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
I use the Insight Timer app every day to support my own prayer practice and discipline. I highly recommend it. I have begun putting my own guided prayers on this platform to add a contemplative Christian presence. I’m chuffed to bits to learn that my Prayer for sleep is being featured on Insight Timer today. You can find it here.
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I wrote a short piece for the London Centre for Spiritual Direction‘s May newsletter. Then a few days later I was invited to give a reflection at a Holy Communion Service on Zoom. I used the original piece as a springboard to engage with the scripture. Here is the delivered product.
This time of plague is a desolation for many: loss of work, loss of income, loss of health, loss of life; traumatic, dangerous front-line work; and decimated support services. Those of us not so endangered still suffer desolation. There is overwhelming uncertainty: where will we be next year, or next week!? How are we to live now? What is God’s call now?
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The Approaches to Prayer website is sponsored by the Annunciation Trust. It is a repository of scores of ways to pray as an online version the book Approaches to Prayer compiled and edited by Henry under the auspices of SPIDIR.
Henry Morgan and Roy Gregory, both part of Annunciation Trust, have edited a book which is a follow-on from Henry's Approaches to Prayer. It was inspired by their experiences of working together as Spiritual Directors at the Greenbelt Festival.
Originally published by SPCK, you can now read it here.© 2024 The Annunciation Trust
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