Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 12)

I’ve been writing pieces on this web-site for about ten years now, and earlier this year a friend suggested that I might usefully go back and re-read them all. So I set myself a Lenten task to do so, and was agreeably surprised.  Sufficiently to decide to make them all more easily available.

With help from family and friends I’ve created a blog that contains them all in order and also grouped together in themes. 

You can find it at https://contemporaryspirituality.blog

Do have a look at it. I’d welcome your reflections, and if you think it a useful resource do draw it to the attention of anyone you know who might find it helpful.   Thank you.  Henry

I enjoy looking at paintings. They often slip under my guard and take me by surprise. I sense that they speak and my soul hears them before the rest of me catches up. One painting that does this for me is this one.

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?

I find myself in hospital, in a 4-bed bay. In the bed opposite is Sardar Ali, an 81 year old Moslem gentleman from Pakistan. He has few words of English. His son tells me he is in Huddersfield visiting his son and family; he visits them twice a year. His son visits his father in hospital twice a day – on his own at lunchtime, and with his wife and young son Esa in the evening. 

A year or so ago a young woman whom I had known as a child and a teenager re-emerged in my orbit of friends. She had had a traumatic, abusive life and had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was 45 now. She had been back in touch with a couple of her several estranged sons. She had recently converted to Islam. She was living in a loving, caring community housed in a number of simple terraced houses in a small street in Bradford. ‘Our TLC’ offers residential care for learning difficulties, mental health and substance abuse. God breathes through the pores of ‘Our TLC’!

One of the benefits of being feral is that I feel freer than before to think creatively about my faith. I’ve done that with my thinking about Jesus’ death, and through Holy Week and Easter this year I’ve found myself wondering about Judas, whom I fancy may has had a raw deal from the Church. He’s been vilified as the betrayer, but was he really that much worse than the other male disciples? Peter denied Jesus, the others, bar Peter, James & John, fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, all of them ran away when Jesus was arrested, and apart from John none of them seem to have been present when Jesus was crucified.  None of the male disciples covered themselves in glory. Why put all the blame for Jesus’ death on Judas? Who would benefit from doing so?

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The www.feralspirituality.uk web-site began life last autumn, and this Lent, among other things, I’ve found myself mulling on what its existence has meant for me personally. To my surprise I realise that its opened my eyes in a number of ways.

Firstly, simply by naming ‘feral spirituality’ publicly, has meant that I now see it everywhere.  That’s a common experience I think. I remember years ago when I bought a Skoda car. I’d never really noticed Skoda cars, but now driving one I was aware of lots of them on the road. Naming something often allows a greater awareness of the thing named. So it was for me with feral spirituality.

Recently I was staying in London and a friend told me about the ‘Gaia Exhibition’ in Southwark Cathedral, a focus for thought & prayer for the care of our planet. It’s a travelling exhibition that’s been in other cathedrals, and the entrance was free. I was ordained in the Cathedral many years ago so it’s a place that has significance for me.