to help you discover the God you already know

Tag: prayer (Page 1 of 3)

Retreat day: Coming home

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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Lass auch Dir die Brust bewegen, Liebchen, höre mich!

Thrush (photo by Julian Maddock)

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

Mary Oliver: In Blackwater Woods

I was listening to Radio 3 over breakfast on Wednesday. Bryn Terfel was interviewed and asked to recommend a recording. He chose Schubert’s Ständchen sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau partnered on the piano by Gerald Moore – “the definitive recording for many people,” the presenter said. Listen to it on YouTube, or BBC Sounds at about 1’12” in.

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Retreat Day: Lent in lockdown

Photo by Irina Iriser from Pexels

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
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.

TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday V

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.

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Praying together

a review and an invitation

Stand of trees
Photo by Annette Kaye

Breakup

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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Art & Soul: Breathe Peace

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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Audio prayer featured on Insight Timer

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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Thoughts in a time of plague

Desert, Newberry Springs, CA (photo by Julian Maddock)
Desert, Newberry Springs, CA (photo by Julian Maddock)

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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Art & Soul – meditations

In these times I have been painting in my studio images inspired by the lighthouses of Cornwall. Each painting also reflects something of my prayers and my faith – encountering the dynamic presence of God in the world around us.

I have several on the go, but thought I’d share here the first one I have completed. Here it is on my easel – to give a sense of the scale. It’s 40 x 54 inches.

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