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Blog: Pictures-Books-Reflections
Our Relationship to the past?
Posted on by James Woodward
One of the most obvious features of modern life in the West has been a radical questioning of tradition, of everything received from the past. Wisdom distilled from living in previous eras has often seemed irrelevant and out of date, unsuited to modern conditions and problems.
Advice? From Bill Gates!
Posted on by James Woodward
Here's some advice Bill Gates recently dished out at a high school speech about 11 things they did not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teaching has created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept sets them
Gaze
Posted on by James Woodward
Gaze at the river. It is time and water.
Remember that time is itself a river
Know that we too recede always into the past.
See all of our faces flow by, like a river
and feel that to wake up is only to dream again
and that each of those dreams is as real
as the other; and tha
Durham
Posted on by James Woodward
"Grey towers of Durham,
Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles,
Half church of God half castle against the Scot, A
nd long to roam these venerable aisles,
With records stored of deeds long since forgot".
Sir Walter Scott
The Promise
Posted on by James Woodward
Promising myself before bedtime
to contend more urgently
with the problem. From nothing
nothing comes. Behind everything -
something, somebody? In the beginnning
violence, the floor of the universe
littered with fragments. After
the enormous brawl, where
did the dove come from?
The harrowing of hell
Posted on by James Woodward
'Keep your mind in hell, and despair not' is indeed a basic formula for the ideal truth inherent in Christlikeness.
'Take up your cross', says Jesus to his disciples, 'and follow me'. For that is how God is revealed - first and foremost, on the cross. Properly interpreted, t
look at love
Posted on by James Woodward
Look at love...
how it tangles
the lover and the beloved
look at spirit
how it fuses with earth
giving it new life
why are you so busy
with this or that or good or bad?
pay attention to how things blend
why talk about all
the known and the unknown
see how unknown mer
generosity
Posted on by James Woodward
Lord, said David, since you do not need us,
why did you create these two worlds?
Reality replied: O prisoner of time,
I was a secret treasure of kindness and generosity,
and I wished this treasure to be known,
so I created a mirror: its shining face, the heart;
its dar
Expectant
Posted on by James Woodward
O come, O come thou living word,
and pierce our hearts with healing sword,
from God’s own mouth proceeding far
to lance the fest’ring wounds of war.
Rejoice! Rejoice! To mend our strife
Shall come in flesh the God of life.
- Jim Cotter, Expectant – Verses for Advent
language for god?
Posted on by James Woodward
Ordinary Christians are constantly being invited to forget their language.
Clergy are also tempted to dilute the force of the language we represent in an attempt to be relevant. Yet paradoxically the pluralist character of our society offers us, once again, the space to emb
joy
Posted on by James Woodward
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the v
wrought flower
Posted on by James Woodward
I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream
the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that
Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Posted on by James Woodward
Clive Hicks-Jenkins was born in Newport in 1951 and educated in Theatre Studies at the Italia Conti School. He currently lives in mid Wales. His painting has been critically praised in The Independent, Modern Painters, Galleries and Art Review. Shelagh Hourahane, in Plane
Beware of professionalization!
Posted on by James Woodward
For some clergy, professionalism is their way of compensating for a sense of being an anachronism as a cleric.
So skills in parish administration -- skills in this, skills in that -- are all part of “I matter because I have these skills,” as opposed to “I have internaliz
The creation of the 1611 Authorized (King James) Bible
Posted on by James Woodward
The King James Bible began life at a conference convened by James I at Hampton Court Palace in 1604. There it was ordered that a new translation of the Bible be produced, as the King strove to forge unity between Scotland and England. It was the culmination of over two centur
Faith
Posted on by James Woodward
Faith is belief that God is leading us to become in tune with the universe, however different we see ourselves to be.
Faith is trust in the unknown goodness of life without demand for certainty in the science of it.
Faith is belief that the God we call "our God" is either t
Launching a Prayer
Posted on by James Woodward
The stripling posturing
before the hero;
the mature man
posturing before
God. Circularity
is endless, yet
one prayer, slipping
the reason, speeds out
into the cornerless
universe so close to God
as to open a crater
in his composure.
R.S. Thomas, Residues
oddity
Posted on by James Woodward
Love, thou are deep:
I cannot cross thee.
But, were there Two
Instead of One --
Rower, and Yacht -- some sovereign Summer --
Who knows, but we'd reach the Sun?
Love, thou are Veiled:
A few behold thee,
Smile, and alter, and prattle, and die.
Bliss were an Oddity, without