"We have our loneliness and our regret with which to build an eschatology,’’ Peter Porter says in a poem, speaking of secular modernity. Our loneliness, I think, is our sense of God’s absence, our unfulfilled longing for God that runs unseeing through all our relations wi
Blog: Pictures-Books-Reflections
Your Spirituality?
Posted on by James Woodward
Like the word health, spirituality is hard to define in the abstract and is better understood by discussing it functionally.
It points to our relationship to the mystery dimension of human existence, the transcendent realm, the ultimate reality. It turns us to the great issues
A new Bishop?
Posted on by James Woodward
From the Guardian Diary page......
At this, the beginning of our week, let us give thanks for the elevation of the Reverend Donald Allister. Who is he, you ask? So did we. But last week, rather quietly, he was unveiled by Downing Street as the new Bishop of Peterborough. Whole
Charles Simeon
Posted on by James Woodward
Charles Simeon was born on September 24, 1759. He attended school at Eton and enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, in 1779. Although baptized as an infant, his family was not particularly religious and neither was Charles, until an experience during his first few mont
What are your hopes and fears?
Posted on by James Woodward
My hopes and fears are the core of my unknowing. My hopes maybe are vain, my fears groundless, but they keep me from letting God be my only hope and fear. Coming to wisdom, as I am doing, rather than by way of disillusionment, I come to the thought of hopes and fears being ‘â
Windsor Conference on the Environment
Posted on by James Woodward
Windsor Conference on the Environment - Many Heavens: One Earth by the Bishop of London
I was breasting a hill near to the coast. When I reached the summit and saw the fields stretched out below and a village nestling in a hollow and beyond, the sea, such a weight of glory overw
Leo the Great
Posted on by James Woodward
St. Leo the Great was born in Tuscany. As deacon, he was dispatched to Gaul as a mediator by Emperor Valentinian III. He reigned as Pope between 440 and 461. He persuaded Emperor Valentinian to recognize the primacy of the Bishop of Rome in an edict in 445. The doctrine of the I
Go Deeper – the search for wisdom
Posted on by James Woodward
I set out my pilgrimage , hoping to learn how to conjoin seeing and feeling, to conjoin knowing and loving – this conjoining is what I am going to call ‘’wisdom’. It is what I find in the places I visit, in the things I experience there, in the guises in which I meet th
Remembrance
Posted on by James Woodward
The following poem was written in 1999 in connection with the conflict in Kosovo. In 2005 the author decided that it was not a good idea to have written the poem in such a negative form, soit was re-wrote it as There will be peace. Readers can choose which
Where is true religion to be found?
Posted on by James Woodward
It may indeed be phantasy, when I
 Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings ;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be ; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this
Rain
Posted on by James Woodward
Rain
The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.
The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.
A face I know is beautiful--
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And
in a different light?
Posted on by James Woodward
towering of shadows of clouds
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me
into December? a lowland
of space, perception of
Richard Hooker
Posted on by James Woodward
Richard Hooker was born in March 1554 in Exeter.
He was educated in Exeter until he was sent, with Bishop Jewel as his patron, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He graduated MA in 1577, and became a fellow of the college in the same year.
He became assistant professor of Heb
What future for Anglicanism?
Posted on by James Woodward
I am no scholar of Church history or skilled commentator on the Church. The conversations that continue over the recent action of Rome offering a 'home' to Anglicans remain divisive and distracting.
While fellow priests consider their position, spent inordinate amounts of time
All Saints
Posted on by James Woodward
Â
Father, all-powerful and ever-living God, today we rejoice in the holy men and women of every time and place. May their prayers bring us your forgiveness and love. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, Who live and reigns with you and Holy Spirit One God, forever and eve
Martin Luther
Posted on by James Woodward
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben. His father was a copper miner. Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and in 1505 decided to join a monastic order, becoming an Augustinian friar. He was ordained in 1507, beg
A Mission Shaped Church for Older People
Posted on by James Woodward
I travelled down from Windsor to London yesterday to share in a conference run by the Church Army and the Leveson Centre to promote our publication A Mission Shaped Church for Older People at St Michaels Chester Square.
(available from the Leveson Centre - www.levesoncentre.org.
James Hannington
Posted on by James Woodward
Precious in thy sight, O Lord, is the death of thy saints, whose faithful witness, by thy providence, hath its great reward: We give thee thanks for thy martyrs James Hannington and his companions, who purchased with their blood a road unto Uganda for the proclamation of the Gosp
State visit of the President of India
Posted on by James Woodward
British pomp and pageantry was on full display today as the Queen welcomed the Indian president toWinsor Castle today.
Pratibha Patil - India’s first female president - was greeted by the Monarch and Duke of Edinburgh on a royal dais in the centre of the Berkshire town as a t
those things that don’t flower?
Posted on by James Woodward
self-blessing
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The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words an