This drivenness is deepened by what sociologists call the rapid shift from ascribed to achieved status in modern societies: the shift from sensing a givenness to who we are through family, religion, and community membership, to defining ourselves (and being defined by others) in terms of what we produce through whatever individual way of life […]
Blog
Commission On Assisted Dying
Posted on by James Woodward
But Lord Falconer, who is chairing the Commission On Assisted Dying, said it would be “objective, dispassionate and authoritative”. It will receive evidence from experts and the public before publishing a report in December 2011. Earlier this year the Crown Prosecution Service issues new guidelines. The clarification of the law, issued in February came […]
The Cathedral as ‘person’
Posted on by James Woodward
The word ‘person’ comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask. A mask was often worn by an actor in the theatre. It was the means of taking on a particular character. Nowadays we refer to persons in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes we simply mean individual human beings, but at other times we refer […]
Living with our selves?
Posted on by James Woodward
We often the fail to see what is truly there in front of us – because our own vision is clouded by self-obsession or self-satisfaction. There are several variants of a story in which some young monk goes in despair to one of the great ‘old men’ to say that he has consulted an […]
Colin Slee
Posted on by James Woodward
Colin was my college Chaplain at Kings College London in the 1970’s – a great man – here is a flavour of his character! The Very Rev Colin Slee obituary( The Guardian) Colin Slee was far from pompous or solemn, relishing the absurdities of the church.The Very Rev Colin Slee, the dean of Southwark Cathedral, […]
Advent
Posted on by James Woodward
ADVENT SUNDAY Blessed are you, Sovereign Lord, God of our ancestors: to you be praise and glory for ever. You called the patriarchs to live by the light of faith and to journey in the hope of your promised fulfilment. May we be obedient to your call and be ready and watchful to receive your […]
to express the sky
Posted on by James Woodward
This is the grass your feet are planted on. You paint it orange or you sing it green, But you have never found A way to make the grass mean what you mean. A cloud can be whatever you intend: Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye. But you have never found A cloud […]
upward
Posted on by James Woodward
Time takes hold of us like a draft upward, drawing at the heats in the belly, in the brain You told me of setting your hand into the print of a long-dead Indian and for a moment, I knew that hand, that print, that rock, the sun producing powerful dreams A word can do […]
the popularity of the Vicar…..
Posted on by James Woodward
Follow this link at your peril….. does it look or sound familiar? Dangerous ground!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPOZnz0Jmc4
Learning to live with others!
Posted on by James Woodward
We begin to see here the cluster of ideas generated by the apparently simple words of Antony, Living in a Christian way with the neighbour, so that the neighbour is ‘won’ – i.e. converted, brought into saving relation with Jesus Christ involves my ‘death’. I must die to myself, a self understood as the solid […]
Gauguin
Posted on by James Woodward
I wrote earlier this week about the life of Paul Gauguin following a visit to the Tate to see Gauguin: Maker of Myth ( http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gauguin/ ) Gauguin had been a stockbroker and a Sunday painter before taking up art full-time after an economic downturn in the early 1880s, as a result of the collapse of a […]
intersection
Posted on by James Woodward
When the familiar is suddenly strange Or the well known is what we yet have to learn, And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change; By whom, and by what means, was this designed? The whispered incantation which allows Free passage to the phantoms of the mind? By you; by those deceptive cadences Wherewith […]
Love your neighbour
Posted on by James Woodward
The neighbour is our life; to bring connectedness with God to the neighbour is bound up with our own connection with God. The neighbour is our death, communicating to us the death sentence on our attempts to settle who we are in our own terms and to cling to what we reckon are our achievements. […]
Silence
Posted on by James Woodward
Silence is living, dynamic, and liberating. The practice of silence nourishes vigilance, self-knowledge, letting go, and the compassionate embrace of all whom we would otherwise be quick to condemn. Gradually we realize that whatever it is in us that sees the mind games we play is itself free of all such mind games and is […]
Paul Gauguin
Posted on by James Woodward
Motivated by a visit to the Tate on Friday with my friends the Dwyers here a some reflections on the artist Gauguin – the first blog is some biography – we shall move onto his work later in the week. Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France to journalist Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal, […]
How should we address God?
Posted on by James Woodward
Barth understood that the work of the theologian is word work, or, as John Howard Yoder would have it, that the task of theology is “working with words in the light of faith.” The difficulty of the task is manifest by the misleading grammar of Yoder’s observation, that is, one can draw from his description […]
reflection
Posted on by James Woodward
We are the time. We are the famous metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure. We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still. We are the river and we are that Greek that looks himself into the river. His reflection changes into the waters of […]
Difference
Posted on by James Woodward
Difference, then, it seems, can lead us in one of two directions – towards an increased competitiveness that can lead to mistrust and division, or to the open recognition of difference, and the possibility of understanding and even co-operation. True co-operation, however, requires a commitment to listening: a quality of listening that can turn strangers […]
Armistice Day
Posted on by James Woodward
Armistice Day (also known as Remembrance Day) is on November 11 and commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh […]