God brought things into being in order that God’s goodness might be communicated and be represented by them. God’s goodness could not be represented by one creature alone, God produced many & diverse creatures. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided.

Michael Hischer WV 466, 2017 Painted Aluminium New Art Centre

Most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness. —Barbara Brown Taylor

@luxmuralis.bsky.social @salisburycathedral.bsky.social Wonderful immersion into story and colour and lost worlds

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception. WH Auden

It is only in the second half of life that we come to understand that dying is not opposed to life. Dying is a part of a greater mystery—and we are a part of that mystery. In my experience, it is usually the older psyche that is ready to hear such sober truth.

Aging is not for the weak. One day you wake up and realize that youth is gone, so go insecurity, haste, and the need to please.Learn towalk more slowly, but with greater certainty. Aging means accepting, discovering that beauty was never in our skin but in the story we carry inside us. Meryl Streep

What some call “liminal space” or threshold space (in Latin, limen means a threshold) is a very good phrase for those special times, events, and places that open us up to the sacred. It seems we need special (sacred) days to open us up to all days being special and sacred. #Rohr

End of October Colour @visitwales.bsky.social

Powis Castle is a medieval castle, fortress and grand country house near Welshpool,Wales. The seat of the Herbert family, the castle is known for its formal gardens and for its interiors, the former having been described as "the most important" in the country.

Tuesday and the prefect accompaniment to The Great British Bake Off ( proudly sponsored by @waitrose3.bsky.social )

A few days away starting with some English Sparkling - refreshing ! @visitwales.bsky.social

@rcbirmingham.bsky.social @stchadsbirm.bsky.social Glad to be present to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate here at St Chads Cathedral

Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life?

To be part of a life-giving tradition brings with it a moral responsibility to make it even better as we pass it on to future generations. –Brian McLaren email.cac.org/t/d-l-ggudjy...

The contemplative life is not a way of knowing. It is not the path of certitude. In fact, that’s what makes it so alive, so necessarily active. Our glimpses of “arrival” along the way are places we can catch our breath and recall we are moving in the right direction.

In the end, contemplation is not about escaping life but entering it more fully. It is how we listen for God in the silence—and how we hear God in the cries of the poor, the groaning of creation, and the joy of being alive. It is how we live from that place for the sake of the world.

We are part of a living tradition of action and contemplation, people who have gone beyond the theoretical and are living out this wisdom in their daily lives. Truly, it will take a movement of such people to create a world where everything belongs. —Richard Rohr cac.org/support-cac/...

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. —Walter Brueggemann

Let us be carriers of the gospel. The gospel of the revolutionary, brown-skinned Palestinian Jew who made it very clear that he didn’t come to be status quo. He wasn’t a chaplain of the empire but a prophet of God.

Life will break you. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

And so the season slowly moves and changes : signs of that this morning in the light and colour and temperature which caused the use of one of last year’s Christmas presents ( and effective it was on the walk in to @sarumcollege.bsky.social

a great day exploring older age @sarumcollege.bsky.social www.annachaplaincy.org.uk/post/what-is...

One of the best disguises for evil is religion. Those are the things that prophets point out, so prophets aren’t nearly as popular as priests. Prophets honor the tradition, and they also say what’s phony about the tradition. That’s what spiritually mature people can do.   cac.org/about/cac-fa...

A person is a confederacy of parts often at odds with each other, but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself. There is a peace that comes from this which renders life truer and therefore more alive.

A helpful reminder ! To overwork—that is, to spend time working for what one does not need—means that one’s life is out of balance, and it breaks the circle of harmony.

Money and soul are united. There is a river beneath the river. The upper stream has always been money in all its forms. The deeper stream is the spiritual meaning such exchanges must have for our lives. Money and soul are both about human exchanges, and therefore, divine exchange, too.

www.sarum.ac.uk/celebrating-... @sarumcollege.bsky.social

Walking in for my flu jab ! In praise of the NHS

This weekend @sarumcollege.bsky.social welcomes participants for a weekend gathering to dig deeply into the life and poetry of George Herbert

Another day - three views as I prepare to lead a Study Day with Julia Burton-Jones on What is Old Age For ?

Every act of communication is an act of courage in which we give ourselves to two things: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed.

Is it really possible that what is given up will be returned a hundredfold? Can we believe that as we lose ourselves, we will find ourselves? Francis, who renounces his claim on all things, is free to enjoy all things as gift. Utterly foolish. Impractical. Subversive. Even dangerous.

So excited that this is now published www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bluegrass...

In one of the earliest accounts of his life, Francis offers this instruction to the first friars: “You only know as much as you do.” His emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was foundational and revolutionary for its time and remains at the heart of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy.

Francis didn’t want his friars to preach salvation (although they did that, too) as much as he wanted them to be salvation. He wanted them to model and mirror the life of Jesus in the world, with all of the vulnerability that would entail.

Managed to make a brief visit to the Faith Musuem aucklandproject.org/attraction/a... this morning

Was there ever a better view from an English Station ? Glad to be home to catch up with family and celebrate a life well lived today

I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. —Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a (man) is, so (he ) sees.” Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding.

Memories 2000 : Cambridge : birthday party speech ? Where do the years go ?

Moving between meetings today I found this lodged in my back windscreen wiper - it made me think differently about time and change and space a few seconds

So well deserved : a gripping, disturbing drama with stunning acting @netflix.com www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cz...

And in other news www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Looking for some learning this Autumn? Take a look at our short courses brochure Sarum College @sarumcollege.bsky.social www.sarum.ac.uk/wp-content/u...