Dear Friends, Advent is here again! This year, just because of dates, it is a ‘short’ advent – the 4th Sunday of Advent is Christmas Eve. So we better get on with it! Attachments in these weeks are all related to Advent and into Christmas & we are trying to give you a variety each…
Dear Friends, Gosh – end of November – Feast of Christ the King &, next weekend, the beginning of Advent. The Feast of Christ the King can be a bit ambiguous in our time. Monarchy and all that! Rather than try & imagine what the Kingdom of God might look like when, at an undisclosed…
Dear Friends, November always seems to me to be a long month! But we are now over half way through. But in these last weeks I have been haunted by the felling of that sycamore tree at Hadrian’s Wall earlier in the autumn. It was a landmark between two hills & was around 300 years…
Dear Friends, We hope this last week has been a good one for you, on balance anyway, & that you have escaped the worst of the storms. Remembrance Sunday – another special November day – comes round again. We hope the reflections are helpful – there are so many to choose between. Whilst there is…
Dear Friends, November begins, in the Church, with the great feast of All Saints, followed the next day by the Commemoration of All Souls. And then a bit further into November we have Remembrance. These, together with the evidence of the dying of the year which is there for us all to see, sets quite…
Dear Friends, Earlier this month we had a Week of Prayer for Prisoners & their Dependents. The focus in our attachments strays around direct reflection on prison but also touches on forgiveness and on an inner freedom that we all strive to reach. As we pray for those in prison, we also think of their…
Dear Friends, This weekend we have World Mission Day. Amongst the attachments is something Pope Francis has written on this subject stressing that the message that needs to be given is one of hope. The other attachments are around the subject of hope. Our blessing is from John Glynn’s ‘May the Lord Bless You’ and…
Dear Friends, Hoping that you are enjoying these strangely warm autumn days and finding the time to enjoy all that we are surrounded by. For some of us, maybe the spectre of winter approaching is a bit of a dread – meanwhile we wait to see how long it will be before we need to…
HOW FAR DO YOU GO: WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF PROTEST AND DIRECT ACTION AS A LEGITIMATE EXPRESSION OF CHRISTIAN FAITH? Christians are called to stand up for the oppressed and to speak out against injustice. Protest, nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience are important parts of our Christian tradition that have strong Biblical…
We were hugely grateful to Megan Knowles from Jesuit Refugee Service, and to James, Michael, Florence and Basirat who shared their experiences as refugees seeking asylum in the UK. A moving and informative session which you can see or watch again below. TALK BY MEGAN KNOWLES (JRS) Are you curious about the different sides of…