The Beauty of Silence...

Curiosity in Lent

Lent starts on Wednesday and I've decided this year to cultivate curiosity. I'm not sure where this will lead me but it came off the back of a school assembly I led yesterday for 200 17 year olds. I was referencing Jesus' famous saying ' you will know the truth and the truth will set you free'. ( John 8:32). Amidst all the revising for exams and the importance of learning facts and answers I was hoping to inspire them with the sense of wonder they had as children and the curiosity that led them to ask questions. Good questions sometimes are even more important than good answers. After a day today walking with Ina in the Trossachs and hanging out in our van afterwards reading and chatting and snoozing I felt the challenge of my own words the previous morning. Lent is so often seen as a period of contraction, a narrowing of appetites, restricting of habits, scrutiny of motivations etc. It is hard to get excited about Lent the w...

A deep breath and a covenant prayer.

It’s 9pm on the 31 st of December and rarely have I felt so uncertain about the coming year. There seem way more instability than usual in our national and international systems and given the record of early 2020 and 2021 all bets are off that there’s not something else coming down the track. Or perhaps October 7 th was that and it just came early. Or maybe it is the metastatic fall out from that day which will dominate early 2024. Tonight I’m at the top of a big wave, hovering there waiting, feeling rarely more alive just as the pre-reptilian bit of my brain flashes all the danger signals. A deep breath. And yet I am reminded of the prayer I led my church in this morning, written in the mid eighteenth century by John Wesley and since become an integral part of the Methodist Community’s life. I am no longer my own but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to...

Re-enchantment

The magical wonder of snow can be lost by a couple of degrees warming turning the white falling flakes into dismal rain. It is precisely the same elements of moisture and air, humidity and wind, yet the shifting of the one variant of temperature creates a totally different outcome. I have only managed three snow days in the mountains this winter, due to a combination of mostly busy diaries and a very unpredictable weather which meant days set aside for a climb would sometimes be literally a washout. Ina and I did have a good summitting of the Cobbler with the spikes on our boots giving us the grip we needed in the the last snow of the season, and I felt again the sheer wonder of walking in crisp, hard snow as the world fell away around us. It looks like it's gone for the year now though and we have to wait 9 months probably to get out onto the white stuff again. The hills just look wet and sodden now and most uninspiring... and yet...they are exactl...

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