For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
I remember so vividly the day you were born. I remember how you woke mom in the early hours of the morning (you always have been an early riser) and then took your time actually arriving. Even nine years on, I remember the long (17) hours’ wait, where the whole world seemed to be condensed... Continue Reading →
People are fictions. What I mean is this: we never relate to people as they are; we relate to versions of those people from the stories we tell ourselves about them. The more time we spend with people, the more closely our narratives may align with the people themselves, but even then our narratives will... Continue Reading →
So here I stand, with the spectre of the cross looming large, staring up at a Jesus who seems to me to be at once completely alien and yet so intimately familiar. The more I have read, the deeper I have delved into Jewish thinking in an attempt to better understand this most beautiful of... Continue Reading →
All of us will have stories of teachers who have – for better or for worse – shaped how we see ourselves, who we have become, and – by extension – the children we raise and the communities we participate in. Many of us will have unwittingly adopted attitudes, paradigms, habits that were engendered in... Continue Reading →
I hope my regular readers will pardon my relative silence lately. I have been trying to get all my ducks in a row, workwise. To be honest, I am not even sure I own ducks anymore. Certainly we don’t seem to occupy the same farmyard. So I haven’t had time to do a lot of... Continue Reading →
Arguably the single most important concept in Christian theology is that of forgiveness. In fact, I am willing to suggest that without the uncompromising prioritisation of unconditional forgiveness, Christianity is only one more brutal expression of the kind of divisive religion that has plagued humanity since the beginning of our history. Now anybody who... Continue Reading →
Picture, for a moment, a hypothetical, completely dysfunctional family. The son’s academic performance is poor and he has become rebellious at school. The daughter’s devotion to her work borders on the obsessive and – although very few of her classmates know it – she cuts herself compulsively. Dad demands perfection from his children. For him,... Continue Reading →
All faith is derivative. In other words, because nobody (at least nobody I wouldn’t regard as either a fraudster or schizophrenic) has personally interacted with God, all faith is based on individual interpretations either of religious texts or of personal experience. This means that the nature of the values we believe God to espouse will... Continue Reading →
If you do not follow Game of Thrones, please keep reading anyway. I promise that I will not make this post about the series, although I do want to use an incident from one of the recent episodes to illustrate a point. The show is seven seasons and a few years in, and it was... Continue Reading →
It’s been a busy few weeks, workwise. In many ways, they have been very rewarding. But the last few weeks have been disillusioning too, and I have found it very difficult to write. I feel like I am beating the same drum, over and over again. But that drum is my heartbeat at the moment,... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 