When bad things happen to good people, be it in Siloam, Christchurch or Grenfell we are tempted to question God’s care for the faithful. Yet the response of Jesus to disaster is ‘repent.’ What does he mean or is he just being mean?
Be it our Baptismal Promises or the words of a Solemn Profession all these words welcome us into the same Family of God. We must use them to remind us to fall more in love with our Beloved and with each other.
The Body of Christ shines brighter when we learn to not insist on always having something to say on everything and that we do not always have to have the first or last word in every conversation.
To tend the griefs of our past we need to find ways of holding them close and making them part of our future. Loving as Jesus loves gives us the hope to turn pain into forgiveness.
Living Lent, and our faith fully, is not solely about saying ‘no’ to the things that hold us back but also saying ‘yes’ to the love of God that calls us forward.
In the life of faith there is no room for spiritual one-upmanship which presumes that our work is more important than another’s prayer or our worship more precious than another’s washing-up
Of all the tools the Church has to bring healing to a broken world the most powerful is the willingness of the individual Christian to confess their sins.
‘All work and no play’ is as true an aphorism in the enclosure of an Abbey as in our churhces as in our Lenten Journey
In our journey of faith we need a balance between being busy and being prayerful – Ora et Labora when balanced help us steer a straight course.
Penance, along with our lenten devotions, is not a punishments for past peccadilloes but an instrument to help us give ourselves away more fully.
