Rev elations

Lent is a really good time to consider spiritual practices of silence and of renunciation. Fasting and silence help us to understand Jesus’ experience in the desert or wilderness. We think of Jesus in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights as a metaphor for our own need to strip away in our life unnecessary distractions. Desert spirituality is about raw encounter, with ourselves and ultimately we hope with God. Sara Maitland writes in A Book of Silence about her own journey into silence as a modern day, somewhat alternative hermit. In one particular chapter Sara describes some time she spent in the Sinai Desert and this leads her into some specific insights. In an engaging paragraph she writes: I started to think that perhaps silence is God. Perhaps God is silence – the shining, spinning ring of ‘pure endless light’. Perhaps God speaking is a ‘verb’, an act, but God in perfect self-communication in love with the Trinity, is silence and therefore is silence. God is silen...

It’s been a week for me of thinking about money. It has of course for the nation as well as we listened to the detail of the Chancellor’s budget. How much money we have got, how we get it and how we spend it are questions that every household has to ask; every business and charity too. The questions are the same for the nation, if on a much larger scale. This week in my church we have been looking closely at our finances and the resources available to us. It has been challenging, making all of us vulnerable. For questions of finance and money get right to the heart of things. They ask us to seriously reflect upon what is important and who is important. In so doing they reveal our deepest values. Jesus taught unequivocally that we cannot serve two masters – we can serve either God or wealth. Yet I suppose the temptation is to think that we can divide our loyalties. We can blur the line and keep our feet in both camps. I was inspired to read this week about the Sikh t...