Simon Says ...

Ash Wednesday "Lent is supposed to be a time when we review our spiritual life, think again about what it means to be a follower of Christ, reset the compass of our discipleship and prepare ourselves to celebrate the Easter festival. But often we just give up biscuits" (Stephen Cottrell, I Thirst , p. 12) I've spent part of today burning Palm Crosses, so that there is ash for the service tonight. Each of us at the service will have a cross made in ash on our forehead with the words 'Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ'. I've also spent the day thinking about how I shall mark the season of Lent and review my spiritual life. I think the main thing for me will be making my confession. I will spend some time beforehand in self-examination and afterwards in looking to deepen my discipleship. But the main feature of Lent for me this year will be making my confession, coming into the

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Last night I watched Bruce Almighty with the youth group. Aside from the difficulty I have getting through 90 minutes of Jim Carrey, it wasn't as bad as I expected. Near the end there's a really interesting scene where Bruce and God talk about prayer. God asks Bruce to pray, to ask for something. Bruce asks for world peace and the hungry to be fed. 'Now ask me for something you really care about' says God, and Bruce has to think about what it is he really wants. Part of what the film is doing is suggesting that we don't always know what we really want. A lot of this rings true. I've found that people, particularly young people, often pray about what they think they ought to be praying for. There are expectations and formulae at work, and people think that they shouldn't pray for themselves or for what they want. But Jesus connects best with those who know their need of God. Only to pray for those who qualify as needy others is to put ourselves

Andrew Motion (the Poet Laureate) has written a poem called Simple , based on the story in John 21, as part of a BBC programme called What the World Thinks of God . Together with what he writes about it, it catches a combination of faith and doubt and a sense of being overwhelmed by the whole experience. There are also some fantastic images of faith , connected with the same programme, which are well worth a look.

I've been reading A New Map of the World by Ian Linden (DLT, 2003). It's a book about globalisation and its effects. As well as an approach to political ethics that avoids the simplistic approach of 'the Bible/Church says, therefore ...', he has a number of important things to say about networks. "Today the network society links up concentrated nodes of technology, financial management, high skills and education, expertise in information processing, wealth, power and privilege. People and places have become differentiated into 'high value, low value and no value', with the differences reflected in everything from property prices, investment and income to health, schooling and life expectancy. For every Silicon Valley, City of London and Ile de France, there are feeder foothills, and a hinterland of isolated, disconnected and productively barren land. The network society co-exists with the threatening black holes of marginality" (pp. 88-89). O

I went to see two pieces of installation video by Mark Wallinger at the weekend. Wallinger is the artist who exhibited the sculpture Ecce Homo on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2000. His new exhibition is at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London and is well worth a look. One of the pieces is called Via Dolorosa , and it is a large screen that shows a film of the crucifixion of Jesus, but with a large black box covering about 90% of the screen. All you can see are the edges of the film. There's a review of the exhibition here . I spend the first few minutes looking at the edges and trying to work out which film version of the crucifixion it was. As it turned out it was Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth , the crucifixion scene of which I've been showing to the youth group of the church I serve as part of a Youth Emmaus course. This is both well known and sticks closely to the Gospel account of the crucifixion. Having patted myself on the back for