Simon Says ...

This evening we hosted a Taize service at church. About 50 people came, and it was a really refreshing change to be in the older half of the congregation! We were also fortunate to have Brother Paolo from the Taize Community with us. He gave a little encouragement on prayer and praying to begin with. Much of it chimed with my experience. Prayer, he said, is not something we can get better at. It is more like eating lunch. We can all do it. We need to do it regularly. A very helpful image for me. The service itself was beautifully put together (and I can say that because I had nothing to do with it). Thanks to Heather and all involved. It was a rare treat to sit on a prayer stool and enjoy meditative singing, silence and scripture. My lunch was late today, but it was worth the wait!

Three of this years series of the Bible in an Hour are now available for downloading from virtualtheology.net . There's Job ; John ; and Jonah . Just James (pun intended) to go. Thanks to Paul for technical assistance (and the Noel Coward quotation)!

Pinned up on the noticeboard above my desk is this picture of Edvard Munch's 'The Sun' (nicked from the Boy's Cbeebies Art Magazine, I'm afraid to say). It was painted in 1912 as a mural at Oslo University. Munch's life is almost a catalogue of pain. He lost his mother and his sister when he was a child. He was something of a depressive, suffering a breakdown. He lived through two world wars and in the 1930s was condemned as 'degenerate' by the Nazi regime. His final years were spent under Nazi occupation (the Nazi's even orchestrated his funeral), fearing for the fate of his art. And yet, in the midst of paintings that reveal this pain (most famously, 'The Scream )', Munch could paint a thing of such naked beauty as 'The Sun'. There is an instant appeal to me of this painting. It speaks profoundly of pain and of redemption. The sun and its reflection together begin to look like a light bulb. So there's something here ab...

It was a great pleasure to spend tea-time of my day off yesterday at a service of blessing for a new school building. There were awards - Head Teachers gold certificates for the staff closely involved and for the contractors. I am the proud bearer of a Values in Practice pencil, given to Governors who had been involved in the project for putting our values into practice. Bristol City Council are to be congratulated for being the first (and probably now the only) authority to get all their secondary schools through the Building Schools for the Future programme. I have to say that whatever political capital is being made about BSF, my experience of it has been very positive. We have a fantastic new building, on budget and on time, despite some real difficulties with the site. Skanska , the contractor are to be also to be thanked for making the building process as easy as possible. This is, of course, not the end. The school move into the new building over half-term, and then the ...

I've had a lot of conversations and encounters this week that have left me reflecting on space. There was a conversation about Lectio Divina , reflecting on how being strict with the method of doing this enabled participation. There was a question with a confirmation group about the rules for consumption of the elements after communion allowed Anglicans to remain united despite differences in theology. There was a meeting of the Standing Committee of the local Children's Centre, which provided a means by which all the different sub-committees could report and all the work be co-ordinated. None of this is rocket science, but in each situation there is a space created by means of which other activity or reflection is made possible. The space is created by means of something (rules, a meeting, or whatever) that provides boundaries and thus creates the space. The question therefore arises about these boundaries. They are clearly determinative of the nature of the space create...

There's a fantastic piece on the Ekklesia blog by John Heathershaw called " God is in the (political) detail ". Mostly about high level political decision making, Heathershaw argues that good intentions in making big decisions are not enough. The focus is mainly on the war in Iraq, and the claims of the likes of Tony Blair and George Bush that they had high motivations and good intentions. In the context of a complex world, is good faith enough? For Tony Blair, operating in a 'big picture world', it seems it is. However, Heathershaw thinks not: A politician, official, social activist, doctor or school governor who does not pay attention to the details in our complex world is in dereliction of duty, however much good faith she applies. Just war thinking has always agreed with this, not least in its demand that any proposed war ought to be 'winnable'. It's not so much Iraq that interests me in terms of detail, however, as the proposed benefit cuts ...