“I have found it harder to go out since the pandemic,” someone said to me just a few days ago. They are not alone in this experience. Whilst for many the pandemic is fully past and life much as it was before, for others this is not the case.
We vividly remember this month four years ago, when our lives were turned upside down overnight as we were plunged into lockdown. Questions cascaded – ‘How do we do our job?... do the shopping?... see our families?’ A weird world of face-masks and lockdown rules enveloped us. More serious were the tragic …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s March Notes – Pandemic aftershocks
Reverend David’s December Notes – Calendars of Hope
Travel north with me to the dark winter days of Orkney. Italian prisoners of war are building barriers between the islands around the deep water of Scapa Flow, protection for naval ships. It’s wartime, 1944. We are ushered through the barbed wire into the camp. The men have finished for the day. We see them file into a Nissen hut, so we follow them in – and our breath is taken away. For this unassuming hut is the most gloriously painted chapel we have ever seen. In the midst of conflict and alongside enemies, we are drawn with them into quiet …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s November Notes – Upside Down
Some things are viewed better upside down. An example: one of my favourite album covers (one of my favourite albums), pictured here. Two handstands on a beach when inverted appear as people touching the sky, even being pulled up there.
Inverting things is sometimes attempted by force. The Gunpowder Plot, for example. Picture Guy Fawkes and his friends, crouched beneath Parliament’s chamber: “Oh, yes!” we hear him proclaim, “how we’ll invert things to their rightful way! These Protestant usurpers cast down, our kingdom raised again to the power …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s September Notes – Deliveroo/Deliver Who?
The Deliveroo rider weaves skilfully through the Exeter traffic, their big turquoise box strapped to their back. Pedalling hard – up the hill, down again, following their phone’s directions. Ding-dong. “Delivered to you – your freshly-baked pizza.”
The big white van skids to a halt outside the house, the 129th of their day. They stride up the path, no answer, so leave the package in the porch, jog back to their van, leap in, and onward. “Order today: Delivery tomorrow – our promise to you”.
The drone speeds over the green Orkney fields. Over …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s August Notes – the Power of ….
Nelson Mandela is one of my heroes (as for many others). Desmond Tutu isn’t far behind. In 1982 I did 6 months’ voluntary work in South Africa. It was impossible then to see apartheid being dismantled without major bloodshed. And yet it happened. Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a key part of this.
Roll on a few years, and I was struggling to forgive someone. It involved significant hurt for those close to me and myself. I discovered ‘The Forgiveness Project’, an online resource from Tutu and his daughter Mpho. I …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s May Notes – Sliced or unsliced?
The man wondered why he was there. His wife had dragged him along – “A family day out,” she’d enthused, “with the kids.” He wondered, and he worried. How was he to feed that family today? He should be working. Not perched on a craggy hillside listening to a preacher. His ears pricked up. “Give us this day our daily bread,” the man was saying. “Yes please,” he thought, “but easier prayed than done.” His mind wandered again. “At least this man seems to know what real life’s about, living hand-to-mouth,” he thought, “not like those religious rich …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s April Notes – Heavenly Horrible Histories
The Horrible Histories children’s books’ author and God seem to agree. Kingship is dangerous. “Every king and queen in history has been either stupid or cruel but most of them have been both!” said author Terry Deary in a recent interview, as Horrible Histories marks its 30th birthday. “This will be the ways of your king,” warned the prophet Samuel when the Israelites longed to have a king like everybody else, “He will take your sons… your daughters… the best of your fields… and you shall be his slaves.”
Thank goodness we no longer live in an …
[Read more...]
Rectory notes – Garden tales
Isn’t it wonderful how our gardens come alive in April! New buds, new green, new life. So a tale of two gardens, with two trees, and two choices.
The first garden? Mythical Eden, the perfect paradise – until the tears, that is. The tree? Befitting paradise, it bears its enticing knowledge-of-good-and-evil fruit. But the golden fruit, it turns out, complicates life more than we can handle. The choice? We opt to take our life in our own hands – what could possibly go wrong?
The second garden? Gethsemane, late one foreboding Middle Eastern night …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s March Notes – “Shhhhh! Not so loud!”
Nicola Sturgeon resigned a few hours ago as I write this. Love her or hate her, she gave widely acclaimed leadership (particularly during Covid), and reinforced direction and identity in Scotland. She was a subversive force against the United Kingdom – a would-be queen of Scotland perhaps (no longer).
Are all of us called to be subversive, at least a bit? ‘Thy Kingdom come,’ we may pray or have prayed (continuing our monthly glance at the Lord’s Prayer). Might saying this actually be subversive?
“My kingdom for a horse!” Richard III famously …
[Read more...]
Reverend David’s February Notes – Hallowed Heights
“I ♥️ NHS” badges were once a thing – “I love the NHS”. We all did during the pandemic. Now we look on fearfully, because the NHS is on its knees. Because it hasn’t been loved, not in the way it has needed.
It’s Valentine’s Day month, so a good time to think about what, as well as who, we love. And let’s use an old-fashioned word that fits here more than we’d think – ‘hallowed’. Whilst the word originates from ‘holy’ – the ultimate pinnacle, as it were – it also means more generally ‘respected, important, revered’. So, borrowing from a …
[Read more...]