St Mary the Virgin Church

Once upon a time… there was a beautiful forest. Everyone called it the Christmas Forest. Each winter all would come to it for a merry and festive time. Every patch of woodland was named after the particular delights it brought: Shopping Wood, Parties Wood, Carols Wood, and more. But one winter a Man with a Mask brandishing a chainsaw arrived at the forest. Brutally he began to raze all the lovely trees to the ground. Parties Wood was first – the majestic timbers of fun and jollity crashed to the earth, the buzz of conversation and fuzz of drinks extinguished. […]

2020 has been different in so many ways. So let us make our village Remembrance commemorations this year different too. Let us make it a ‘Silent Remembrance’. Silence: the silence of a First World War battlefield when the guns have ceased and the scattered dead lie still. The silence of a COVID intensive care ward, save for the wracked oxygen aided breathing. The silence of grief of loved ones, bereaved by war or by disease. The silence of a peaceful country lane with wayside summer flowers mingled with birdsong, more still this year in lockdown. The silence of sunset, as […]

How often in a typical day do I ‘judge’ someone? Many times, probably. There’s the car driver who’s too fast / too slow (compared to my own perfect speed, of course). There’s the inconsiderate neighbour – not that I’ve ever been one myself. The Government gets a good dose of my judgements on their decisions. And the Opposition. And the judgemental person on social media. I could go on. Three short startling words of advice Jesus gave us: ‘Do not judge’. Is this perhaps his most overlooked instruction? Yet it’s one I see increasingly as being of the highest value, […]

Winners and losers have emerged from the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is reported to have seen his financial worth balloon to an extraordinary £150 billion. Meanwhile others have tragically lost their jobs and now struggle to make ends meet. Thankfully finance is not life’s only measure. But the waves created by the pandemic have rocked most people’s boats. As schools finally return fully in September, young people who were unable to sit public exams this summer have had a particularly torrid time. We’ve all witnessed the waves of confusion and exam-grading changes which have crashed over […]

Masks. Yet another word that has entered our frequent use this year. Another article now a household item. For some professionals, masks are always essential protection, of course. For children, masks can be the fun of dressing up. But for most of us, masks spoke of falsehood or distrust – the ‘masked gunman’. Even veiled faces may invoke unease. So I could understand when served in a shop by someone who knows me, when their normal friendly manner was replaced by notable caution the first time I was masked. After all, how could they see my smile? How would they […]

Rectory Notes—July 2020 – ‘Rock and wind’ For the first time in an age, I stepped with delight out of the car last week onto Dartmoor soil. In each place we’ve lived in Devon, I have found a ‘spiritual landscape home’ – here it’s up at Hembury Fort. But Dartmoor remains my home-of-homes. The springy turf sunk familiarly under my boots, and the granite stones in the path were like old friends, as I walked unhurriedly between tors. Just five minutes’ drive beyond the ice-creams of Haytor Rocks, and the space was my own. A lightness of spirit lifted me. […]

Are we in control? I was 19 when I managed to turn a car on its side. I was doing voluntary work in rural South Africa at the time. I was following my boss’s van down a straight road, when the pick-up truck I was driving started swerving uncontrollably from side to side due to the ruts on the dry mud road. One moment I was careering out of control at speed towards the dense trees bordering the road, the next the car was stationary on the grass verge facing the opposite direction, as if perfectly parked only on its […]

Rectory Notes—These times are a journey Here’s a puzzle. We are more stationary at the moment than we’ve probably ever been: our time is corralled within our home’s boundaries. If we are permitted out, a trip to the supermarket is now an adventure to the horizon of the known world. Cross-country travel is as what inter-planetary travel once seemed. Yet we are also on an extraordinary journey together. Like Columbus and his friends, we have bade farewell to familiar shores. The land of assumed good health (more or less), of ample supply of our favourite nibbles, of trips to the […]

On Boxing Day in 2004 we watched our TVs in horror, as a tsumani engulfed coastal communities. People, boats, homes, livelihoods, lives – all tossed in the air as if they were nothing. A tsunami has engulfed our world. Not just health and lives have been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, but livelihoods and incomes, families and connections, stability and security. So much of what was normal has fled, at least temporarily. We are learning a new way of living. I write this in ‘self-isolation’ (one of so many words that have gate-crashed our vocabulary), due to a member of the […]