Images of Service
It’s less than 24 hours since the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh as I write this. The images are raw. The military precision of the procession in the bright sunshine. The Royal family, grieving but together. Most of all, the Queen in the double pain of her husband’s funeral with Covid restrictions. The first glimpse of her seated in the limousine, face-masked. Then most poignantly of all, sat in the Chapel isolated from her family members. Vulnerable and frail, she walked the painful path so many others have done in these …
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Reverend David’s May 2021 Message
Reverend David’s April 2021 Message
Does life win?
It’s Saturday of Easter weekend last year, on the hill above Feniton. It’s dawn. We can’t hold our usual Sunrise Service there the following day due to this new national ‘lockdown’. I am making a fumbling attempt at filming an introduction for an Easter video service. And the sunrise is perfect. The huge orange ball emerges inch-by-inch above the hills over Honiton. At the end of the year I will compile an album of 2020 lockdown photos – that sunrise is now its front cover.
Resurrection comes. Often slowly, but it comes. Those …
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Reverend David’s March 2021 Message
‘Rainbows, candles and tunnels’
The year is 1897. You’re driving a horse and cart through the newly opened Blackwall Tunnel, beneath the River Thames in East London. You’re nervous – how can it be safe to travel under water?? But you are more tense for your horses: how will they handle this enclosed space? Kinks in the tunnel prevent you seeing its end*. You’d love it to be straight, and be able to see the light at the tunnel’s end. But you’re glad the horses can’t. You coax them forward. You round the final bend, daylight appears – and the …
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Reverend David’s December Message
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 …
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Reverend David’s November Message – A Silent Remembrance
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 …
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Reverend David’s October Message – Three Short Words
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 …
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Reverend David’s September Message
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 …
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Reverend David’s August Message
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 …
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Reverend David’s July Message
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 …
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Reverend David’s June Message
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 side. I clambered out of the …
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