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The Prayer of my Life
Prayer is much more than a few religious words spoken now and again: it is being open to God in everything that we do in life. In the course of a lifetime we put only a fraction of ourselves into words. So real prayer needs to be more than words if we are to call…
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There Were Shepherds Staying In The Fields By Night
Through the night, shepherds watched over their sheep. In Psalm 23, the Lord is the shepherd, and human beings are “the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100.3). Human beings need shepherds, whatever names they go under: politicians, managers, influencers. Be moved with active compassion, as Jesus was when he saw people as sheep without a shepherd (Matt 9.36). Ezekiel saw…
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Thinking Humanity in Space and Time: two comments and a response
Read the original post here. 1. Response to Nathaniel’s comment thank you very much for sharing this. It is profound and thought-provoking. I think you are right that contemplating our insignificance in space is far easier than doing so in time. And I think you are right that we are conditioned to take time for…
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Thinking Humanity in Space and Time
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. Pensees, Blaise Pascal https://academyofideas.com/2016/03/blaise-pascal-the-infinite-spaces-alienation-and-the-wager/…
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Saying the Lord’s Prayer from a different perspective
Deliver us from the evil – of ever giving up praying this prayer whatever the pressure of temptation Deliver us from losing the ‘our’ to make the Father ‘mine’ Deliver us from claiming the Kingdom now rather than steadily praying for it to Come Deliver us from seeking the Father in heaven as though he…
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Learning history through moments
History as I was taught it was basically one thing after another… Getting to know the sequence, the flow, became more sophisticated as the flood broadened, But it was still sequence and consequence One thing that was missing, was contemplation and penetration of moments, short and drawn out moments… So for instance I read a…
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Love and Things
NIRV gives us ‘always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres’, as its translation of I Corinthians 13.7: πάντα στέγει, πάντα πιστεύει, πάντα ἐλπίζει, πάντα ὑπομένει. When this wonderful chapter was read in church recently, that ‘always’ woke me up, jarring with my memory which is based on the KJV and RSV. I missed the…
While it is yet day
Haddon Willmer