The gap between Easter and Advent has seemed especially long this year. Perhaps this is because of the discipline I’ve undertaken of writing a weekly reflection throughout all of Ordinary Time, perhaps the slow drag of lockdown. But this year I have felt every week of Ordinary Time as though it should be over andContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Waiting for fruit”
Tag Archives: faith
Ordinary Wednesday: Will you even know yourself?
So yesterday I handed in the final assignments for my Graduate Diploma in Divinity, bringing to a close 12 years on and off of study at a theological college. I wish I could share with you here the photo of myself on my student card when I began. Disshevelled, full head of flowing hair andContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Will you even know yourself?”
Ordinary Wednesday: Daily Bread
During the first Melbourne lockdown around Easter 2020 I began baking bread. One of the first items to start disappearing from supermarket shelves was bread (after toilet paper…) and with shops overwhelmed by panic-buyers rushing in to get everything they needed for the apocalypse it was generally easier to make do with what we hadContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Daily Bread”
Ordinary Wednesday: Nature’s Hat-stand
Today would have been the 100th birthday of one of the most important people in my life: my maternal grandfather James Savage, known to his friends as Jim and to me and my cousins as Pep. Born in 1921 to an Irish Australian father and Scottish Australian mother, he grew up in working-class Sydney duringContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Nature’s Hat-stand”
Advent with the Prophet Jonah: Day 22
Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose,Continue reading “Advent with the Prophet Jonah: Day 22”
Compline: After Christian Wiman
Man is what he is and he is everything that he is in the decision of faith Karl Barth And faith, or belief, is moredirection than assentto a thought or a fact; it ismovement towards the thing from which others turn,and from which you may have turned,will have turned,for hole-hearted love is never whole-hearted,and yetyouContinue reading “Compline: After Christian Wiman”
Vespers: After Louise Glück
Once I believed in You,still do,though belief is often evasive, often abstract,like air, which itself defies graspyet needy lungs clutch at it with the certaintythat this, this alone they must have.And I believe likethe fig tree believes in the soil,sometimes wilted, sometimes refusing fruit,always held, always known to the roots.And at the vesper light, Ibelieve,Continue reading “Vespers: After Louise Glück”
Pruning
Against expectation, thisSpartan clipping makes spring flourish more,this cutting back to bones,to bare knobbly knuckles makesgrowth more abundant when it comes.And so we bearthe naked cruelty of these bare days,knowingagainst all experience,trusting againstbarren winter feeling,enduring againstthe buckling in our bones that wants to fall.
The Consolations of Writing 