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What a glorious day it is as as I wrote this. I don't know about you but days like today, especially after the greyness of recent times, feel like days full of hope, of possibility and perhaps even of new ways of seeing things. The latter is sometimes the hardest of all, so easy is it to get into a rut in our thinking and seeing as years go by. It's as if our little box and all its thought contents is the only way to see and respond to the world and unless we are well practic

Two interesting moments in time coincide as I reflect on this first Sunday in lent. Firstly, we hear on this day of how Jesus enters into the desert to be tempted and tested. Deserts are hostile places! Should you become lost in one you would find it a place of testing, a place of fear, of doubt, of stripping back to basics and a place of isolation. The monastic movement as we know it today has its foundations in the desert. In the 3rd and 4th century men and women went out i

Two weeks ago I wrote about St Brigid claiming her as one of my favourite saints. This week I thought I would mention another favourite saint as in some ways she puts me very much in mind of St Brigid. Hildegard of Bingen was yet another feisty powerful woman in a patriarchal context speaking truth to power. She was a polymath; passionate about the earth, stood up to injustice and was a sustainer of the needy and vulnerable. Like St Brigid she seems especially present at th

Revelations of Divine Love, a medieval book of Christian mystical devotions, is the remarkable story of Lady Julianna, a fourteenth century Christian who received sixteen revelations from God whilst on her death bed. She observed God and understands and is present in all things. Remarkably she recovered and wrote down her experiences to share them with everyone. Churches Together, comprising four churches in Winchcombe, - St Peters, Encounter, St Nicholas, and the Method

This year we will be repeating the course we attempted to do at Bethesda Methodist Church last year but only managed 2 weeks before stopped in our tracks by lockdown. The course will now be offered online in Wednesday evenings at 7.30. Each session will begin with discussion and after a break will conclude with a period of contemplative silence. The course will run for 6 weeks as follows; Week 1 - The Contemplative Call... The depth dimension of Christian Practice Week

'How is it with your soul?' Our online community gathers for discussion and contemplative silence on a weekly basis. The underlying impulse for the group is the question asked by John Wesley...'How is it with you Soul?' We meet every Monday evening at 7.00 for a 7.15 start. The meeting begins with conversation around the around this great question . We then reach into a deeper themed discussion, often based on lectio using scripture or the contemplative writing of the mystic

Our community has recently been reading 'Answering the Contemplative Call' by Carl McColman. We were totally in agreement with our acclaim for this book. It is aimed at those just starting out on this path and indeed it uses the metaphor of a Journey to describe the stages that unfold as one commits to and engages with contemplative practice. He explores ideas such as what provisions will be needed for the journey, who your companions might be, where the path begins and whe

Today is St Brigid's day. If, like me, you enjoy a Celtic twist to your Christian life then the 1st and 2nd of February, the days of the feast of Imbolc and Candlemas are the days when she is uppermost in our awareness. As with a lot of the Celtic saints there are many myths and legends about her life that we would struggle to take literally One such legend tells us that one day she was looking for land to build a monastery for her community and King Leinster refused her re