• Dedication Sunday Sermon

    This time last year, I was away in the United States on sabbatical. I was travelling about from place to place and particularly from church to church. And I was looking for something

    I realised afterwards that I was looking for what is over the rainbow. There’s something about the New World and particularly the West Coast of the new world that makes people a bit like that.

    I was looking for the next best thing in the church. Looking for what was new, exciting, fresh. So much of what happens in that part of the world comes to us in the end. I was looking to get ahead of the curve.

    As I went from congregation to congregation I started to see patterns in what I was finding and gradually, particularly since I’ve come back, I’ve been making sense of all I saw.

    One particular pattern emerged. (more…)

5 responses to “The Convent”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    I really enjoyed the programme, looking forward to the next part.

    Couldn’t help grinning all the way through though thinking of you and a certain remark about convents and nuns from last year!

  2. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    “wish more people did it”
    I tried to post a comment here, but it disappeared…

    anyway, I just said, be careful, because I’m scared I may get “itchy feet” again and want to reexamine looking at monastic life.

    I was disappointed by how rude two of the people were, but the sincerity of the lady who had been hurt by her family and was “afraid of God” was amazing stuff.

  3.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Monastic Life
    I thought about monastic life at one point. However, when I went to a monastery to consider it more thoroughly I was stricken with a plague of boils and ended up being told to flee by a doctor. Notwithstanding my hesitation about the possibility of God meddling any more with humanity than by God’s becoming incarnate, there was no arguing with a plague of boils and I never went back.

  4. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Hey, but I never got boils! And as I was saying to Fr Philip last week it was that very experience in the monastery that has left a mark on the rest of my life. I simply don’t want to play along with materialism to the same extent anymore…

  5. Moyra Avatar
    Moyra

    It was certainly interesting watching from an insider’s point of view…

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