ASH WEDNESDAY
Adam 1
O Adam is the dustman,
so the scriptures say;
then breathe, O Lord thy Spirit
into
this recalcitrant lump of clay !
Adam 2
My thoughts are the trees in the garden
behind which I hide
from the One who sees my nakedness.
Adam 3
Adam, where art thou ?
Still hiding, Lord,
Amidst the trees of my busy thoughts,
Bound up with my own preoccupations.
Lazarus, come forth !

One day when I was a hospital chaplain ( at the Medway Maritime, Kent ) I was visiting a ward and an elderly lady called me over to her bedside. “Chaplain, please, could you be an angel ?” “How can I do that ?” I replied. “Well you see it is like this. I have been transferred up here this morning from that ward below, but I left me dentures behind ! And lunch is about to arrive. Please could you go down and bring them up for me ?” So I went and got them, brought them up the stairs to the ward, and she was grateful to be equipped for lunch. Then I thought, “that is a nice image of an angel” and I am still waiting for that icon to be painted of me climbing the stairs, carrying the dentures on a plate, and no doubt with silver wings attached to my shoulders. As it happens, there is really an overlap between the services of angels and of human beings : the traditional collect for Michaelmas in the BCP prayer book puts it like this “ O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the...

Now my mind hears the tread
Of other feet on the steps
That take you down to the sea;
And there are other voices
Of children, rising up
playfully
From the long room.
What has been
Cannot be repeated
Neither can it be removed;
It remains in the heart’s
Secret place,
Awaiting that quickening
Touch of love
Which will make all things new.

And was it on that road
the Spirit came,
whistling along with surprise
through living waters ?
What now of Jerusalem,
torn in two, one part resistant
the other hard of heart ?
And Gaza,
full of bitter resentment,
thoughts of deferred revenge ?
Can the Spirit still alight
on that road between two places
that so cry out with anguish ?
Anguish – one word for two places ?
Come, Holy One
who breathes, heals, unites,
works the impossible
in desert ways of human hearts !
Come !

Story by Jennifer Pinto – 2nd Feb 2025 GB news Archaelogists have made the historical discovery of the lost residence of the last Anglo-Saxon King of England who was killed in the Battle of Hastings in 1066… Bosham, in West Sussex, is shown twice in the Bayeux Tapestry which shows the king being killed by a Norman knight and the defeat of Harold Godwinson’s army. Dr Duncan Wright, senior lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at Newcastle University, who led the study, said: “The realisation that the 2006 excavations had found, in effect, an Anglo-Saxon en-suite confirmed to us that this house sits on the site of an elite residence pre-dating the Norman Conquest… He added: “A latrine was the killer clue to find what was, essentially, the palace of King Harold. That was surprising, but an en-suite bathroom would have been found only among the highest elites. “The latrine was not pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry, of course, but it would have been just up the...

The internet is infested with demons – not little devils with horns, but with forces that drag us towards negativity, or the worst impulses of our selves.
Doom-scrolling
brings a kind of carrion-comfort –
you can actually find
a kind of nurture in despair,
the discovery, looking everywhere
that everything is far worse than you thought.
God save us then from doom-scrolling
and restore in us our hope !

Whale and Rafter – and After
“Rafter is briefly swallowed by whale in Chile, as his father films”
NYT Feb 14th 2025 article by John Burlett and Alan Yuhas
Said the whale unto the rafter,
“Get out now, you lazy grafter
Seeking to take a lift in my inside
Counting on me for a free ride !
Pretending you are a dainty morsel
When you are but
a disgusting mortal !”

Who am I ?
I’m sexy,
positively aphrodisiacal
pursued by all,
it is my fate
to end up being late
upon a plate.
Bug-eyed I am,
long-necked, spindly-legged,
size of a turkey –
in love with my own beauty,
good at dating
puffing out white feathers,
pacing out my courtship dance
expert at mating.
“Falcon’s delight”
they call me, what a plight !
enough to make me die of fright
in mid-flight
as one swoops down to knock
the living daylight
out of me.
A narrow squeak it was to dodge
those catastrophic claws
that lethal beak
I’ll never know quite how
I did it, perhaps by taking refuge
in this verse
for fear of finding
something worse.
Surely you’ve guessed by now
my true identity
no chimera am I
but,,, a houbara ! Wow !
Today it is your task
to help me live beyond these lines
to celebrate and procreate
so there will be
houbaras enough
to populate
eternity.
see: International Fund For Houbara Conservation

From Jerusalem to Gaza, Acts 8. 26
And was it on that road
the Spirit came,
whistling along with surprise
through living waters ?
What now of Jerusalem,
torn in two, one part resistant
the other hard of heart ?
And Gaza,
full of bitter resentment,
thoughts of deferred revenge ?
Can the Spirit still alight
on that road between two places
that so cry out with anguish ?
Anguish – one word for two places ?
Come, Holy One
who breathes, heals, unites,
works the impossible
in desert ways of human hearts !
Come !