“Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” Jeremiah 18:6
The Central Applications Office tables show that the number of points at Leaving Certificate required to study theology at Trinity College, Dublin is 335; that’s 200 points less than for admission to read law, 220 less than dentistry and 240 less than medicine.. Obviously, there is little demand for the places. The most able students now look for courses that offer them lucrative careers; there seem to be few interested in Holy Scripture.…
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Sermons
"Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” Jeremiah 18:6 The Central Applications Office ...
“And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years” Luke 10:11 I ...
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! “ Luke 12:49 Forecasts of ...
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also ." Luke 12:34 There’s an old Jewish story about searching ...
“I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink ...
Sermon written for the midweek service at Borris-in-Ossory Church, Co Laois on Wednesday, 28th July 2010 “For we do not have ...
‘ . . . a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to ...
‘Mary has chosen the better part’ Luke 10:42 Growing up in a small rural community in the west of England, there ...
“what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Luke 10:25 “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Do ...
“ . . . ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest”. Luke 10:2 ‘The Lord of ...
"Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit". Galatians 13:25 In one parish ...
‘When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town’. Luke 8:27 The part of England in ...
There can be no moment more melancholic than the last day of the summer holidays when you are twelve years old and must the next day begin a new year at a new secondary school. The sick feeling at the pit of the stomach recurs like those nightmares where one is sitting in an examination hall with a paper file with questions on subjects never studied. The prospect loomed like a dark cloud, overshadowing the whole summer.
Wandering the cemetery today, swapping memories with those whose names filled the dramatis…
Looking homewards from English shores, Ireland still seems a very different place, still outside of European liberal secularism, still not fully engaged with an Enlightenment worldview, still unprepared to contemplate a separation of church and state, still unprepared to accept a desacralisation of society.
The churches will fight tooth and nail to hold the ground they have, not because Jesus asks them to do so, but because they value their power and influence, because bishops expect to be people of standing and not merely members of a religious group. There…
“Our sermon next Wednesday evening will be on the hymn ‘For those in peril on the sea’”.
The closing announcement at our midweek service reminded me that I missed the sea. Driving to Graiguenamanagh last evening, walking along the banks of the Barrow, was a reminder of how far inland we now live. The sea was part of our lives for more than twenty years, up and down the East Coat; living close to Strangford Lough, and then Dundrum Bay, the North Channel, and Killiney Bay, moving from the coast…
A string of orange lights hovered across the night landscape, blurred by patches of mist and drizzly rain. An odd sight, until recognition as a westbound train passing along an embankment a hundred kilometres an hour; the orange lights being the illuminated destination signs beside the doors at the end of each carriage. Those staring out from the train would have seen nothing beyond their own reflections and the darkness that encompassed the farmland that lay all around.
Passing through an unrecognized place suggested itself as a metaphor for parochial…
Holidaying in the Channel Islands in 1997, the evening news was enlightening. Having flown from Belfast, where the process of members of the opposing communities agreeing not to kill each other was proceeding at snail-like pace, the Channel Islands’ local news headline that someone had been threatened with a knife outside of a nightclub was strangely reassuring. Not that someone had been killed, or injured or attacked; the fact that someone had been threatened merited inclusion at the top of a bulletin. Imagine living in a community so safe that…
A serendipitous moment – flicking through the radio channels on the road over Salisbury Plain, an untypical voice appears on BBC Radio 3, radical singer Billy Bragg talking about Beethoven’s musical setting of Frederich Schiller’s 1785 poem ‘Ode to joy’. The tale of the music drew upon the hopes of the French and American Revolutions, upon beliefs in human equality, upon a vision of the world very different from that which prevailed. Beethoven, Bragg explained, wrote from a feeling of disappointment that such hopes would not be fulfilled in his…
Today’s Irish Times editorial on women bishops prompted thoughts about the absurdity of the institutional church, particularly the Church of Ireland.
A friend who belongs to the Masonic Order once complained that attendance at his Lodge meeting had been so thin that he had played a number of roles to allow the evening’s proceedings to take place, at one point this meant answering his own question. I laughed at the thought of it. He is someone who is always on the edge of a joke or a story and…
A Hyacinth Bucket character encounters a distasteful scene
Really, it wasn’t nice. It wasn’t nice at all.
I was just saying to Leonard, my husband, that it wasn’t nice. Leonard has just retired as an important civil servant and he knows about things. He agreed with me, “Not at all pleasant,” he said to me. “Not the sort of thing that decent people like ourselves should have to see”.
You’d think the Government would do something about it, wouldn’t you? I mean to say, if this sort of thing started…
From ‘Hurt for Haiti’:
Hey Folks!
On Sunday, 21st February, we are holding a massive event in aid of our brothers and sisters in Haiti who are in such despair.
We have a huge day planned with some top entertainment on hand. The venue is The Bentleys Complex- all the upstairs and downstairs rooms AND The Brazen Head next door. It’s going to be a great day out and for a great cause.
We’re gonna kick off around 3 in the courtyard with Jon Kenny and Mike Finn on hand…