Author: stuart

  • Let go and let God

    Let go and let God

    When I was licensed here, I was licensed as Priest in Charge in these parishes.  It is a technical, but important distinction.  I am not the incumbent, though for all practical purposes I am treated by the Diocese and constitution as such.  However,  I find it rather a liberating position.  Though at any moment, if…

  • Disaster, Death and Re-Creation

    Disaster, Death and Re-Creation

    There are a myriad of disaster movies that exist of extinction events of cataclysmic proportions.  Events on earth to wipe out or nearly wipe out humanity.  There is an even greater list of movies that talk of a new beginning – After some apocalypse or other.  Why are some so obsessed in the arts with…

  • One EASTER Day

    One EASTER Day

    During Lent I’ve been reflecting each week on the film One Day.  It is a story about love, life, death and resurrection.  It doesn’t describes specifically the events of our Easter story at all – however, it does give us a window into the ebb and flow of two ordinary lives lived in and out…

  • One Day won't last forever

    One Day won't last forever

    Passion Sunday for me is about being uncomfortable in a comfortable place.  A bolt hole, a place of refuge, a place to go before a difficult encounter.  A favourite cafe.  A bench on a hill.  A place with friends where one can be natural, uninhibited, perhaps.  A place to relax and let the hair down. …

  • Healing the Hunger Games

    Healing the Hunger Games

    For the Conwy County Civic Service 2016. Around ten years ago I was in Liverpool for Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday. We visited the Anglican Cathedral, took the tour, climbed the tower and looked back towards Wales. I remember a conversation after lunch with a good friend, John, a priest working…

  • One Day in the life of a Fig Tree

    One Day in the life of a Fig Tree

    I have in my garden, not a fig tree, but an Autumn Olive tree (elaeagnus umbellata)   It is a hardy specimen, good for creating wind breaks and a nitrogen fixer so it is a team player in the garden, but perhaps not quite so hardy as the welsh climate requires given that we regularly have…

  • One Day – in the City

    One Day – in the City

    So if the wilderness doesn’t get you, perhaps that fox in the city will.  In the reading from Luke today Jesus compares Herod to a fox and the people of Jerusalem as a hen’s brood – Jesus of course is the would be mother hen, protecting the people, but they reject him!  I’ve been slowly…

  • One Day in the wilderness

    One Day in the wilderness

    And so begins the long dark teatime of the soul – or Lent as we call it.  To counter the drab feelings that this season can throw up, I like to indulge in a book.  You’ve been offered a number of worthy titles already, however, the title I’d like to reflect on for Lent would…

  • turning aside

    turning aside

    As some of us travelled yesterday to witness a new dawn breaking for the cathedral and for Bro Deiniol in Bangor, what will the spring sunshine bring to Bangor and in Kathy’s Ministry we wonder?  I noticed the brightness of the mountains dusted with a little snow and reflected on the first line of a…

  • Maintaining the Container

    Maintaining the Container

    To put this gospel reading into its context: Luke tells us that Jesus has just survived the temptations of the Devil in the wilderness. He goes out teaching and preaching with the zeal of a new curate sprung from the rigours of theological college and imposed upon a parish for good or ill. However, the…