Author: stuart

  • Bread for Today

    Bread for Today

    Today we celebrate ‘Lammas’.  It is not something you are going to be overly familiar with unless you have come across it on an old calendar of the seasons.  It marks the beginning of Harvest, traditionally the wheat harvest.  Lammas means Loaf Mass.  At the beginning of the harvest the workers would gather together, bake…

  • On sharing a little

    It’s not much, it won’t feed them all, but it’s all I have.  Sorry, I should have brought more, but this is all there was.  But, before I give it to you – Can I just say?  That’s my lunch.  I know.  It is a little odd.  But I like bread and fish.  Oily fish…

  • Lights out on the Sanctuary

    Tomorrow lunch time I will attend a service at the former Anglican Chaplaincy to the University in Bangor where a sanctuary and a light is to be extinguished. I’m tempted to go in purple, in mourning. It was the place where I and so many others were nurtured in their vocation, either to the ordained…

  • Amos, a Disaster Movie Script?

    Sunday 12th July.  Amos 7.7-15 Ephesians 1.3-14 and Mark 6.14-29 It is high summer. The sun sits high and long in the sky, the days stretch on well into the night. The perennial midsummer prophecy of Terry Wogan – “The nights are drawing in, soon be Christmas” has not yet come to pass. Midsummer is…

  • A Sanctuary and a Light

    A Sanctuary and a Light

    Church Hostel Bangor is up for sale.  aka The Anglican Chaplaincy, more affectionately: AngChap or simply for those of us who lived and worked there ‘home from home’. We were always walking a tightrope whilst juggling the twin identities of this place, Hostel and Chaplaincy.  Whether doing the accounts and applying for money, or justifying…

  • Stormy seas? You'll need an ARK

    Stormy seas? You'll need an ARK

    Goodbye seems so very final. Perhaps then we should say Au Revoir, until we meet again, but we are not in France we are in Wales. The Welsh Hwyl Fawr is more akin to the English Goodbye for both are offered as travellers depart. However the origin of Goodbye might save it from being quite…

  • Beyond these Walls

    Beyond these Walls

  • The Long Goodbye – back to the wilderness

    I’ve never been very good at saying goodbye.  Sometimes less is more.  At least that is what I have always told myself.  And on that note, you might think I should probably give up trying.  John’s Gospel however is rather a different case.  We have chapters devoted to what has been called the ‘farewell discourse’. …

  • Pilgrimage Time

    Pilgrimage Time

    It is Pilgrimage time. The weather being generally kinder this time of year, pilgrimages to Enlli from Basingwerk are beginning.  From the Abbey at Greenfield they will walk the 133 miles in company of all who choose to gather with them.  Those who walk the full distance will end the journey as friends.  I’ve walked…

  • Ask the Yew trees…

    Ask the Yew trees…

    Ask the Yew trees, they probably bid Asaph welcome as he set up his preaching cross and Llan in these hills. Led Zeppelin fans will want to take note, though true Zep fans will know all this anyway! LZ3 the famous acoustic album was recorded by the British Rock band and released in 1970. The…