Second Sunday of Easter John 20:19-31 There’s nothing worse than being with a group of people who are talking about an experience that you haven’t had. There’s only so far that you can go in trying to understand what they are saying and feeling. It’s easy for me to understand how Thomas might be feeling …
Category Archives: Monastic
Easter Saturday
Easter Saturday Mark 16:9-15 Writing these few words didn’t come easily to me today. After the intimacy of Mary’s encounter at the tomb with Jesus and then the breakfast on the seashore, today’s Gospel text feel abrupt. It reads as a recap of themes we’ve heard during the week: refusal of the disciples to believe, …
Easter Friday
Easter Friday John 21:1-14 Just after my A levels I was able to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Our visit to the Sea of Tiberias stands out for me as a time of grace. In what was a fairly packed itinerary, there was suddenly time to sit and watch the water. It was …
Easter Thursday
Luke 24:35-48 This Gospel passage gives the impression that Jesus just appears among his disciples. They are startled and Jesus reassures them with his greeting of ‘Peace be with you.’ Understandably they think he is a ghost and he reassures them again: ‘Touch me and see for yourselves.’ If I imagine myself among the disciples …
Easter Wednesday
Easter Wednesday Luke 24:13-35 Luke paints the picture of the disciples at the end of an emotional journey where crucifixion has dashed their hopes. As they walk they talk to each other. There is a sense in which the journey is a time of healing as the disciples verbalise the experiences of the past days. …
Easter Monday
Easter Monday Matthew 28:8-15 ‘Filled with awe and great joy the women came quickly away from the tomb and ran to tell the disciples.’ These words leapt out at me this morning. I went searching for a picture that would capture ‘awe and great joy’. I had to settle for depicting ‘joy’, but not before …
Holy Saturday
LAMENTATIONS OF THE PROPHET JEREMIAH Holy Saturday is often spoken about as a day of ‘emptiness and numbness’. On one level this is true, but since entering the monastery I have discovered another dimension. On a day when you could feel out of sorts and not quite know what to do the for best, the …
Good Friday
Good Friday Hebrews 4:14-16,5:7-9 Every piece of text in the Good Friday liturgy is heavy with meaning. Pieces of scripture that I may have heard throughout the year have a whole new resonance today. I found it hard to pick just one text. I settled on the text from Hebrews. In a series of fairly …
Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday John 13:1-15 Each year I am stuck by how much the liturgy invites us to engage our senses in Holy Week. We wave a palm branch, we hear the story of the anointing and can imagine the smell of the perfume filling the house, we picture the silver coins of betrayal and night …
Wednesday of Holy Week
Wednesday of Holy Week Matthew 26:14-25 Today we have Matthew’s telling of the Last Supper. Once again Judas is in full focus and his actions seem inevitable. Those thirty pieces of silver are lodged in our collective imagination through art, poetry and hymnody. You’ll even find a reminder of this in the Danish name for …