Advent Sunday 

‘Happy New Year’ - a bit early you might be thinking? Not at all because today being Advent Sunday is the beginning of the Church’s new year. It might seem a bit daft beginning a new year today when the calendar year till has a good month to go, could the Church not wait a bit? Actually, no and when you consider that pre-1752 New Year’s Day was the 25th March starting the Church’s new year today is as good a day as any. 

We begin the Church’s new year today because with the beginning of Advent we...

St.Andrew of Scotland 2023

How did a Galilean fisherman become the patron of Scotland? 

According to early chronicles of the Christian religion, Andrew was inspired to preach in Greece and as far north as Kiev, which is why Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Georgia and Russia have him as patron saint. He is widely venerated in many other Christian countries, and among other patronages ascribed to him he is the patron saint of fishers, miners and singers. Andrew was martyred by the Romans in their province of Achaia – now in Greece – at Patras, on an X-shaped cross which became his...

Matthean version of the Parable of the Talents

In these days of higher interest rates, many people have been asking the question “where would it be best to invest our savings?” We are, of course, very fortunate if that’s a question for us since many people have no savings to invest. I remember some years ago checking out the website of a major British bank, which shall remain nameless, where you could only get at information about savings accounts and interest rates by first answering a series of intrusive questions. “None of your business” was my immediate reaction to that...

Very few of us today will have a direct remembrance of those who died in WWI and increasingly as the years past from the end of WWII, this will become the same. No one in my immediate family actually knew my great, great Uncle Ern. My Grannie knew him but not my father and now they are both dead the link to him is very fragile. I have his photograph, in his Sapper’s uniform, on my desk but I doubt any of the next generations of my family will do so. The heroes like Uncle Ern are being forgotten as...

Betty was always there. The chair by the wall of the third row up from the altar that was her spot. She was there for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer with the clergy and for each of the daily masses. The only time she wasn’t there was when she was in the body of the Church for the Solemn high Mass on a Sunday morning or for Evensong and Benediction, when she sat in the choir stalls with the rest of us. 

Betty, as far as I was and still am concerned was a true saint of God. She lived...