May 2026

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God almighty!

Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;                                  

Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty!

God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Trinity, a season in which we celebrate the three persons manifested by God. Three ways of being the one and only God. When one says it or writes it, it seems quite simple but to many when we talk of the three persons in the God-head they may assume we are talking about three...

“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. With the Father and the Son, he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.”

    Nicene Creed

The Holy Spirit, is the third person of the Trinity, which is our understanding of God. The Spirit is often the being associated most particularly with the inauguration of Christ’s Church and if you did not know better it may seem to have only appeared after Christ’s ascension into heaven. To think that the Spirit only appeared at that time is incorrect...

One of my most vivid early memories can be dated precisely to the twelfth of April 1961.  My grandmother had died the previous November, and we had been clearing her tiny terrace house in Haltwhistle. Getting on the train to travel home felt like being expelled from a childhood paradise. I’ll come back to that idea of Paradise as a place in a few moments.

 Once we were home, I took myself to bed significantly before the usual time for the ten-year-old me but I was very soon shaken awake by my mother.

“You must come down and watch the...

 “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 

          Acts 17:23b

In the ancient world most gods had names. For how else would one know who to thank or to curse for the good and bad things that happened to one? 

Luke, in that quote from Acts  is being canny in the tale he tells about the altar inscription to an unknown god. He is telling us that this anonymous god is obviously worthy to have an altar given to them  and that they must have done things that...

Sometimes it is worth looking at different translations of the same piece of Scripture to see if they give a different perspective on a particular passage of phrase. In reading today’s gobbit from Acts, I was particularly struck by verse 27:

“²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him - though indeed he is not far from each one of us.”

The idea or process of ‘groping’ for God in the dark is I think very apt, and for me, a more descriptive translation that given in either the Jerusalem Bible...