word | spirit | world | church
The snow melted today, and the world is drab. We’ve had four days of it. We awoke to a crisp blanket laid over our garden, and then it kept going. We did the thing that you do when it snows: we stopped and stared. Every time you glance out of the window or walk into… Continue reading Ode to Snow
I’ve recently finished Tara Isabella Burton’s superb book Strange Rites. The book’s central argument is that descriptions of our age as secular are overstated, and there are three great quasi-religious movements on the rise. More on those movements another time; on her way to them Burton explores a range of subcultures that behave in religious… Continue reading Re-enchanted?
I was preaching a few weeks ago on Jacob’s death and funeral in Genesis 49. My message largely focused around the hopeful nature of his death and our hope of resurrection and the age to come. It got me thinking though about a ‘good death’. It used to be that people talked about Christians as… Continue reading Memento Mori
Our world is made of atoms, of spinning particles of energy careering around one another in a fabulously chaotic and surprisingly ordered way. Or so the story goes. I don’t mean to suggest that I doubt the scientists whose work informs our understanding of physics and matter; I have no reason to do so. What… Continue reading We are made of stories
I was mist-coating a wall the other day; Helen was plastering a ceiling. A fairly standard Saturday in the Suffield household. We had some worship music on, which probably isn’t our norm for a hard work renovation day, but a change is as good as a rest. A song came on and the lyrics caught… Continue reading A ballad of breaking idols
Whether reacting against the formalism of ‘saying thank you’ before a meal in my youth, or the disdain of liturgy and repeated prayers that comes from my charismatic twenties, we rarely pray ‘grace’ before meals. I’m beginning to wonder what I’m losing from my own hang up. Thankfulness is a discipline that takes hard work… Continue reading Your table is a battlefield
I wrote this to open our worship on Easter Sunday 2021. https://youtu.be/gGCvf4zjtw4 05/04/33 T. M. Suffield A day of shadows, hope was kept at bay the weary sun’s attempted upward rise akin to our heart’s toil to comprehend a sign above bare scoffed “The King of the Jews” heavy is the head that wears a… Continue reading 05/04/33
At the end of 2019 everyone had a books of the decade list. A few friends of mine shared theirs with each other, which gave me a good list of reading material, and a book group span out of that discussion. It’s more recently morphed into a group that reads old Christian works that we… Continue reading 9 books that changed me
The cultural commentator’s big question at the moment is what will the world be like in the magical hereafter: post-Covid. How will this change us? Perhaps—as Mark Sayers suggests—this will quicken the move that was already happening as globalism gives in to the networked society (this seems plausible), or—as many have commented—we will see the… Continue reading AC: After-Covid
Sometimes light reflects, refracts, and disperses in water droplets causing its brilliant white radiance to split into the visible spectrum and hang suspended in the air. We call it a rainbow, as the sun breaks through rainclouds and colours bend the sky. It has a similar effect on most of us as snow does, we… Continue reading On Rainbows
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