word | spirit | world | church
There’s a lull in your day, a small moment of nothing among the busy tides of time. Is it an oasis to indulge, or a terror to smother? Most of us would talk that a small gap of peace in our over-scheduled lives would be a delight—but my actions, and I’m guessing many of yours… Continue reading Eating Ourselves Dull
I’ve argued elsewhere that the Sunday gathering is for worship, but as the priests gather in the Temple they find that the Lord comes to them. The occasion is worship, but we encounter God as he comes to us. As one of the four ‘events’ when God meets us as we worship him, Baptism is… Continue reading Water is Thicker than Blood
We are a people of the Exodus. Our lives are exodus movements. I’ve written before around the edges of the idea of cosmic geography and about the way the sea was viewed in the Old Testament as the place of chaos and death. When the climactic act of Yahweh’s saving power happens at the beginning… Continue reading Our Emotional Exodus
Jesus hung on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, dying. To us, a detail that we can perhaps use poetically but incidental among the whole. To the Church Fathers, however, an important point to understand the cross. When St Athanasius is exploring why God became Man in his famous On the Incarnation, he devotes… Continue reading High and Lifted Up
I have often written that we need to live a better story, or live the Bible’s stories as though they were our stories. I think this is one of the solutions to a host of our contemporary problems, though I’d get it if you thought it was too small or too flimsy a thing to… Continue reading Living a ‘Better Story’
Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be able to wait? Perhaps you’ve stood in a queue at a shop or waited at a bus stop recently. I stand on the platform waiting for the train to get to work a few days every week. If you have done the same recently, I’d forgive… Continue reading Children of Choice
A couple of weeks ago we were at a wedding. We were invited to the evening but not the reception, so we’d brought a few sausage rolls and a pack of crisps for lunch and went looking for somewhere to eat it before we went on to the afternoon activities we’d planned—exploring the Cotswolds in… Continue reading Burial is Hopeful
What’s the story of the church? How do we fit into God’s grand plan? It runs something like this: God created the world with the aim of making his name great by demonstrating the worth, glory and character of God the Son. It was his good pleasure to do so by making lesser beings and… Continue reading The Church’s Story
We struggle to understand the concept of rest. You might think it’s pretty obvious, but we live in cultures that are so formed away from the ideal for human life that we often get rest backwards. I’ve argued here at nuakh that rest is about the enjoyment of order, about stopping to be with the… Continue reading The story of rest
David Foster Wallace starts his famous speech This is Water by describing two young fish. They’re happily swimming along and meet an older fish coming the other way, who nods in greeting and says: “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them… Continue reading Reframing stories
nuakh 