Scribblings
Spirituality & Christian Ministry
A selection of essays on Christian spirituality, Christian ministry, and congregational life.
Prayer at the Areopagus
Even early risers consider me an early riser. This morning, however, was different. There was no laptop, no dog giving me the evil eye, and sadly no coffee beyond the instant variety. My wife and I were staying in an Airbnb just off the Apostolou Pavlou in Athens, enjoying our first holiday together in Greece. It was a late 5:30 a.m. by the time I crept quietly out of our air-conditioned bedroom into the oppressive morning heat of the kitchenette. Read more.
A House-going Parson Makes a Church-going People
“You’re the first vicar ever to visit my home.” I can’t tell you how many times someone has said something along those lines to me. In some places where I’ve served, this clerical inattention was understandable enough due to the size of the parish or the number of churches combined into one. But in most cases, the speakers have been elderly churchgoers who had spent a lifetime faithfully attending a church that seemingly had never returned their devotion. I’m not sure we esteem highly enough those who continue to attend church despite years of priestly neglect. Read more.
Destruction & Beauty in an Icelandic Landscape
It wasn’t until I had climbed partway up a nearby hill that I realized my mistake. When we’d arrived at the camp after a journey by bus across trackless lava fields, I had immediately noticed the high cliff of black, broken rock and deep green moss. You couldn’t miss it as it towered over the camp just beyond the hot springs in which visitors luxuriated. A narrow path wound its way up the 70 feet or so of rock into what I’d taken to be nothing more than shattered slopes leading up into the southern highlands. Read more.
Memory Inscribed in Stone
On a cold Saturday morning in early March, I picked up the “Clerk of Oxford,” and we drove out to South Leigh to visit its church with famous medieval murals. It’s a marvelous place. While approaching, one’s eyes are drawn to the blue-faced clock in the 14th-century tower with the ominous inscription, “Ye know not the hour when your Lord doth come,” which ought to set up any worshiper nicely. But when you enter through the south porch you’re transported into a space that is soaked with memory.
Read more.
Morning Diary of a
Cathedral Canon
With the tenor bell summoning me out the door, I step onto the pavement of weather-worn stone to make my way into Brecon Cathedral for Morning Prayer. I live in an old almonry, parts of which date back to the Middle Ages when monks oversaw the priory’s care for the local poor. Much of it is now modern — by which I mean 18th-century — and it feels more like a cosy, country cottage than an austere home fit for monks. Read more.
The Melancholy of Gethsemane: Honest Reflections on Priestly Ministry
This wasn’t how you imagined it is it? When you sat up late into the night (probably over a bottle of gin or whiskey) with your fellow ordinands, dreaming about your future ministries, you didn’t for a second think it would be like this. Read more.
Climbing the Ladder of
God’s Delight
I was halfway up from the Ogwen Valley towards Cwm Lloer before I stopped to look back at Tryfan and the Glyders. My vantage point gave me a clear view across the valley to where the low winter’s sun was barely rising above the 3,000-foot heights of Glyder Fach and Tryfan. I gasped as I watched the sun begin to crown Tryfan and its bronze rays to filter around its countours stretching down towards the deep blue waters of Llyn Ogwen. It was a view I’ll not soon forget. I stood there for several minutes, my attention fixed with delight. Read more.
An Elegy towards Hope
Stand with me for a moment on the southern shore of a lake only a few miles from where I live in mid-Wales. To the east stand the dark green heights of Mynydd Llangorse that form the western wall of the Black Mountains. To my left, a range of low hills shelters ancient farmsteads and lanes of earth and shattered rock, which long use has etched several feet deep into the black earth. Llangors Lake (Llyn Syfaddan) stretches out in front of me. Its glassy surface reflects a blanketing fog broken only by vivid slashes of reeds. Read more.
Let the Marble Weep
As chair of the Standing Doctrinal Commission of the Church in Wales, I’ve been leading a series of theological conversations about the ordained ministry in contemporary Wales. In our report, “Faithful Stewards in a Changing Church,” we raise a series of questions in the hopes of getting people to think about their own ministry theologically and contextually with what we call critical faithfulness — a shorthand for taking stock of our current situation and charting a way forward within the Anglican tradition we’ve inherited. It’s aimed at the Church in Wales, but it addresses a ministry context familiar elsewhere. Read More.
Reflections on the Church Year
A selection of essays on the liturgical year.
Walking in a Foreign Land
We Call Home
And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.
Each morning (that is, when Wales isn’t throwing some of its atrociously wet weather at me) after I awake, take my dogs, Cuthbert and Humphrey, for their morning walk. I have my routine. First, I enjoy two cups of coffee while I catch up on email and Facebook. Then, I fetch my shoes and, if it’s winter, put on a warm jacket, hat, and headtorch. Then it’s out the door with the dogs to begin our two-mile journey amidst the wooded landscape of Priory Grove. Read More.
Letting go of Christ
At a recent retreat at St. Stephen’s House, Oxford, we spent time reflecting on the Blessed Virgin Mary and especially the ways in which she held onto her Son. During meal times, we listened to readings about the long tradition within the Church of thinking through what it meant that the Son of God had dwelt in Mary’s womb for nine months. Her womb was like the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple insofar as the presence of God was contained therein. That fact has provided the Church — her mysticism, poetry, and hymnody — with a rich vein to mine over the centuries. And it was well that we should have dwelt on it as we prepared ourselves for Christmas. Read More.
Christ the Lily of Humanity
There’s an old tradition of finding Easter in nature. This can be seen especially in Christian poetry, perhaps most famously in Venantius Honorius Fortunatus’ 6th-century Easter hymn, “Hail Thee, Festival Day”. Read More.
Easter is Bonkers
The older I grow the less I’m convinced that we know anything much about God. Everybody seems to have an opinion about him, and even people grounded in theology disagree vehemently with each other about the nature and attributes of the Almighty. But one thing I do know: God despises bores. Read More.
Rogation Walk
One of the delights of my short period as a vicar in rural Oxfordshire was the annual Rogation procession around the villages. When the weather cooperated, we’d walk from one village landmark to the next, stopping at each place — the village green, a fence by the open fields, a farm, the old manor house — to ask God to bless the land and her people. We ended at the medieval parish church where we sang a hymn and closed with final prayers. Read More.
Politics, Society, & Ecology
A selection of essays on contemporary politics and society and on the environment.
The Wake of Injustice
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., compressing an observation by the 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Although I greatly admire King, I’ve always thought this oft-quoted remark is nonsense. It’s a comfortable fantasy that many have wanted to believe (especially as we often portray ourselves as the active agents of that trajectory), but I think it has little basis in history and encourages a kind of simplistic self-righteousness. Read more.
Common Objects of American Love: Augustine and the Inaugural Address
I admit that I occasionally can be a theological curmudgeon. I say this not to boast nor even to excuse myself since I’m not quite prepared to repent of it. It stems, I think, from a sensitivity on my part to how theology can obscure or how it can reveal the underlying assumptions we make. Maybe I’ve just attended too many clergy workshops. Read more.
Art Versus the Machine:
What Tolkien Might Say to Extinction Rebellion
There aren’t too many times in my life that I can point to and say, “There was a before and after” — moments that changed my life completely. I’ve written often of one such life-changing moment: a long walk in the Blue Ridge Mountains that awoke in me a deep delight that led me eventually to Britain, a doctorate, and my love for the outdoors. But there was another moment much earlier in my life that’s the foundation for much that I am today. Read more.
“Magically Turning White”
A Family Story of Slavery, Racism, and Redemption
On 15 November 1772, a freeborn Martinican “mulatress” named Marianne delivered a healthy son, whom she called Jean-Pierre. Little else is known about her except that she was the widowed daughter of Elizabeth, who had once been enslaved. When Jean-Pierre was baptized in his local Catholic church, he wasn’t given his own father’s surname but that of Marianne’s late husband. He was illegitimate and, consequently, carried and passed down to his sons the family name of a man he never knew and to whom he wasn’t related. That name was Clavier. Jean-Pierre was my great, great, great, great grandfather. Read more.
For the Beauty of the Earth
Little is more fanciful than a medieval bestiary. The imaginations that drew delightful theological and moral lessons from the natural world were only matched by bright illuminations that depicted its creatures. Read more.
“Past its Teeming Time”: Lessons from Colonial Barbados about Environmental Racism
When John Atkins, a British royal navy surgeon, visited Barbados in 1722, he was astonished by what he found. He had heard about the wealth and fertility of the island, then a leading producer of sugar in the British Empire. Instead, he saw a colony in decline: “the Crops of late years have very much failed… The Soil fertile in the Age past, seems now growing old, and past its teeming time.” Forty years later, the land was so exhausted from monocropping that planters briefly imported soil from South America until it became clear that transporting earth swarming with wood ants in wooden ships was not the wisest strategy. Read more.
Technopolis
I’ve a proposal that you may think is a bit mad. But please hear me out. Our churches struggle because we’ve bought almost entirely into the same crazy delusion as the rest of our society. And because we’ve bought into that misconception, we’re trying to build the wrong kingdom. The delusion is that our reality — that thing we’re all currently fighting about like a family of ugly malcontents — is the same as the actual world out there. Our reality is mostly a fantasy, a massive project to compel the world to be as we think it should be. And this so-called reality is built entirely on our will. Let’s call this strange new world Technopolis. Read more.
Augustine the Agrarian
If you’re an American sympathetic to agrarianism, then your constellation of influential writers almost certainly includes Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry. Their ideas have inspired countless arguments for a social, economic, and cultural return to the land. Your star maps may also contain Izaak Walton, John Muir, Wes Jackson, and even Virgil, whose Georgics were extolled by the 18th-century essayist Joseph Addison as “husbandry put into a pleasing dress, and set off with all the beauties and embellishments of poetry.” I can almost guarantee you, though, that your agrarian constellation doesn’t include Augustine of Hippo. Read more.
The Life of the Land:
A Cautionary Tale
Once upon a time…
…there was a palace of incomparable splendor, more resplendent than any palace that had been seen before. In the palace lived all the kingdom’s nobility: a prosperous people who enjoyed whatever their hearts desired. They were, by and large, a good people who genuinely wanted what was best for each other. But they were not a wise people. Read more.
More Thoughts on
Trump, Race, and America
I have been watching events in America from afar with profound sadness, not least coming as they do on the heels of protests about COVID-19 restrictions. While in much of the world, the pandemic has produced a renewal of community-spirit, in America it seems to have fueled divisions. Read more.
Is Progressivism Sustainable?
Probably ever since the first cities arose in Mesopotamia ten thousand years ago, urban elites have distinguished themselves from purportedly backwards country folk. Our word “pagan,” for example, comes from the Latin word for country yokels. Similarly, the Romans borrowed the Greek word barbaros, which originally referred to anyone who didn’t speak Greek, to describe those deemed uncivilized—indeed, our word “civilized” derives from the Latin for city (civitas). Throughout history, being civilized has meant being a city-dweller, a partaker of urban culture. Read more.
Baldwin, Buckley, and Berry on Racism and the World Order
Even in grainy black and white film, the atmosphere in the Cambridge Union debating chamber remains palpable. A field of impeccably turned out students packed densely into that grand nineteenth-century theatre; an almost uninterrupted field of white faces directed with eager anticipation towards the gaunt, slightly nervous looking African American sitting on the left-hand side of the central aisle. Across from him, exuding the confidence of a virtuoso in his natural element, sat his blonde-haired opponent. The topic for that evening’s debate was “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The two debaters were James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. Read more.
Reviews & Commentary
A selection of essays reviewing books or engaging with contemporary authors.
A Pastoral Inheritance: James Rebanks and a Tribute to Our Late Cathedral Sacristan
On a cold late December evening, I waited by the north entrance of Brecon Cathedral for the coffin to arrive. Since the rebuilding of the North Porch in the 15th or 16th century, countless dead have been carried through its two high-arched doorways into the nave of the Cathedral. Yet, for us, this reception of a body on the night before the funeral was particularly sad: we were solemnly welcoming Jan Roberts, our long-time and much-loved verger, sacristan, and devoted seamstress, one last time into the place she considered home. “The Cathedral won’t be the same without her,” whispered one person as we stood on the same spot where Jan herself had stood at almost every funeral in the Cathedral for twenty years. Read More.
A Reflection on Hannah’s Child
On a cold late December evening, I waited by the north entrance of Brecon Cathedral for the coffin to arrive. Since the rebuilding of the North Porch in the 15th or 16th century, countless dead have been carried through its two high-arched doorways into the nave of the Cathedral. Yet, for us, this reception of a body on the night before the funeral was particularly sad: we were solemnly welcoming Jan Roberts, our long-time and much-loved verger, sacristan, and devoted seamstress, one last time into the place she considered home. “The Cathedral won’t be the same without her,” whispered one person as we stood on the same spot where Jan herself had stood at almost every funeral in the Cathedral for twenty years. Read More.
Stories of Healing & Wholeness: An Appreciative Engagement with Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole
Stories are a necessary part of healing and wholeness. I don’t just mean a story we may like or we tell ourselves (though they include that), nor do I mean that story we weave from our experiences and think of as our life or our autobiography (though they include that too). I mean all the stories that surround us, even those we don’t like, that invite us into themselves either to discover something about ourselves or to see things from another perspective with sympathy or revulsion or even indifference. Read More.