This week the church celebrates Saint Matthew, patron saint of bankers, tax collectors and accountants. In our Start:Stop reflection we ask whether it is time to take stock and reconcile the balance sheet of our own lives? Are we properly valuing our assets – those things that are dear to us. Are we taking proper  [Read More]

Psalm 30 is the song of thanksgiving of someone who has survived a terrible crisis, the nature of which is ambiguous but clearly perilous; the psalmist states that their foes were rejoicing over them, that they were in the “Pit”. As we read on we learn that their cries for help were heard; God turned  [Read More]

It’s not just in the workplace that we face role conflict, but within all areas of life – and perhaps especially at the point at which the different areas of our lives meet. Nor is it always a third party – another person – who places these pressures upon us; it is just as likely  [Read More]

Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century Carmelite Lay Brother seemed to perfect the art of being ‘constant in prayer’ – of making prayer ‘business as usual’. But isn’t that what monks are supposed to do? His letters and conversations published under the title “The Practice of the Presence of God” reveal that the life of a lay  [Read More]

It seems as though more and more of our knowledge is now being stored “in the cloud” – even our knowledge about God, about ourselves and our memories of others – and our cloud keeps growing. That might sound a bit scary to some – but according to an anonymous mystic, writing in the late fourteenth  [Read More]

This week the church celebrates Alban, the first recorded British martyr, who famously sheltered a priest fleeing persecution by the Roman authorities, helping him to evade capture by swapping cloaks. When the Romans found it was Alban beneath the priest’s cloak, he was sentenced to death. Little is known about the priest that Alban sheltered, whose  [Read More]