Category: blog

In the past two years, I have organized seasonal blogs for Advent and Lent.

At their best, the blogs:

• help us to focus on a season
• draw on the diversity of the church
• have established and strengthened relationships
• have offered a space for new — and often very powerful — writing
• given us a space to share favourite quotes, stories, photographs
• made us sit still for a few minutes each day in the midst of a busy season
• been a good ‘window’ on the SEC

but they also:

• take a lot of co-ordination
• demand a high level of commitment and discipline from the authors
• catch us all of guard sometimes, and send us into a tail spin as we cover our own and each other’s scheduling mistakes

So, my question is this:

Do we want to blog again this year, or has this project run its course?

Several of us who have been involved in the past have been struggling to keep our blogs active lately.  I suspect if we are going to do this we need some fresh ideas and new voices (along with some old familiar friends).

Those of you with blogs: please ask around, and send people here with responses.  Those of you who know creative types who might be persuaded to write for us, please get in touch by comments or email.

I’m willing to co-ordinate the blog again if there is sufficient interest, but my time for it will be quite limited this year, and I need to hear lots of enthusiastic voices if I am going to commit to the time it takes.

Last year’s blog is here:  Love Blooms Bright.

Strange the things we get excited over.

For one year I taught in a girls’ school in rural Virginia.  I found it a hard place to live, but it was a remarkable school, and it had a wildly disproportionate influence on my life.  Many of you will have heard me speak of it before.

Well, they have just received a gift of 31 million dollars from an alumna whose own life was transformed by the school.  It is such good news, and will help so many girls in more ways than any of us can forsee.

Just imagine the impact on the world of a community that teaches 100 people at a time to live this vision deep inside their bones:

Trust is given before it is earned.  Once given it must be maintained.

Imagine a community that teaches people to trust and be trustworthy, to value truth, and to hold themselves to it.  Imagine a world that could do the same.

A good day for Chatham Hall, and for all whose lives have been shaped there.

update:  O help!  They’ve changed the Purple and Golden Rule.
I’m sure the ethos is the same, but there was magic in what they discarded.

bright crunchy apple, straight off the rectory tree.
crumbly, sharp cheddar from a small-batch producer.
mmm.

I do love autumn.

Molly and I have celebrated Michaelmas by putting up the bird feeders.

I have been rewarded with a mistle thrush (curiously) and Molly has been rewarded with blue tits and finch, who have found a watching perch just by the study window.  Much swooping, much chattering, much fun.