More Posts from 2007

  https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/steppenwolf/ https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/flowers-of-grass/ https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/on-coombe-hill/ https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/ducklings/  

The Naked Ape

This was published on 15th December 2018. It's another post rescued from perpetual-lab.blogspot.com, which no longer exists. There's a determinedly atheistic* elite of do-gooders who care more about “the planet” than those who fall foul of their holier-than-thou values. Prime example: President Macron of France had imposed a carbon tax on fuel to help save…

A Little Lower than the Angels

Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands: Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him.…

A World Split by the Same God …

. . . Un Mondo Separado Por El Mismo Dios in the original Spanish I put this compilation together about 12 years ago. 1. Weep No More My Baby - Brenda Lee I'd just left school and got a summer job washing dishes in a Shanklin hotel - heard it in the street and loved…

God’s Funeral

At Wycombe Hospital you can buy hundreds of books at £1 each. There's a shop alongside the main Reception counter collecting donations for purchase and maintenance of scanners installed in Wycombe, Amersham and Stoke Mandeville hospitals. There's a Scannapeal shop near to the main hospital as you go in. Every book is £1. Usually it's…

From Etty, to God

". . . there is a remarkable woman who can give us vision and stability, who can help us to do good despite all the terror due to the Covid-19 virus. She speaks from another time of dread, the Holocaust." From her journal: "You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your…

Guided Randomness

I've often asked myself "Do you believe in God?" but never got an answer, only that it's an unanswerable question. A better one would be "What do you believe in?" One has to search within oneself, but not for some borrowed ideas and expressions, some flag of convenience to sail under and dodge the challenge.…

The writing on the wall

Yesterday I was accosted by a big black woman of mature years on a corner of the Desborough Road—that village pump, that microcosm of this glorious world, a few stones'-throws away.  She was not unbeautiful, the sidewalk was not wide, she only needed to stand there to slow my pace. She beamed as though I…

The Book of Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe was a bloody-minded woman, living in a time when England was still Catholic. Bishops, priests and friars held worldly and spiritual power. bloody-minded: Chiefly Brit. Perverse, contrary; cantankerous; stubbornly intransigent or obstructive. Cf. bloody adj. OED She came from the provinces, had no education and bore 14 children to a husband socially beneath…

The Way to the Land of Freeness

I once wrote a post concluding that all we ever need to know is what to do*. These days, what to do is a important question as how to be. For example this, from the ancient Chinese oracle: Be content with what you have;rejoice in the way things are.When you realize there is nothing lacking,the…

About the Magdalene

Click for Wikipedia article Obtainable from Amazon etc. but beware: the alleged Kindle version is a different translation that might not contain the above chapter.

Talking the Walk

Transcribed from an ad-hoc recording made on December 14th between 12:30 and 13:50, while walking the above route. To hear the audio please click here. It will be played in a new window. There are problems with politics [referring to words rather than deeds]: when it’s diminished to binary options, with clichés replacing awareness when…

Passion and Society

The present train of thought started 54 years ago with a red book. Technically it was shoplifting but I thought of it as using the campus bookshop as a lending library. In mitigation of the offence, I returned it stealthily to the original shelf ten days later. That was the hard part, very scary. I’ve…

The God Interviews

I find writing here harder and harder, sometimes labouring for days over a draft and then scrapping it. In the early days I’d write simply, with the freshness and naïveté of an unguarded moment among friends; something I only manage now in comments and emails, which might be a bit loose and slapdash, but seldom…

Intelligent Design

I’m sure there must be various ways to introduce the elements of science in schools, some good and some bad. Let the reader judge. Aged 9, I was excited by the prospect of Science lessons. We started by proving the existence of air, a project which seemed disappointingly trivial and uninteresting. We thought we knew…

Colloquy

I was moved by Ellie's recent comment: Click to download a copy of the book We engage in a colloquy reflecting one another’s light through the jewel of our own perception. In my last I spoke of the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and in subsequent comments the ebb and flow of tides.…

The Lord is my shepherd

God is nameless, because no one can say anything or understand anything about him. It was for statements like this that the Dominican friar known as Meister Eckhart was nearly condemned as a heretic. He was an employee of the Catholic Church, an organization which claimed an exclusive right to say things about God; and…

Presence: the numinous in everyday life

Numen n. the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place. Numinous, adj. having a strong religious or spiritual quality, indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity. (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2010) I suggested in my last that one might find a starting point for the meaning of “God” in the everyday…

The Evolution of God

Limited by space, a frog in the well has no idea what is the ocean. Limited by time, an insect in summer has no idea what is ice. Limited by intellect, a man in life has no idea what is Consciousness. — Chuang Tzu (369 BC-286 BC), tr Herbert A. Giles In my reading, I’m…

Mister God, this is Anna

Reading Nietzsche is like having a guide show you round your home town—perhaps your own street. He takes you to a familiar blank wall, and shows you cracks in the smooth surface. “So what?” you think and then he takes your hand and you go through each crack to an unfamiliar vista on the other…

The book as a sacred space

Today is the 70th anniversary of Desert Island Discs, a BBC radio programme in which celebrities are interviewed about their life, interspersed with their personal selection of eight gramophone records. At the end, they are invited to choose one book and one luxury to take along to the desert island on which they are to…

Keeper of Souls

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: yea, it is even he that shall keep thy soul. I saw this on a tombstone at Hambleden, a tiny village that doesn’t seem to have changed since the Middle Ages. For all I know it may be still enmeshed in the feudal system, though its origins…

Stories of animal sagacity

As a child I read Stories of Animal Sagacity, a set of Victorian anecdotes by William Henry Giles Kingston. I didn’t remember his name of course: the World-Wide Web has the full text in facsimile and OCR transcription, with the illustrations reproduced too. Sagacity is a lovely word: it was many years till I came…

Spreading the Word

A few miles from here, the Wycliffe Bible Translators nestle in a spot near the woods, in huts that might have once been an Army camp, but have now been landscaped into a cosy village from which the Good News is spread worldwide. Jesus in his time couldn’t speak loud enough to be heard by…

Flowers of Grass

written after a lunchtime  walk during my contract with Fujitsu at Bracknell (codename MaxiRam in Babylon Town) Perhaps there is no God to answer our prayers, listen to our anxious concerns, detect our hidden needs. Perhaps there’s a Creator who has shaped Nature through the interaction of physical laws, Chaos, improbability and long periods of…

Bible as sacred object

It was by accident that I discovered afresh the magic of the Holy Bible. I’ve come back to it purged and scoured of religiosity and the baggage of Christian reverence. My Bible is a fetish object, and I love every detail of its physicality: the edges gilt on pink, the blue silk bookmark, the flexible…

Divine Anarchy

Twilight on Christmas Day: Dashwood Mausoleum (illumined) & St Lawrence’s Church with Golden Ball I want  to speak theologically, to say what I think about God and angels. But then, it’s a bit hard putting abstractions into words. No, that’s completely wrong. It is all too easy to put abstractions into words, and give them…

Angels and us

At some point in the Christmas season the pathos converts to joy; just as grape juice needs only yeast and a little time to turn into wine. This is the Christmas miracle, repeated every year: “Peace, goodwill to men”. I used to think it was a supernatural thing, as though some power, God I suppose,…

Testament

Rain beats insistently against the windowpane. I look out at two instant rivers rushing down the sloping drive between this house and its neighbour. When I first put this computer in the corner of the room, it was to avoid the distraction of looking out through the windows on either side, but that seems foolish…

The Pope & the Koran

It being Sunday, I heard a Christian service on BBC Radio 4, broadcast from a Church of England cathedral, so that its congregation could endorse the standard prayer: “Good morning, God. It’s us again, you remember, the righteous ones. Others may fail you but not us!” The theme for the service was World Peace, the…

Pope & Islam

I published the ex-Pope's controversial speech (which enraged Muslims) soon after it was made. I'm not sure when or why I suppressed it. Benedict XVI stood down in 2013. It makes a nice contrast  with my recent posts about Marguerite Porete: Catholic Church versus female mystic burned as heretic. Speech at the University of Regensburg…

On the side of the angels

In everyday life I act as though there is a power beyond Nature, that brings luck, answers prayers and sometimes sends miracles. When catastrophe strikes, I assume that in some way it is all for the best, at least in my own life and the small circle of those I know well. I accept that…

The word “spiritual”

Darius commented on my previous post, thus: That response to nature is fascinating to me too. It seems as though while a lot of us have it, some don’t. You almost never hear the spiritual importance of nature brought up in discussions about preserving the environment. “Nor should the spiritual importance of nature be brought…