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4 Corners Festival 2025: Collaborating to Care for our Common Home

On Wednesday evening at Fitzroy Presbyterian we had a small celebration to say thank you to the small team of fabulous volunteers who make the 4 Corners Festival possible. To deliver a festival like 4 Corners (and the common consensus is that this year’s festival was a possibly the best in its 13 year history), teamwork and collaboration is essential. Not only between the directors, planning committee and volunteers wearing the ubiquitous teal hoodies, who pull everything together, but also the various host organisations, funders, performers, contributors and a few key partner organisations. Members of some of the latter, like YWAM and Focolare, are part of our faithful front of house volunteer team, while others like Peace Players, Play it by Ear and Westcourt Camera Club essentially deliver entire events, and have essentially become firm fixtures in the programme before the first planning meeting of each cycle (which starts again next week). They have each demonstrated t...
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Twilight Visitor

A slightly different post from my previous one. This is based on a regular visitor to our garden (Sally has even installed a camera to keep tabs on him), who I have also seen sitting in our gateway a couple of times... Returning home I see that strange grey dog is guarding my gateway again. But as the headlights hit him, before turning his back, I glimpse those two tell-tale, matte black paint stripes daubed on his dirty white muzzle. Then he turns and waddles away in his baggy, tweed trousers, leaving this leafy, middle-class interface with an unsleeping city, shuffling and snuffling his way along a damp, woody corridor, between carefully coiffured gardens, returning home. Selah
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Nothing New Under the Sun

A short story based on I Samuel chapter 8. All the elders of the nation gathered together and came to their leader. They said to him, “You are old, and your successors do not follow your ways. So appoint a strong man to rule over   us, like all many other nations have.” When they said, “Give us a strong man to rule over us,” this displeased their leader; so he prayed to the  Lord .   And the  Lord  told him: “Listen to what the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but me. Th ey have done this from the day I granted them freedom until this very day, ignoring me and serving other gods. So listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the strong man who will rule over them will claim as his rights.” So their leader told everything that the Lord  had said to the people who were asking him for a strong man to rule over them. He said, “This is what thi...
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Beyond the Grey Skies - Again

I'm probably not going to get a chance to blog as much about 4 Corners Festival Belfast this year as I would like or normally do, because I have barely enough time to write the stuff I absolutely have to write and do for the events I am involved with this week (and my day-job)... Indeed yesterday morning's service on Radio Ulster (which you can listen to on  BBC Sounds for the next month until it self-destructs Mission Impossible-style) was a metaphor for my week, in that we ran out of time and had to axe Mylie Brennan reading my poem/meditation based on St. Francis' " Canticle of Creation ". Of course St. Francis' poem was also part of the inspiration for, and the source of the title of "Laudato si'" the encyclical by Pope Francis about caring for our common home, the Earth. Dr Lorna Gold, our preacher on Sunday morning and lecturer last night in another stimulating event at Jennymount Methodist Church, was, only this week, appointe...
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Benedictus - In Memoriam

Last weekend in my #AdventRythmsOfGrace series on various social platforms I  referred back to "The Song of an Old Man" on this blog, based on Zechariah's song, known by many as the Benedictus, in Luke 1: 68-79. That, and the appearance of the preceding passage about Zechariah's voice being returned after confirming the name of his son John, reminded me of a time, around 15 years ago or more at this time of year, when I was preaching on that passage at a baptism in Ballybeen. Father Gerry Reynolds and his Unity Pilgrims had turned up for their first visit (as previously arranged - although I had forgotten) to a church packed with other visitors, there to support the child being baptised, many of whom would have been from a somewhat militant loyalist background. Having baptised the child "William", as was my custom I took him around the congregation while they sang a song of blessing... But for Gerry, coming from the Catholic tradition, a song of ...
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Are You the One?

A new poem for this year based on the Gospel reading from today's Daily lectionary Luke 7: 18-30. Are you the one Who is to come; The one my mother said I recognised while we were both still in the womb? Are you the one who is to come, or have I led everyone  along the wrong road through the wilderness? Are you the one who is to come, or should we look out for someone else, or is no-one coming at all? Are you the one who is to come; the all-atoning lamb of God, or have I sacrificed myself for nothing? Are you the one who is to come; the one to heal, not only the blind, deaf, infirm and ill, but all of creation? Are you the one who is to come? If so, then come quickly For I can’t last much longer In this dark place. Selah
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Hope in Challenging Times

I rarely post "sermons" here... but last Sunday a couple of those who were present at the Grosvenor Hall suggested that I might do so... so here it is, in its un-edited glory... Please forgive the inevitable typos... OLD TESTAMENT READING: Jeremiah 33:14-16 GOSPEL READING:  Luke 21: 25-36 On Thursday morning, with a hard frost on the ground I came down to breakfast to have Sally tell me that having let the cat out, and swiftly back in again after her morning necessities, a little robin that regularly follows her round the garden when she is working, flew across the patio and perched on the back of one of our chairs sitting there, looking through the doorway, waiting for her to come out with the mealworms that she regularly puts out for it… And it reminded me of the famous poem “Hope” by Emily Dickinson,           Hope is the thing with feathers           That perches in the soul,           A...
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