Virtual Methodist

Episode 2 of our Journey with Jonah. (The blurry photo is of the performance of parts 1 & 2 in Dublin in 2004 that started me on the blogging pathway) You really won't believe it! Where had I got to? Oh yes... I told you how I ended up doing the doggy paddle in the middle of the Mediterranean. God had asked me to go to Nineveh and I just happened to take a wrong turning... Ended up heading in the opposite direction... In a boat headed for Tarshish. But God soon caught up with me and whipped up a storm just to grab my attention, and before I knew it the sailors had grabbed me and threw me over the side to keep God quiet. So there I was... Fishfood... Literally, as it happened. Have you ever had the misfortune of listening to fishermen telling you tales of the one that got away? It was this big, they tell you... When you know fine rightly it was this big. Well I've got a story that will top any of their's... Not so much the one that got away as the one that got me...

This has been a tough week. It began with my birthday but any celebrations were somewhat subdued because I awoke to the news that one of my brothers had been taken in for radical surgery. He then went to ICU where he has been all week. I and all the family are so grateful for the excellent care he has been receiving, from the surgeons, the ICU consultants and nurses, the physios and the whole team.  Our NHS is amazing. The picture was fairly bleak at first, and whilst things are somewhat better now he is still not "out of the woods." But it was interesting that material I had already prepared for worship and other prayers and pieces of scripture that I read, some of which I have posted here, have been remarkably apposite for all that I and the rest of the family have been going through. For various reasons we have been very coy about making any details public and even now I don't want to go into details, but prayers have been and continue to be valued. But again, in

Having posted a prayer by St. Teresa of Avila earlier in the week, below is one drawn from another inspiring medieval woman, the German Benedictine, Hildegard of Bingen ( 1098 – 1179), a veritable renaissance woman, long before the Renaissance. She was an abbess, poet, composer (she even had a hit album recently!), theologian, philosopher and mystic, is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany, writing influential botanical and medicinal texts, was the author of what is possibly the earliest German liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play, and inventor of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota. She might easily be seen as a patron saint of the modern environmental movement with her strong sense of the wholeness of creation. Given her range of interests she has always intrigued me, especially given that she had a strong sense of how they were all integrated: “Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, the

Once a month I meet with a group of friends and colleagues for a midweek lunch and discussion of where things are in the world, particularly this peculiar corner of it. At the close of it we use the mid-day office of the Northumbrian Community. We don't meet over the summer, but on Sunday past 2 friends on either side of the Atlantic posted a prayer that is part of that liturgy, a prayer by Teresa of Avila. Personally, it could not be more timely, for reasons that those who know me well will come to know in due course, but in the midst of an, at times, frightening world, it is appropriate for all of us: 'Let nothing disturb you, Let nothing afright you, All things are passing: God never changes.' St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

Two posts in two days! Almost prolific by recent standards... This is a partner piece to yesterday's Jonah monologue, It's a responsive Psalm loosely based on Psalm 139: 7-14 which we used for a call to worship: Where can I go that your Spirit is not there? Where can I escape from your presence? If I climb the highest mountain, you are there; if I if I dive down to the depths of the Ocean, you are there. If I travel to the lands where the sun seems to rise, if I were to sail across the wide Atlantic, you would be there ahead of me, your right hand could reach out to take hold of me. If I say, “Sure the darkness will hide me” and if the light were to become night around me, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night will be as bright as the day. You have known me from before I was born. You created me inside and out; Y ou shaped me in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am a work of wonder Beyond human comprehension; All

Back in ancient history I was first prompted to start a blog because people were asking for the text of a monologue I wrote based on the story of Jonah, Indeed the avatar for that blog was me, seaweed strewn emerging from a Dublin fountain... A few years later that blog moved across to this platform and the avatar and Jonah got pensioned off. But for the "summer season" this year at Belfast South Methodist, I thought I would dust him off again, and draped in bladderwrack taken from Mahee Island on our Celtic Spirituality Pilgrimage yesterday, he re-emerged in the Agape Centre this morning... So here is the first of a 4 part "Journey with Jonah." You just wouldn't believe it! The week I've had. It all began with a message from God... Recorded delivery, so I couldn't even pretend it had got lost in the post. It was addressed to Jonah, Son of Amittai, Prophet of Israel... That's me... But I was in no way ready for what was inside. It said "D