Virtual Methodist

Last night I was at a concert by Brian Houston and Ken Haddock back at my old school... A fine, upstanding, and overwhelmingly middle class grammar school on the Gold coast of County Down... Whilst there I discovered that a year 9 English class had gone to Marie Jones' new play at the Waterfront Studio, and had to leave at the interval, seemingly because the language was foul, the subject matter was unsuitable and the production was poor. This was a little unsettling to hear, since Sally and I had booked to go to the same show tonight. But since neither of us are 13 year old school children (and haven't been for some considerable time) we decided to risk it all the same. And I'm glad I did, because it was a good night out. Yes the language is somewhat ripe, but its set in a doss-house in a run-down inner city loyalist estate, so it wasn't going to be the repartee of the likes of Terence Rattigan... And whilst it was a little melodramatic towards the end and the stage fi...

If the religious elite of the day had written the script for Jesus’ birth, he would have been born to a respectable married couple (either Pharisee or Sadducee depending on which brand of religion you asked); he would probably have still been born in Bethlehem, because that was in keeping with the prophecies, but he would have had a proper cradle to lie in rather than a manger. And the first visitors would NOT have been shepherds… I mean, everyone knew that shepherds were ritually unclean and low down the social pecking order… So what if Jesus’ ancestor David had been a shepherd… God had raised him above all that… And as for the Magi… There is no way that foreign, pagan astrologers would have been allowed within a mile of the Jewish Messiah. But are we any better? How quick are we to judge children by their social background? Make assumptions about people because of their jobs? Lump people together according to stereotypes of race and religion. Or presume that because Jesus is the Way ...

Just been listening to Glenn Jordan's reflection for the beginning of Advent on Radio Ulster... Until 8th December you have the chance to listen again ... But anyway, in a typically perceptive and challenging programme he included a reference to Thomas Merton's amazing piece entitled "The Time of No Room," as good a description of the era we find ourselves as any. In it he says: We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration. The primordial blessing, "increase and multiply," has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, da...