MAY 2025
Not so much time for serious stuff. The first five days were taken up with the Kirchentag, about which you have already received the blog. The last two weeks we spent with Linda’s Canadian cousins, starting in Cawsands, Cornwall, followed by six days travelling round Kent. So here is what happened in the remaining fourteen days.
In the garden of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Crawley Down
WRITING
No significant writing apart from the blog on the Kirchentag which you have already received. I did spend two hectic days making final corrections to ‘The Church has a Past – has it got a Future?’ Reading it through I discovered a couple of duplicate passages and lots of amendments. Then I revised some of the images and made sure the captions were correct with the right copyright information. By the time we went off to Cornwall, the deed was done!
Doing corrections in the new Members Lounge in the V&A.
MARKETING
On 15th I put the book launch on eventbrite. The launch will be on Monday 7th July at St Mary Abbot’s church Kensington, so the next month is going to be all marketing.
I had a talk via Zoom with my social media adviser. We decided that I would post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, including short talks, that I should learnt to use Canva, a very useful site, and put a longer talk on YouTube once a month. That will all take a lot of concentration. I also need to get my websites up to date, with a possible link to my Facebook posts. It ’s not my comfort zone, but I shall try my best.
CHURCH
I prepared two sermons this month, one on Jesus at the Feast of the Dedication (John 10.22-30). The other I prepared on just one verse: ‘If anyone loves me, they will obey my message, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home in him.’ What a promise! In fact the lay reader was down to preach, but I got so much from just preparing the sermon.
I went for a one and a half day retreat at the Monastery at Crawley Down for a much-needed break. There I found the extraordinary ‘The Book of Silence ‘ by Sara Maitland.
Somewhat to my surprise I celebrated Ascension Day at the evening eucharist in Canterbury Cathedral.
CORNWALL AND KENT
The second half of the month, as I wrote above, Linda and I took Albert and Suzy first to the delightful Cornish coastal village of Cawsands, then showed them round Kent, including Beachy Head, Battle, Sissinghurst, Canterbury,
Ightam Mote and a lot of antique shops. The weather was excellent almost all the time.
Cawsands Bay
FILMS TV ETC
Only two films to mention this month.
We watched almost three hours of ‘The Chosen’ a devout American retelling of the life of Christ. It has 28 million people watching it worldwide. But we thought it was just too long.
A very different film was Wes Anderson’s ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ a sort of thriller with a lot of absurdist violence and intelligent Christian background. One of the three main characters is a serious novice nun. The soundtrack is full of marvellous classical music, including at the end, ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.’ Go and make up your own mind.
WEDNESDAY SAINTS
This month we celebrated the following:
- Lady Julian of Norwich, hermit and mystic
- Matthias – the replacement for Judas
- Helena, dowager empress and protector of the holy places in Jerusalem
- The Ascension
BOOK LAUNCH
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