It begins in mystery and ends in mystery.We enter the world crying, gasping for air, and one day we leave it with a sigh, returning, perhaps, to the same quiet we came from. Between those two moments lies everything: joy and sorrow, love and loss, laughter and pain. We are like twins in the womb, living in a world we think we understand, not knowing that beyond the veil of what we see lies something more. There’s an old story about twins in their mother’s womb. They live in

Lamorna Ash, who is a voice of her generation, tapping the zeitgeist , in her last book uses the story of Jacob wrestling the angel as a metaphor for her explorations within Christianity – a wrestling with faith – ‘my personal match with Christianity’, as she puts it. Sometimes it made life better, sometimes harder; It changed everything, it changed nothing. “All that wrestling, though” she says, “it was exhausting.”   She takes faith seriously; It’s what I’ve heard young peo

The church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.   Words by TS Eliot that are always on my mind. At the first church I served in, the vicar, introducing the parish, told me, “ we lose a third of the congregation every year, as people leave central London. That means, just to stay still, you need to grow the congregation by a third each and every year.” Putney is more stable, but judging by Oberon’s class, which has dropped fr

I’m going to embarrass people. People often think the British are squeamish about sex. But actually they’re really squeamish about the ‘sordid subject of money’ which anthropologist Kate Fox calls out as a taboo, resulting from the peculiar British characteristics of ‘social-unease, modesty, hypocrisy and class-consciousness’ (559). She reports how an American-immigrant she knew had resorted to only discussing money in letters and emails as the English found it impossible to