Recently a parishioner paid me what they obviously thought was a great compliment: “We do so love you, Father, because you leave us alone.” Suddenly my imagination transported me to the moment after my death, when the Lord would require me to give an account of my priesthood. “Well, I did my best to leave …
The Year of Shopping
There are many occasions of sin for a priest, and one came up recently when I decided to read at Epiphany the traditional announcement of the moveable feasts for the coming year, as directed by the Roman Missal Appendix 1. It’s meant to be a solemn moment when ‘after the singing of the Gospel, a …
It’s all Greek to me
One of the really bad things about being dead is that you can’t answer back. You need someone to do it for you. If you’ve been dead for a very long time, the problem seems to get worse, so I have agreed to act as a spokesman for the Ancient Greeks. One of their words, …
Unforgettable photographs
There are a handful of press photos that have etched themselves indelibly into our memory as portraying the horrors of recent times: traumatised children running away from the My Lai Massacre; an aeroplane crashing into the twin towers on 9/11; the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach during the Syrian …
Here comes the Man of Dreams
I’ve always been fascinated by my dreams. Weird as they are, they somehow give the exciting sense that this is what I’m really like when all my defences are down, and inner censorship is silent. From time to time I make a serious effort to understand them, and have discovered some excellent books on dreams. …
Because we are at war!
Oprah Winfrey, please come in: I need your help to confess some extremely intimidating and aggressive behaviour in my wild youth. Well, more exactly my rather tame early middle age, when I was rector of our diocesan seminary, Allen Hall. My room there was just off a corridor along which the students frequently passed, and …
Footnotes
There is a major defect in my intellectual make-up which it is time I admitted to: it’s not just that I don’t understand philosophy – any of it; I don’t even understand what it is about or why anyone would engage in it. I’m not proud of this: it is a pretty serious flaw for …
Soul or Spirit
I have some rather weird habits which have been known to reduce fellow priests to tears of laughter, and would probably be of interest to a psychiatrist. For example, I have about 200 pictures of saints stuck on to the glass fronts of my bookshelves, and visitors have to guess the principle on which they …
Refugee Tales
One of my great joys this past year has been welcoming into our large Notting Hill parish house (15 decent size rooms with sink, reviews on Trip Advisor welcome!) three refugees from different countries through the agency of the wonderful Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) based in East London. One of the side-effects of the COVID …
A holy face
Recently I was trawling through the Catholic news websites in search of some good news to counteract the general gloom and doom, and once I’d scrolled past the usual bunch of ‘Pope says Mass,’ ‘Bishop thinks prayer is a good thing,’ kind of headlines, I found my attention grabbed not so much by the headline …
Holy Smirk 