Quiet!!!

I find my Lent Quiet Days in Simon and Clarissa's Garden Room at Bortley Mill just as worthwhile as the more extended time I spent over many years at Malling Abbey. This time as it was a Monday I wasn't fasting for the day but in homage to Catherine de Hueck Doherty's strictures about time in the poustinia I subsisted only on bread and black coffee for the day! Not that the privilege of spending a day praying and reading is a great privation. 

The Holy Scriptures aside (I had never before realised that the Parables of the Great Banquet in Matthew 22 and Luke 14 are two profoundly different stories, and I concluded the keynote of the latter is the Lord satirising social customs), the book I took with me was one recently given to me by Dr Michael Lloyd, my former doctrine tutor from Staggers and now gloriously reigning as Principal of Wyckers. God, Struggle and Suffering in the Evolution of Life (2025) is a series of written conversations between six scholars including the Revd Dr himself around the knotted issues of where God fits into the suffering we see embedded in the mechanics of the non-human world. It is, as you might guess, very dense. I was encouraged to know that not only are thoughtful people devoting energy to this ('I have been examining this subject for the last 35 years', writes Prof Paul Fiddes, with the slight suggestion that his younger colleagues might have found some of their conundrums answered by reading his earlier books), but that they actually take the trouble to listen to what each other says and deal with it respectfully, dedicating time and thought to opening debates out rather than closing them down. No odium theologicum obvious here. As someone recently congratulated me on an article I'd written for opinions I hadn't expressed, I can only rejoice. 

No flash of kingfisher by the millstream this year, only grey wagtails.