A childhood memory comes back from time to time of sitting in a car in a lay-by. Cars approach at speed and pass by with a ‘whoosh’, sometimes the passing of a lorry causes the car to shake. The location of the lay-by remains clear, beside the road there are signs pointing to Honiton and Exeter in one direction and to Andover and London in the other. The road was the route to London from the West Country, it would have taken us past Stonehenge on its way eastwards.
The …
David Martin, the central character of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Angel Game” is engaged in trying to understand the roots of religion. His conclusions could be presented as a very uncomfortable analysis of the traditional church;
” . . . beliefs arise from an event or character that may or may not be authentic and rapidly evolve into social movements that are conditioned and shaped by the political, economic and societal circumstances of the group that accepts them. Are you still awake?”
Eulalia nodded.
“A large part of the mythology …
Canon Jim Hartin, the gently unworldly priest who presided over the training of Church of Ireland clergy in the 1980s would wave his finger in rebuke at sharp comments. “Cynicism is the enemy of spirituality”, he would say, “become a cynic and you have nothing to offer anyone”.
Envy is the mother of cynicism; the muttering about people who tried things that were new or different, or, even worse, who succeeded at anything that was new or different, was always loudest amongst those who had never tried anything and disliked …
Five posts from this blog were recycled to provide five ‘thoughts for the day’ for the Sundays during August for East Coast Radio – this is the third.
My asthma was bad in June and my wife decided that some sea air would be good for me. One evening, we parked on the seafront in Bray and took the DART to Greystones.
We walked around the marina site and up to the cliff path. There was a sea mist that shrouded Bray Head and clouded the view. Damp and clinging, …
“Pots” came from a town in the deep south of Ireland; his soft brogue was often difficult to pick up by an ear attuned to the strong consonants of the east coast of Ulster. He lived by himself in a flat at the centre of the town. Always turned out in his grey suit and tie with a distinctive “Columbo” type overcoat, he was a familiar sight along the streets.
Pots lived a self-contained life; he stewarded carefully his old age pension and was always attracted by the idea of …
International boundaries are odd things.
Staying in a motel a few kilometres south of France’s border with Belgium and crossing the border to visit the city of Ypres one evening, sausage and chips from one of the vans at the funfair in the city square seemed inviting. Not having a word of Flemish, it seemed courteous to order in French, Belgium being a bilingual country. The attempt was not received in the spirit that was intended. “Speak English, I am not French”, the woman replied, with the sort of vehement …
