A little pause

Very much enjoyed a recent podcast from Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable series (Here on spotify but available via all the podcast hosters). It featured writer Paul Kingsnorth and Rowan Williams. Dr Williams’ theological musings have freedom to take wing now that he has been released from being Archbishop of Canterbury. Seeing him in his natural habitat (books, ideas and God) you feel perhaps he was never quite suited to the Archbishopy world of soundbite and confrontation and politics and business plans.

Paul Kingsnorth’s story was of a long reluctant progress to Christian faith via environmental activism, Buddhism and Wicca. He was eloquent in describing his journey to Christ, which despite its unlikely stopping places seemed to him more to do with continuity than discontinuity, though of course it had elements of both. He eventually realized he was searching for God and eventually Christ found him, via the Eastern Orthodox tradition as lived out by religious Romanians in Ireland.

Rowan Williams, meantime, was busy colouring everything in with his own reflections on conversion and Orthodoxy, and was, as ever, capable of giving us plinkety-plonk evangelicals a taste for the symphonic. His Christian faith, he said, expanded his view rather than contracting it. I liked that. He told us how you can’t just ‘put God over there and examine him’, which, frankly, is a bit of an evangelical pastime. And he talked about God creating creation like a pianist creates a sonata, or perhaps like a stream being created by the flowing water within it, a ceaseless creation, enabled moment-by-moment by an unsummarizable God.

Next time you’re on a long car journey, as we were, I’d recommend a listen.

And a shout-out to Justin Brierley whose Unbelievable podcast, a model of how to listen to the other guy, still shines after ten or more yours, and where this appeared. Broadcasting at its best IMHO.

Time, our missed perspective

This is at the heart of slow. I have been in a conference this week where one of the speakers reminded us about God answering prayers ‘immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine’1.

There’s a scale here and an extent that stretches out beyond the limits of our imagination and does so because of the compounding effects of time.

It is impossible that the Apostle Paul, writing those words to a group of Turkish and Greek churches in the first century could believe what was going to happen. Twenty centuries later, the world is more complex than Paul could have guessed, but as earth turns, the sun never lights up a moment there when thousands, probably millions, are not reading Paul.

Would John Milton know that five centuries after his passing, someone, me, would be listening to Paradise Lost on a thing called a phone via a thing called a podcast while travelling at speed in a car?

What will Time and God do with the little things we offer him?

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