Temple Cloud

Lately, I have been wondering about whether to remain a Christian.   The evidence around us indicates that there isn’t nearly so much difference between all Christians and all non-Christians as Christian preachers try to make out, nor so much difference between all religious believers and all atheists as some atheists try to make out.   Not only European Christians like PDB11 and me, but also probably plenty of American Christians with liberal political views, probably have more beliefs in common with liberal atheists than with fundamentalist Christian Trump-supporters, for example. PDB11 mentioned to me a question on Quora about a quiz, the Religious Values Test , which a Quoran we follow, Melissa B , had taken.   Melissa, who is a Catholic, took the test and got – Pantheist.   According to her results, she was 59.8% pro-Catholic, compared to 68.5% pro-Jewish and 65.5% pro-Hindu.   PDB11 , as a Protestant, also got Pantheist, but scored 59.4% pro-Protestant, ...

‘And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…  After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.  “The time has come,” he said.  “The kingdom of God is near.  Repent and believe the good news!”’  Mark 1:4, 1:14-15 When it’s coming up to Christmas, I am frequently ambivalent about whether this is good news or not.   It’s not that I don’t believe that Jesus was born (even though he probably wasn’t born on December 25 th ), but that I’m not always sure that I trust him to be good news for us.   If he isn’t, then Christmas for me carries similar overtones to the spoof Christmas carol my friend Doom Metal Singer found for me: Death to the World!   About ten years ago, a visiting preacher at the church I then went to asked the congregation how we would sum up the message of the gospel in one sentence.   We wrote various answers, generall...

Last week, 1 st November was All Saints’ Day.  I might have written a blog post about it then, but I had got out of the habit of updating this blog at all, and wanted to work my way back in with a silly post about dragons .  But at any rate, the calendar of early November is full of death and destruction, or attempted destruction. Hallowe’en, with children dressing up as ghosts, skeletons and vampires to confuse evil spirits, is the prelude to the day for commemorating all the saints that have ever been: the ones whose feast days everyone knows (with St Patrick’s and St Andrew’s Days already being bank holidays, many people think St David and St George deserve the same honour), and the ones no-one except God even remembers existed.   After that, 2 nd November is All Souls’ Day, to remember any of our dead friends and family who weren’t quite saints but we loved them anyway. Then we have a jolly festival of fireworks and bonfires to celebrate Britain’s most famous te...

When I proposed to do another walking challenge, one of my reservations was the effect that over-exercising might have on my mental health.   Getting over-tired, or not eating enough because my body is too focused on walking to remember to be hungry, tends to knock me off balance if my body isn’t expecting it. When I last spent a month walking as much as possible, in 2021, a friend wrote an encouraging comment about walking being good for body, mind and spirit, but, as with most things that are good for the mental health of normal people, it doesn’t necessarily work that way for me.   2021 wasn’t a good year, and the best thing I could say about July of that year was that I was tired enough after days of walking that I didn’t have trouble sleeping. By now, I’m capable of being reasonably sane for a fair amount of the time, and for the first half of the month, I was fine as long as I kept walking.   I only really started to have difficulties when a few days of wet weat...

One of the things I find hardest to get used to about life in the country is how small rural congregations are.  I realise that the majority of British people aren’t Christians, but I’ve spent most of my life living in towns where there were enough people overall that the numbers of them who went to church would still produce congregations of a couple of hundred or so, of all ages from children through to elderly people.  Some would hold several services each Sunday: a traditional Communion service early in the morning, a family service in the late morning, and a service for students in the evening. In a rural parish, it’s more like the scene in The Vicar of Dibley where Geraldine, newly arrived, asks in her typically irreverent way, ‘What kind of crowd do you pull at these gigs?’ and is told that the usual congregation is five worshippers.   ‘What about at Christmas?’   ‘Oh, that’s totally different – it’s four then, because one person spends Christmas with her s...

In view of my emotional instability combined with my ambivalent feelings about Jesus, Lent is a difficult time for me.  Trying to get into a pattern of reading a Bible passage each day and thinking about it just gives me more things to worry about. I had been mostly on a fairly even keel for the past three weeks.   But on Sunday evening, I was unexpectedly knocked back by a wave of self-pity. PDB11 and I are currently reading The Rainbow of Renewal by Michael Mitton.   This is divided into seven weeks’ worth of themed chapters, with the first week on the theme of mourning. We discussed our experiences of loss.   PDB11 talked about his best friend who had died when they were in their early twenties, and his experience of splitting up with his previous girlfriend.   While of course he still misses his old friend, splitting up with his girlfriend had been difficult to get over because, rather than her having died and therefore being definitely out of reach,...