Temple Cloud

I decided to see whether I could actually make it to Wells this time. First, though, I wanted to go to church.   I had wondered whether to cut out all non-walking activities, but I thought I could manage an hour for this.   There are enough times in the year when I just feel too emotionally overwrought to attend church, but now, when I’m in a good mood and want to thank God for ferny green banks and trees lining the roads, it seemed a shame not to go. In the two hours between setting out at 8 and the service at 10, I just about had time to do a circuit of the roads around Harridge Wood, over Oakhill Recreation Ground, and up to Ashwick Church.   I arrived just before the service started, and sanitised my hands from picking up a plastic bag in the woods to ensure that some animal didn’t choke on it, and getting rid of it in the rubbish bin at the Rec. The sermon was on the subject of rest, and the importance of intentionally resting and relaxing rather than simply tr...

On the first day of my walking trip, I woke to a soft, birdsong-filled pre-dawn shortly before sunrise.   There was no frantic hurry to be off; I had time to have a leisurely breakfast and three mugs of tea, put out the recycling, and fill up the bird-feeder and watch the birds on it.   Feeding birds in spring and summer, when there are plenty of insects and small slugs and snails around, feels indulgent – shouldn’t they be hunting their own food?   But I suppose putting out suet-cake for the parents helps them to have enough energy to hunt insects for their chicks, and it’s certainly popular at this time of year.   Initially when I hung a lump of suet-cake out, it was mainly of interest to families of magpies, who would sit in a circle on the ground and take turns for one of their number to fly at the suet-cake and ram it with his/her beak until it crumbled and fell through the gaps in the feeder.   But now it’s popular with an assortment of smaller birds...

I was planning to go out for a walk with a friend tomorrow morning, to try to prepare for the long sponsored walk in June.  It was the last opportunity we were likely to get before she has to take her children away on holiday at half-term.  As I had wasted a perfectly good opportunity for a walk last week by being in such a miserable mood that I would rather angst about my worries than go out and explore the countryside around Bath, I had been hoping to make up for it with a long, cheerful walk this time, if we could manage it before rain set in.   However, yesterday evening I had an urgent text from the manager of the Oakleaf Café:   I hope you are well? So sorry to ask this but we are really struggling for volunteers this week and I wondered if you were able to help us out at all on Wednesday between 11-1pm? Tim and I are in Cornwall until Wednesday pm so can't either help unfortunately.    Many thanks, Caroline   I slept on the decis...

I have just received my first donations for a sponsored walk, and I haven’t even begun the walk yet. Ever since doing my last walking challenge in July 2021, I have been hoping to do another, preferably not in July, and see whether I can push myself a bit further.   I managed to walk 300 miles (483 km) in a month last time, which sounds good but is only really an average of 10 miles per day – could I manage 400 (644 km) the following year? However, in practice, life didn’t work out that way .   I tried taking up a sponsored reading challenge  in 2022 instead, seeing how many books in German I could read in seven months.   However, this wasn’t very successful, either in terms of reading many books (because I was trying to fit this in around everything else in my life, instead of setting aside a month for a challenge) or in terms of raising much money to help Ukrainian refugees.   Probably, because a sponsored reading challenge is so much more unusual than a ...

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,...

We’re now one week into Lent.  Admittedly, I did take a day off yesterday to eat a slice of cake and a few Nachos, as it was a friend’s birthday – but then, as I see it, the point of Lent being forty days of self-restraint over a forty-six day period is that it allows for the occasional day off.  I used to think that Lent was called that because, before globalisation and frozen or tinned foods, it was a lean time .   It was the end of winter, most of the supplies stored in autumn were used up, and there weren’t many fresh vegetables growing, cows giving milk, or hens laying.   Making it an official fast in remembrance of Jesus’s ordeal in the wilderness was both a way of deterring people from eating up the last of the remaining supplies too quickly (or the wealthy and greedy gorging themselves on supplies that everyone else needed), and a reminder that God knows how it feels to experience hunger and hardship. More recently, though, I learned that the word ‘Lent’ ...

Has Christianity lost its way?  It seems to me, from the memes and articles I see on the internet satirising Christianity, that something has gone badly wrong in the way that evangelists try to teach the gospel message. Of course, there are plenty of reasons why many people are not Christians.   One of the biggest is that God’s existence cannot be scientifically proved.   After all, if God exists, then He is everywhere, so He is not an object in the universe that anyone can point to.   We can test the effectiveness of a vaccine or a drug by measuring the health of a group of people who have been given it compared to a control group who haven’t.   But we can’t test the effectiveness of prayer – or the validity of different religions – by comparing the recovery of one group of patients who have been prayed for by a vicar, one group who have been prayed for by an imam, and a third group who have not been prayed for, because God is perfectly capable of choosing to...