Lent is a preparation time, a 40 day period to get ourselves ready for the momentous events of Easter week. The actual period is closer to 46 days because Sundays are not considered part of the Lent season. In popular conception Lent is a time of sacrifice, of giving up something, like a certain pleasure […]
“Love is patient and kind” 1 Corinthians 13:4 Love is the virtue that contains all other virtues and two of the most beautiful that are enfolded in love are patience and compassion. Patience is the ability to stay steadfast and centered no matter the provocation. This quality of forbearance and fortitude is wonderfully expressed in […]
The famous author, poet, farmer and activist Wendell Berry writes that “no settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment”. No-one has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric”. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament…but they come from the […]
By Rev. Paul John Roach Presented at the 2013 Unity Lyceum on April 5, 2013 The poems of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth are not sacred texts in the ordinary sense yet they convey, by sheer force of poetic inspiration, a numinous quality better than many scriptures. In the one hundred and sixty three […]
When I was a child growing up in Wales my parents would often take me on walks up a local mountain called the Garth. The lower slopes of this mountain were covered in dense forests of oak, ash and hazel. About halfway up the woods gave way to bracken covered moorland. In summer the ferns […]
Worlds separate us now.I have tiptoed across the creaking floorof the locker roomwith its bits of grass stuck to the floorboardsand odd scratchy golfballs kept in cardboard trays,closed the doorand gone down the brown, waxshined staircaseto the bar and the boys. I’ve looked my last illicit look with youfrom my grandparents’ roomin the top of […]