There is something inherently "offensive" about the gospel – however much you get to grips with the love and forgiveness and comfort of God, if you are engaging with what it means to live out the gospel, there is still the regular jab in the ribs. The gospel is many good things – exciting, challenging, comforting, fulfilling, forgiving, gracious, merciful… and much more – but one thing it will never be is comfortable, in the sense of being mentally settled down on a sofa never to move again.

As I commented to Jon, there is something about being a minister of the gospel (and this is true in the sense that every Christian is a minister, not just the "professional" thing) that means you should anticipate that you will end up offending people. The TV Vicar is nearly always "nice", to the point of being bland; even the Vicar of Dibley, while not bland, was still "nice" on the whole. A true engagement with faith should certainly make us kind, compassionate and forgiving, and I don’t suggest we justify giving unnecessary offence through our own clutziness. But we should never feel obliged to be bland-nice. There’s a pressure (perhaps especially on the professional minister?) to be "nice" to everyone, but it can lead you into woeful passive-aggressive behaviour, it’s fake, and in any case it doesn’t do justice to the fiery, vibrant, exciting character of the Kingdom of God. Goodness and Niceness are not the same thing at all.

and marking and examining will

be stressful for many people. 

I’m hoping for a great summer;

hoping that the slog of exam term

will be broken up by some beautiful

sunny hours in the College gardens.

photo: Robinson College, Summer 2006

Hoping that the summer vacation

will be hot and sunny this year

(not grey and cold like last year)

photo: Brittany 2007

EDIT: the people from the competition have assured me they want a COPY ONLY – don’t send them your original artwork!

In the park where I take my son to play there are enough different trees to keep a photographer as well as a tree-climbing boy very happy indeed.   

We went over to Burghley the other day, back when the sun was shining, where there is a sculpture garden and the new Garden of Surprises, both of which have astonishing art installations set among trees, making you see the landscape in a completely different way.

The artist who set these strange figures up on a branch must love trees too, I think.

BBC – collective – christoph b? simply botiful review plus image gallery.

woke up to

on a clear morning

  earlier this week .

(Edit:  Ever since the first time I saw it, it has left me gobsmacked not only by its beauty, but by the stunning effect of its location. Driving up from the South, first you see it down in the dip, and register "oh, there he is!" . Then you drive down and around the corner and he disappears again. But the next time you see him he is not down in the dip at all, but up on the skyline, so much bigger and more impressive than you realised at first. 

The Angel, according to the artist, has three "functions" – one, to mark the memory of generations of miners who worked down under the ground in the darkness for a couple of hundred hears. Two, to represent a future hope for the area over which he looks. Three, to engage anyone who sees him with their own hopes and fears.

This weekend, for the first time, we not only drove past but stopped and went up close to look at him properly. He is vast, and was warm from the sun. He has an air of hope, stability, and some kind of non-specific spiritual "blessing" about him. )

My son is rather pleased to find that the Angel is the same age as he is. 

catapult magazine: unite.learn.serve