Here goes...

I am not the kind of person who prays for people and they instantly glow or fall over. In fact most of the time after I have prayed for people, they smile politely, say thank you and nothing much seems to happen. I guess I hope it's been vaguely helpful and leave it at that. The other day I met someone I prayed for about three years ago. He told me that after that prayer he had been healed of a depression that he had endured for about 40 years. Now this doesn't happen very often. It certainly doesn't happen to my prayers very often. I dimly remember praying for him, and it seemed like most of the other times I've prayed for people – pleasant but a trifle disappointing. It was just an ordinary prayer, prayed because someone asked me to, with just a modicum of faith that he and I could muster - a very small modicum of faith on my part. Sore knees and headaches are one thing, but I'm not sure I really think God can heal clinical depression. But he did. And in some way,...

I thought this TV review from the Evening Standard tonight was telling and hopeful... ...while young men feed the beast in Edinburgh, a comic miracle is taking place on our television screens. Last night was the final episode of Rev, BBC's against-all-the-odds hit about an inner- London vicar. The comedy flowed from the kindly but flawed Rev, played by Tom Hollander. It was like Richard Curtis but with melancholy shadows. London's curious coalition of C of E congregations — parents trying to get their children into church schools, black gospel, alpha, and the homeless and oddball — forms a tableau of humanity. I'm sure the Bishop of London recognises it, although I am certain he would not compare himself to the worldly and menacing Archdeacon Robert, played by Simon McBurney. The struggle to be virtuous is the deepest human conflict and Rev is a painfully funny study of ambition, envy and loneliness as well as fellow feeling. Great novelists from Trollope onwards have fo...