Here goes...

The evening of June 13 th was an evening like any other in London – it had been a hot day, and the sun went down on a calm, gentle, night. That evening people went out for a meal, went to bed, stayed up talking, doing what people do in London on a warm summer’s evening. Yet that night was to change the lives of so many here in this Cathedral today. Since then, it has been a long six months. Many here grieve for loved ones, precious people who perished on that dreadful night. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts & uncles, cousins, sons and daughters. Today would have been the first birthday of one of the youngest victims of the fire. Many still struggle with their memories. There are still far too many living in hotels, in a kind of limbo, not sure of what the future holds. There are so many unresolved issues and questions, and it’s hard to live with uncertainty. Yet in the following days, in the middle of that unimaginable tragedy, we saw something extraordinary...

I have always struggled to understand what Christians mean by freedom. There is quite a lot in the Old  Testament  about  Israel  as free people, in  the  New Testament about how Christ sets us free, Christians talk a lot about freedom, and yet Christianity has always seemed to demand things like obedience, submission to God's will, adopting a moral code where certain things are right and certain things are off-limits, none of which really seems like freedom.   For a number of years now I've been pondering this question, and the result is a book which has just been published, entitled “Bound to be Free: the Paradox of Freedom” , published by Bloomsbury. At the risk of sounding a little arrogant I think I may have worked it out - at least to my own satisfaction! The problem is not so much a Christian understanding of freedom, but the secular way of thinking about the concept which most of us imbibe without even thinking about it. The boo...

In our community over the past few days we have been through a range of emotions that we rarely experience so close together. Even now as we meet and pray, there are people here in this church, in the surrounding streets wondering how to make sense of this.  How do you put into words what people here have experienced, the story of the past few days? First there was Shock. As we woke up on Wednesday morning, there was that numb feeling, incredulity that something like this could happen in our modern, C21st sophisticated city. Looking up at the Tower and imagining what the people in there was going through was almost unbearable and so hard to even imagine how awful that must be. Then there was Compassion. Alongside the tragedy, one of the remarkable things has been to see the amazing outpouring of compassion in this community over the past couple of days. It is as if that deep, God-given humanity in all of us has suddenly arisen to the surface and displayed itself in...

The other day, as part of my Holy Week spending time with those who experience the things Jesus experienced during his final week, I spent the day with homeless people. When you hear the ‘homeless’ what do you imagine? Probably fairly ragged, unkempt people with plastic bags, straggly beards and dirty clothes, people with little employment capacity, who had spent a good deal of their lives unemployed? Well there’s a fair bit of that but I found my preconceptions beginning to erode quite quickly. I’m ashamed to say I tweeted early that day that I was going to spend the day with ‘a bunch of homeless people’ to which one person replied that they were a bit uncomfortable with that description. And they were exactly right. Talking to several people over the day, I began to realise that ‘homeless’ is a fairly blunt category. This homeless drop-in centre in a church in central London had around 60 or so regulars but they were all there for different reasons. I spoke with one elderly woma...