Here goes...

In the current crisis around Coronavirus, I have been reflecting on St Paul’s trinity of Christian virtues: Faith, Hope and Love, and how they might frame our Christian response to the crisis in our communities: FAITH : We are in uncharted territory where there is no clear trajectory for spread of Coronavirus and no obvious cure as yet. Yet our Christian faith tells us that we can trust the God who holds our times in his hands. We do not believe that the world is governed by blind fate or random chance but Providence – the sure and trustworthy hand of the God of Jesus Christ working his purposes out through all the confusing and bewildering swings of history. Fear can be as infectious as the disease, so why don’t we try to counter it with the even more infectious influence of faith? Faith, especially during this time of Lent, urges us to pray with greater urgency, as the church has always done in times like this in the past, for those at the frontline in the NHS, for the most vu

Lent is traditionally a time we think about sin. Of course, we think we know what sin is, who are the saints and who are the sinners. Jimmy Saville & Harvey Weinstein = sinners. Mother Teresa & Jean Vanier = saints.   Or so it seemed.  What Jean Vanier did with  l’Arche  was remarkable, as I tried to explain  in an article I wrote in Unherd  when he died. To create a set of communities across the world based on the conviction that mental or physical abilities bear no relation to the value and beauty of an individual human being was extraordinary. So the news that over a period of 35 years, he abused at least six different women is devastating, first and foremost to the women who suffered at his hands, who still live with the effects of his behaviour, but in a lesser way for the many who thought of him as someone as near as you might get to a modern saint. The discovery that someone who displayed a level of compassion and love beyond which most of us can manage, was al