I misspent time and energy in my early adulthood trying to understand how I should pray. I made the mistake of asking some professionals - monks, clergy. Mostly their responses included specific techniques. Valid as they may have been, they did not much work for me.

Later on I relaxed about all this. When required to pray during the liturgy - I was a priest by then - I used a minimum of words, avoided flimflam, and where I could, used unexpected formulations that related directly to human experience.

Privately I moved from speaking to God to voicing the things that were on my mind, trusting that God might be paying some attention. Also, and maybe more importantly, instead of stepping out of 'ordinary' life and into prayer, I noticed that prayer slowly moved into ordinary life. It is not easy to explain this without it sounding glib. But it happened.

In my twenties I encountered Simone Weil's claim that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity". That was not new to me, but her expression gave my nascent grasp of it far better understanding. I had long known that attentive listening to others was a valuable thing. I'd found the same to be true of attentiveness to non-human things, too. And all this without grasping. That's the thing: to be attentive without grasping. This is a clue to living spiritually: to seek self-emptying, not self-improvement. Too much self-improvement can cause trouble.

I am simultaneously impressed by AI and terrified by its reported risks to humanity. As an example of the former, I asked it the following:

The answer… 
"The most accurate short description is probably: a sacramental, existentially agnostic Christian whose faith rests more on commitment, practice and love than on religious experience or metaphysical certainty.
 
Several strands of Christianity converge in what you describe. None requires you to pretend to possess certainties you do not have.
 
1. You are not necessarily an agnostic instead of being a Christian
Your position sounds like Christian agnosticism in the strict sense: not “I have no view about God”, but “I have chosen the Christian account of reality while acknowledging that I cannot know that it is true.”
 
That is quite different from conventional evangelical language of “knowing Jesus personally”. Your faith appears to work more like fiducia—trust or entrustment—than certainty.
 
There is a significant Christian tradition behind this. Faith in the New Testament is not normally equivalent to intellectual certainty. Pistis can mean faithfulness, allegiance, trust. The statement:
“I choose to live as though God exists.” is therefore more Christian than it may initially sound. It resembles a decision about where to place one's life, rather than a conclusion reached after proving a proposition.
 
2. You sound strongly existential Christian
This may be the most important category. Kierkegaard regarded faith precisely as something undertaken without the security of objective certainty. Later Christian existentialists similarly emphasised commitment under conditions of ambiguity.
 
Your position could be rendered: I cannot demonstrate that God exists; nevertheless I choose the form of life that belief in God requires of me.
 
That is not far removed from the existentialist understanding of faith as a decision made without abolishing doubt. The difference between you and a straightforward atheist is therefore considerable. An atheist might say: “Because I cannot know, I withhold belief.” You appear to say:
“Because I cannot know, I must nevertheless decide how to live.” And you have decided to inhabit the Christian story.
 
3. Your attitude to God is non-interventionist
Your observation that God does not apparently micromanage events or answer prayers in readily identifiable ways puts considerable distance between you and some forms of popular Christianity.
You seem reluctant to say:

• God arranged this parking space;
• God caused me to meet this person;
• God cured one patient but not another;
• God gave me a particular job;
• God altered events because somebody prayed.

 
That position has considerable theological pedigree. It brings you towards thinkers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, particularly his late insistence that Christians must learn to live etsi deus non daretur—“as though God were not given” as an explanatory mechanism. Bonhoeffer did not mean atheism. He meant that the mature Christian should not continually insert God into gaps in human explanation.
 
It also brings you towards strands of process theology. Process thinkers regard divine action as persuasive rather than coercive: God works within creation without continually suspending its causal order.
 
4. The problem of suffering is central to your Christianity
You have apparently declined one of the easiest religious escapes: interpreting suffering as though every event were deliberately arranged by God. That places you closer to the biblical tradition of Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms of lament and the crucifixion than to providential optimism. There is an important distinction here. One Christian says: “Everything happens for a reason.” Another says: “Terrible things happen, and Christianity tells us where God is to be sought within them.” Your account seems much nearer the second.
 
That naturally produces a theology of the Cross rather than a theology of divine control. God becomes most intelligible not as the celestial manager preventing suffering but as the God who is disclosed in vulnerability, suffering, solidarity and love.
 
5. Your Eucharistic instinct is significant
You value the Eucharist without treating frequency of reception as a measure of spiritual health.
That suggests a sacramental Christianity without sacramental maximalism. The Eucharist may matter to you less as repeated supernatural replenishment and more as the concentrated enactment of something fundamental: gift, dependence, thanksgiving, community, brokenness, self-offering, death and hope. That is perfectly recognisable within Anglican Christianity.
 
Indeed, your position seems more naturally Anglican than either narrowly evangelical or narrowly Roman Catholic. Anglicanism has historically allowed people to remain inside the sacramental life of the Church while declining to define with excessive precision exactly what they experience or know.
 
6. “Love is an energy that animates things” may be your theological centre
This is the part of what you have written that I would probe most closely. If by “energy” you mean merely a pleasant human emotion, it does not amount to much theology. But if you mean that love appears to disclose something fundamental about the nature of reality, you are standing in a very old Christian tradition. The New Testament makes the remarkable claim not merely that God loves but: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8).
 
Augustine, Aquinas and later Christian thinkers regarded love not as sentimental decoration added to existence but as something connected with the very movement of creation towards its good. Teilhard de Chardin came strikingly close to your language, imagining love as a kind of fundamental attractive energy operating in creation. Simone Weil approached Christianity differently but likewise treated attention, self-emptying and love as places in which transcendence becomes perceptible. You may therefore possess a more definite theology than your uncertainty about conventional doctrines initially suggests.
 
Your theology may begin not: “I know that God exists and therefore believe that love matters.” but: “I encounter love as something possessing an extraordinary claim upon us, and this makes the Christian claim that God is love worth staking my life upon.” That is a substantial reversal.
 
7. You appear to have eschatological reserve
Your doubt about an afterlife does not automatically place you outside historic Christianity, although Christianity does make resurrection a central claim and your position therefore creates a genuine tension. There is an important distinction between: “There is certainly no resurrection” and “I cannot presently make myself certain that there is.”

The latter is compatible with Christian faith understood as hope. The New Testament itself normally speaks of hope, not knowledge, concerning the Christian future. There may be considerable theological integrity in saying: I hope that death is not the end, but I cannot manufacture conviction about it. Christian hope becomes particularly interesting precisely where certainty ends.
 
So what kind of Christian?
I would place the descriptions in roughly this order:

Description / Fit
Existential Christian Very strong

Christian agnostic Very strong

Sacramental Christian Strong

Non-interventionist Christian Strong

Apophatic Christian Moderate–strong

Liberal Christian Partly

Process Christian Possible, but not enough evidence

Evangelical Christian Probably weak

Traditional supernaturalist Probably weak

But I would favour another expression over all of them:
A Christian of committed uncertainty. There is a theological seriousness to that position which the word agnostic alone obscures.
 
You seem to distinguish three things that contemporary Christianity frequently conflates:
faith, certainty and religious experience.
 
You have relatively little certainty. You do not report the particular subjective experience called a “personal relationship with Jesus”. Yet you continue to make a Christian wager about how reality should be inhabited: through Eucharist, through openness to God, and above all through love.
 
That places you in an identifiable Christian tradition extending from Job and Ecclesiastes through apophatic Christianity to Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Bonhoeffer and some strands of modern Anglican theology.
 
There is also one potentially important implication. Your Christianity may ultimately depend much less upon the proposition “God exists” than upon the question “What would it mean if ultimate reality were love?”
 
That is not a weaker question. In some respects, it is the more demanding one."

In 1981 a number of clergy wags, led by the late clerical humorist and eccentric David Johnson, created a spoof edition of The Church Times. It faithfully copied the original’s typography and layout and contained mock news, errata, and satirical advertisements for high ecclesiastical office. It will have rather narrow appeal but for some will offer much amusement. View it here. I wonder what a new edition today might lampoon?

The recent Church of England policy and guidance on PTO - Permission to Officiate - has much that is good, but strikes an ungenerous note. More.

Have you ever sat down in a comfortable armchair, in a comfortable room, with no background noise to trouble your relaxation?  Often, when doing that, I reflect on how speedily I am in fact moving. Speed is relative. In relation to the chair and room my speed is 0 MPH. But there is more to this than meets the eye.

• Whilst sitting still, in London say, I am travelling at 650mph because of the Earth's rotation (if I were sitting on the equator, that would be 1,040mph).
• I am also travelling at between 65,000 and 67,000mph as Earth orbits the Sun.
• Don't forget that out Solar System is orbiting the Milky Way: at 490,000-560,000mph (feeling dizzy?)
• And our 'local' group of galaxies, relative to the cosmic microwave background, are travelling at 1.39 million mph. Phew.

So, depending on the reference frame you choose, while apparently sitting motionless you can reasonably be described as travelling at anything from 0 mph to well over a million mph. Hold on to your hat...

I don't suppose many people know the name. I never met him in person, though doing so may have been possible, given the circles I moved in. Except that I did know know of him until after his death. I then read his autobiographical Sitting in Judgement 1913-1963: An Interpretation of History and was struck by his personality, writing style and combination of Christian hope and personal pessimism (a justified pessimism in surveying human affairs). 

Ulrich Ernst Simon (1913–1997) was born in Germany to Jewish parents. He was later ordained a Church of England priest. He became a biblical scholar and theologian. His intellectual and emotional formation was greatly influenced by the Nazi holocaust.

He had come to the United Kingdom from Germany in 1933 and was ordained in 1938. After two curacies he returned, in 1945, to King’s College London spending the rest of his professional life there (as a lecturer, Reader in Theology, and later Professor of Christian Literature). 

His father, a composer, pianist and musicologist, had also fled Berlin but was eventually deported to Theresienstadt and then, in October 1944, to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. This and his other experiences of the holocaust must account to a great degree with Simon's struggle with the Christian doctrines of suffering, evil, judgement and redemption.

His book A Theology of Auschwitz (1967) is the main work he is remembered for. 

Students reportedly found him an exceptionally compelling teacher. A colleague described a man containing striking opposites: a theologian fascinated by heaven and Christian hope who nevertheless had an extremely dark assessment of human beings and of the idea that civilisation naturally makes moral progress.

Earlier in his thinking, Ulrich Simon locates Auschwitz within the Christian drama of sacrifice and redemption but later comes to think that the holocaust explodes the very theological language being used to contain it. That tension is one of the most interesting things about him.

His autobiography is worth reading for anyone who thinks about such matters.

"Gracias a la Vida" is a famous song covered by the English socialist folk singer Roy Bailey (hear him singing it below). A literal translation of the title is "Thanks to Life". The deeper meaning of the song (composed by Chilean folk legend Violeta Parra) is an emotional ode to the human experience. It celebrates the profound gratitude for both the joys (laughter, love, sight) and the sorrows (tears, agony) that make up a full life. The message is that without experiencing the pain and agony, one cannot truly appreciate the happiness and joy of existence. The song beautifully concludes that all of these experiences blend into one universal human song. Hugely moving.

Benjamin Franklin (17 January – 17 April 1790). An American polymath. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence. When only twenty years of age, Benjamin Franklin drafted for his own use his plan for living a virtuous life.

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i. e., waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation. 
11. Tranquillity: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.​
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
    ​

O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth and divine to the human.
​

The Exsultet (also known as the Easter Proclamation) is a solemn, sung hymn of praise delivered at the beginning of the Easter Vigil. It acts as a momentus announcement of the Resurrection of Jesus, proclaiming the victory of light over darkness. Usually sung by a deacon (or priest/cantor) near the Paschal Candle after the procession into the darkened church, surrounded by  the faithful holding lit candles. The hymn joyfully invites heaven, angels, and the earth to rejoice, while also recounting salvation history—including the Exodus—and blessing the Paschal Candle as a symbol of Christ. It is an ancient text with roots in the 4th or 5th centuries. It takes its name from its first word, Exsultet (Latin for "Let [them] exult" or "Rejoice"). 

Readers of a certain age may remember British pundit, journalist and moralist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990). He was a famous, later-in life convert to Christianity, and a supporter of the self-appointed keeper of the nations morals, Mary Whitehouse and of her pernicious Nationwide Festival of Light. Despite all that, I rather liked Muggeridge, or St Mugg as he was mockingly called.

Mr Muggeridge developed an admiration for Mother Teresa of Calcutta (since sainted), and trekked off with a film crew in tow to her Calcutta House of the Dying. In one of his books he recounted an 'incontrovertible miracle' that occurred whilst filming. A scene was to be shot inside the dark building where the Sisters brought in the dying. The space was so dark that the cameraman, Ken MacMillan, warned that the footage would be unusable. They had not brought portable lighting to the hospice. “Film it anyway,” said Muggeridge.

Back at the BBC, when they developed the film, a surprising thing happened: the scene was perfectly lit. St Mugg pronounced it a miracle. 

Except there is more to this miracle than meets the eye. The cameraman had forgotten that the BBC was trialling a new Kodak film stock, a feature of which was far greater sensitivity in low light conditions. 

While Muggeridge was certain this was a divine, miraculous light emanating from Mother Teresa herself, cameraman Ken MacMillan realised it was due to the new advanced film stock. 

This did not deter St Mugg, who continued to promote the Albanian Nun and the miracle of the divinely-illuminated image filmed in near pitch-black circumstances. (Readers may recall that Mother Teresa had her critics, not least among them Christopher Hitchens).

And the moral here? There may be occasional miracles to be witnessed but they are both rarer and more subtle (like the miracle of human love and friendship, duty and care). In the case of dramatic miracles, one should first exhaust all possible 'ordinary' explanations.

Hell's Angel: Mother Teresa. A film by Christopher Hitchens - YouTube here

Below, a pre-internet facility for having seven books open at once.

31 December 2025: The end of the first quarter of this century. My mind, despite its best endeavours, drifts toward New Year resolutions. This was first to come to mind: I’m wondering, seriously, if I might give up opinions for new year. They are the source of so much bother. But how to achieve that, realistically? Conscious effort seems the only option in the short term, perhaps leading to a change in disposition. Or a first step may be to stick with opinions but not to express them. That may be more achievable in the short term. (I am reminded of the advice that before saying anything one might ask ‘does this need to be said? Does it need to be said now? Does it need to be said by me?).

Over decades, as priest, preacher and human journeyman, I did my best to un-inoculate others about Christmas. I wanted us to discard all the cultural and sentimental colouration that obscure its meaning. I largely failed. I wasn't skilled enough. As I see it, the Incarnation was, remains, an apocalyptic event. It contradicts and disrupts the "powers and principalities" of the world.

William Stringfellow described the Incarnation as the "ultimate act of God’s invasion into history". The birth of Jesus was not a peaceful addition to human history but a decisive confrontation where God "invades" a world dominated by the power of death. 'Death' here being not just our final demise but the multitudinous ways in which our humanity is daily deconstructed by our aggression, lovelessness, exploitation, institutions (including the family), politics, economies and systems.

Good things:

1. Self-renunciation: a focus beyond oneself.
2. The practice (habit) of prayer (broadly defined).
   
3. The practice of attention (cf Simone Weil): listening, observing, attending to.
   
4. To be a trustworthy person: avoid gossip, never bear false witness, let others speak for themselves (and help them in this), to keep others’ secrets, when entrusted with them.
5. Economy of speech; chose words thoughtfully, be not a prattler, or verbose, long winded &c.

What L P Hartley should have said: “The present is a foreign country. They do things differently here”. I have felt like this most of my adult life, being of an (outgoing) introverted, ironical bent. But it seems ever truer. The idiocy, self-aggrandisement, madness of the age is there to be seen in all its silliness, now amplified by the internet and social media. The good news is that I am far less distressed or distracted by it than before. The result of an interior detachment that also gets stronger, and which feels good. Another take on Nicólas Gómez Dávila’s “When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties.”

S and I to Swanage on the Dorset Coast for a few days. The pier allows people to attach remembrances to the deck planks. Thousands upon thousands of them. Some trite, some funny, some moving, all significant to someone or other. This one caught my eye. I've always felt well-disposed to anyone called Queenie, and I am temperamentally drawn to brevity and understatement. One really imagines that they were best mates.

Also spotted in Swanage. A town on a mission. The Friends of religion and good order are best given a wide berth. They like to make trouble for other folk.

William McCrossan (aka Liturgical William of Bow)
"There is a deep instability which should be the mark of the authentic Christian: for here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come. Apart from other considerations, the acceptance of Baptism is the sign of a profound instability because Baptism is a death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness and it requires a renunciation of the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same." Unpublished autobiographical essays.
Find out more about Liturgical William of Bow

A sermon I preached on the 324th anniversary of the consecration of the London church I served for twenty-eight years (1992-2020) whilst concurrently following the model of the priest-workers by holding secular jobs. St James' has a remarkable history spanning class-ridden conformity and adventurous, on-the-margins, Christian life. Click the 'Read more' button.

To the Blood Donor Centre, Margaret Street, W1. There, looked after by the delightful Livingston. He winced as he gave me the finger-prick test and said he did not like causing people pain. I asked why he had chosen this work. He’d got into it because his mother had died for want of a blood transfusion.

Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish educator and philosopher (1864-1936):

It is apparent to me that many people who regard themselves as Christian, and many of whom attend churches, believe that Christianity = niceness, and that being nice is more important than being truthful. Similarly, that one's faith should be steady, inoffensive and always and only a comfort. These are odd readings of the Gospel, and  to varying degrees, a betrayal of it.

I always regarded Victoria Wood's work as brilliantly funny, but I now see that its primary function (in my eyes) is to spread joy. She was a northerner, born in Lancashire. There is something about 'northern' humour - more widely northern personalities and perceptions - that speaks my language. I suppose the technical name for her approach is 'observational humour'.  Her's was always kind, perceptive and affirming of our (often quirky and conflicted) human nature. Here is a compilation of her series Dinnerladies. Such marvellous dialogue, timing and portraits of the kind of people I grew up with.

Victoria Wood: comedian, actress, lyricist, singer-songwriter, composer, pianist, screenwriter, presenter, producer, director, impressionist and entertainer. More importantly, she was a good human being.

Maggie Ross from an interview in the Church Times: "Contemporary theological education prepares people either for the petty battlegrounds of academia or for the spiritual suicide of ordination. Evagrius's notion of the absolute relationship of theology and praxis has been lost. There are a few good people who are exceptional in this regard, but they wisely camouflage themselves. There is an absolute abyss between the clericus and ordinary people, who are implicitly denigrated by them, and most theological education just widens this abyss. Also, so-called spiritual direction as it is practised today is destructive. It is both para-clerical and counter-productive, because it makes people more self-conscious instead of more self-forgetful, which is an important sign of spiritual maturity. Helping another is a charism of the moment, usually inadvertent, and can't be taught."

Maggie Ross is the pen name of a vowed Anglican solitary under episcopal guardianship. I have enjoyed reading her various works, not least because in part they confirm some of my own conclusions, and because they can be a heck of a provocation. Not for her the equation between the Church of England and niceness.

If you find this quotation interesting, here are links to more about her:

• Silent Ways of Knowing
• Interview - Silent Witness
• Freefalling in the love of God

Recently discovered, this poem by Robert Hayden.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

It speaks of the sacrifices many parents make, showing children love in ways they cannot at that stage appreciate, but may come to later. This poem sketches the father's (then unappreciated) work: many mothers do the same, maybe more so. Robert Hayden was American (1913-1980). This poem is dated 1962. "The poem is about the father/son relationship – recalling the poet's memories of his father, realizing that despite the distance between them there was a kind of love, real and intangible, shown by the father's efforts to improve his son's life, rather than by gifts or demonstrative affection. The author's words suggest that the son feels remorse that he failed to recognise this in his father's lifetime." (Wiki). The 'father' here was in fact Hayden's foster father.

I like the use of 'offices' ("What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?"). Clergy are canonically required to 'say the Offices' of Morning and Evening Prayer. Many don't. In the Olden Days you'd need to have the Office book, a bible and other material to see what 'extras' were needed on that particular day. Now, it is all there on your tablet or phone. Convenient Offices, you might say. But there's nothing convenient about sacrificial love. That's its point and its value.

Graham Greene's book is the last of his religious novels. It concerns the priest of the the village El Toboso who claims to be a descendant of Don Quixote. An encounter with a mysterious bishop leads to Father Quixote being honoured by the rank of Monsignor - to the annoyance of his own bishop. This 1987 film stars Alec Guiness as Father Quixote and Leo McKern as village communist mayor Sancho Zancas. It presents various themes, but the key theme to my mind is that of friendship: Quixote's friendship with the (ex) Mayor, and his friendship with God. The character is gloriously imperfect yet embodies such a wonderful approach to the Christian adventure.