Blog on the Learig

  27 December 2025 On Christmas Eve 1925, one hundred years ago, AA Milne published the first of his stories about a ‘bear of little brain’ who lived in the Hundred Acre Wood along with his assorted friends. The original story was called, ‘The Wrong Sort of Bees’ and appeared in the London Evening news. It featured the first of Winnie-the-Pooh’s poems: Isn’t it funny How a bear likes honey? Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder why he does? The poem begins with a rhetorical question and ends with a scientific one. ‘I wonder why a bear likes honey?’ The poem is preceded by the bear’s scientific enquiry. He hears some buzzing. ‘That buzzing noise means something.’ he says and by a process of deduction, he concludes that   bees   are   making   honey so that he can eat it! He climbs the tree to get the honey. He falls down. He rolls   in the mud to disguise himself as a dark cloud. He gets a blue balloon to   camouflage himself as he’s carried up   ...

  26 December 2025 Joseph is often neglected in our Christmas celebrations. He has two beautiful gifts to share. Firstly, his silence.   Joseph never speaks. Mary speaks to the angel. Mary sings her Magnificat. And when Mary and Joseph discover the lost child in the Temple, it isn’t Joseph who reprimands him. It is Mary. Joseph is there in the Temple, in Egypt, in Nazareth and in Jerusalem. His presence confirms the purposes of God. He does what the angel says and every time he fulfils a prophecy. His presence protects, supports and encourages Mary in her vulnerability. But he doesn’t speak. Does it matter? Look what he did! Secondly, his disappearance. The shepherds notice him but the wise men do not. Simeon sings his song to Mary and Joseph but he only speaks to Mary. ‘Sorrow like a sharp sword will pierce your own heart also.’ Luke reveals Mary’s inner life but says nothing about Joseph’s. Did Joseph treasure all these things in his heart? He treasured Mary and the ...

  25 December 2025 – Christmas Day The Bible and the Koran both tell of Mary, the angel and the birth of Jesus. The two tales diverge. In one, we travel with Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem and the manger and in the other, we travel with Mary into the desert and the miraculous creation of an oasis. The most significant point of divergence is in the way speech is   put into the Christchild’s mouth . ‘Allah has made me blessed wherever I may be.’   Why are these two versions different?   How can we say one is truer than the other, when both tell of the mystery of God?   We struggle to see what God is doing in our world, what he is calling us to do in our lives.   Where is he to be found in our world – a manger, a desert, a baby who is for all the world a blessing? It is a mystery! Woven into the action of the angels and the shepherds, there is the stillness of the night, the stillness of the angels’ absence, Mary’s inner stillness and restraint, treasuri...

  24 December 2025 Christmas is not a happy time for everyone. I was visiting in the hospital and an older woman said to me, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ It’s a question which has a very straightforward answer, ‘You have done nothing to deserve this.’ Random things happen to us and, to be fair, very few people escape the dark night of the soul. Jesus makes this clear. His friends asked him, ‘Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ They thought that his impediment must have been the result of something he or his parents had done. Jesus makes an interesting reply. ‘Neither this man nor his parents   sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.’   This was a prelude to a healing miracle. Jesus made mud with his saliva and the earth, spread it on the blind man’s eyes and healed him. But not everyone is healed. My friend’s lament, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ was possibly the result of an inner realisation ...

  23 December 2025 This autumn, far-right protests and rallies, focused on immigration and the housing of migrants in local hotels, have been   weaponising Christianity. ‘Christ is King!’ is chanted. National flags are brandished. Crosses waved in the air. This political group is attempting to associate Christianity with nationalism. In other words, to belong to the nation is to acknowledge your Christian heritage and to value it over against other religions and people. There’s no acknowledgement that a percentage of migrants who make such a scary   journey to get to Britain are themselves Christians and some of them are fleeing from their own homes because as Christians they are being persecuted! There are two dangers. Firstly, the demonisation of migrants is an attempt to divide the nation and to create a ‘them and us’ scenario. Parallels with Nazi Germany are not hard to discern. Our nation is not so impoverished to resort to these unscrupulous strategies. Se...

  22 December 2025 For centuries, the Latin Vulgate was the official   version of the Bible used by the Church in the West. St. Jerome, who was commissioned to translate the Bible into Latin by the Pope in the late fourth century, translated the Greek, ‘Rejoice, highly favoured one’ as ‘Ave gratia plena’, ‘Hail, full of grace’. As a consequence, Mary was considered to be full of grace and having such a plenitude of grace was able to share it through the prayers of the faithful. But notice what has happened here. Instead of being the focus of God’s choice, the one who is highly favoured by God, she becomes the focus of other people and through her misappropriated plenitude of grace is considered worthy of their worship. Mary’s sanctity is not in being filled with grace. It is to be found in her obedience to the Word of God. Despite her perplexity, her fear and the uncertainty of   what lies before her, she says simply, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be...