Blog on the Learig

  11 June 2026 When Emily Cullen picked up her fifteen year old son from school, he had a big smile on his face. She was thankful. His English exam had gone well, she thought. Perhaps he remembered some Shakespeare quotes after all. When they met up, she discovered that the exam had gone well but not because of Shakespeare but because of her. Amazingly enough, she had written a poem about her son when he was eight years old and now that poem had appeared in her son’s English exam seven years later! She hadn’t been feeling good about her life. Her son was playing outside. She called him in for his dinner. He was writing something on the pavement with   a apiece of chalk. She looked more closely to see what he had written. ‘The world is great.’ She called her poem, ‘Envoi in Chalk’. The envoi refers to the contents of his chalked out words, ‘The world is great.’ The poet explained. ‘That message just elevated my whole day. It was just what I needed to remind me that ther...

  10 June 2026 In ‘The Guardian Weekly’, there was an interesting article entitled, ‘Visual Art’. It was written by Stuart Heritage and it was all about the art which is produced for children’s books. It celebrated the work of Quentin Blake, who famously illustrated the work of Roald Dahl and his recently opened ‘Centre for Illustration’. Like the piano accompanist playing for a singer or a cellist, the book illustrator has not been seen as an equal partner to the author of the book. Whilst this may be understandable in chapter books where the illustration is limited, it could hardly be the case in what we call picture books. Often the words of a picture book are very few but the illustrations are very fulsome. This is certainly the case with books for very young children. Often it is the illustrations which make the words come alive. In Julia Donaldson’s Gruffalo, it is Axel Scheffler’s brilliant depiction of the Gruffalo which has stuck in our heads. The article argues fo...

  9 June 2026 I was looking through our Church Hymnary, Fourth Edition and stumbled into the last section, ‘The Church Celebrates Oneness with the Church in Heaven’. It includes favourites like, ‘Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken’, ‘For all the Saints’   and ‘The Church’s One Foundation’. None of these hymns surprised me. However, of the twelve hymns in this section, three of them turned out to be taken from the Scottish Paraphrases 1781. They include, ‘Behold what Witnesses Unseen’ which is a paraphrase of Hebrews 12 which begins, ‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses …’ ‘Hark how the Adoring Hosts Above’ which is often sung to that magnificent tune, Desert, and ‘How Bright these Glorious Spirits Shine’   which is set to a Double Common Metre tune, are both paraphrases of passages taken from the book of Revelation which is all about the end times. It seemed surprising to me that a quarter of the hymns in this section were from an eighteenth century...

  8 June 2026 Initially, I couldn’t understand it. The Russians and Ukrainians were digging trenches to defend and attack each other. Could it be that warfare in the twenty-first century had regressed a hundred years to the battleground of the First World War and the Western Front? Whilst the trenches still remain, there have been two technological developments. The first is the drone and its capacity to earmark particular targets, damage infrastructure and human beings without the vulnerability of human contact. The second is the use of AI to create robots. Instead of human beings risking their lives to decimate the enemy, robots have been created literally to do the running instead. They do not share our vulnerability. If they are destroyed another can be built fairly quickly. In this way the human element of warfare is being removed. On the face of it, this appears to be   a good outcome. Human lives are not being sacrificed unnecessarily. But how far can we go with...

  7 June 2026 St. Benedict   was born in Nursia in Italy in 480 AD. He established a community of monks and drew up a book of rules to regulate the life of the monks.   He called it ‘a little rule for beginners’ . There are rules about clothes and shoes. It was the Abbot’s job to make sure that they fitted the monks properly. They weren’t allowed to throw their old clothes away. They were given to the poor. It was the job of the Abbot and the   community to wash the feet of visitors. ‘In the reception of poor men and pilgrims special attention should be shown, because in them is Christ more truly welcomed.’ Right at the heart of his rule book was love. He knew that rules can frighten people. They are afraid of breaking the rules and getting into trouble. But Benedict wanted to love people into doing good. Look at this example. It was difficult for some   monks to get up in the middle of the night for their prayers, so Benedict wrote in his Rule that th...

  6 June 2026 We have two sacraments – baptism and holy communion. The elements of water, bread and wine are ordinary but they are set apart to speak more eloquently about the grace of God. In this regard,   bread is a constant reminder of Jesus, the Bread of Life even if the Sacrament is not being celebrated. There are other ordinary things which speak about God and remind people of his love. The church building is one. Even if people do not belong to the kirk, they acknowledge a church building and may go on to think of its association with God. People have this effect too – the minister of Word and Sacrament, the elder and the parish visitor who come to the door as representatives of the Church, the Body of Christ. By their presence on the doorstep, they remind people about the Church, the story about Jesus and his presence among us. To what extent are buildings and people sacramental? They are ordinary things like water, bread and wine and in their offices, they sp...