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Wednesday, 29 October 2025

The Spirit intercedes with groans that words cannot express

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Andrew’s Wickford:

I wonder how often you find yourself lost for words. While some of us are more garrulous than others, it is an experience that comes to us all, particularly when we have experiences that either raise us to the heights or plunge us into the depths.

I wonder how often you have had that the experience of being lost for words as you pray. In prayer, it is possible that we might feel inadequate as we have heard others pray publicly and think that we are unable to pray as eloquently, so may not pray at all. Equally, we may experience what artists and writers experience, that is the difficulty of beginning – of putting words together or making marks on a pristine page. Equally, in prayer, we may have the experience of feeling that our words cannot match the experience we are having, whether or exaltation or depression. Whatever the reason, we are promised in today’s New Testament reading (Romans 8:26-30) that the Holy Spirit will help us in such moments.

St Paul acknowledges in this passage that such times come; that there are times when we find it hard to pray. We do not know how to pray he writes to the Church in Rome (Romans 8. 26) but in those times the Holy Spirit himself comes to help us by pleading with God for us in groans that words cannot express.

We are often quite restrained in our relationship with God and in our praying. Therefore, we will often praise God and say that we will obey or follow him but we rarely argue, protest, complain or question him, at least not publicly. Yet here Paul is saying that the Holy Spirit wishes to help us express our deepest feelings – the groans that words cannot express - to God. Doing so is part of our coming to know God more deeply.

Words, themselves, are sometimes inadequate to express how we feel, which may be why St Paul speaks here of groans that words cannot express. We will all have heard, for example, of the practice in some cultures of Keening. Keening can mean making any long, sad, or wailing sound but is, most famously, the act of making a loud, high-pitched lament for the dead in the Gaelic tradition of Ireland and Scotland. As a ritualized form of mourning involving crying, wailing, and singing over a deceased person, it recognises that words cannot express our grief in the moment of death and that what is needed to feel adequate to the moment are groans that words cannot express.

I had a similar experience following the untimely death of my brother when, at the airport in Pristina towards which the plane on which he had been travelling had been headed, I heard stories of the impact he had had on people in the Disaster Response Team with which he had been working in Kosovo and on the Kosovan people whom he had been helping to rebuild their homes following the conflict in their country. As those stories were told, all I could do was to cry continually; both at the sense of loss and because of a sense that God had received my brother Nick into his presence saying ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’. On that occasion, my tears were the groans that words cannot express.

I had the opposite experience as a young Christian when, following a service, I spent along time confessing by sins to God and then felt an overwhelming sense of joy that meant I was laughing continuously without being able to stop. I was at a campsite at the base of the Malvern Hills at the time and spent the evening wandering around that beautiful site laughing uncontrollably because of the sense of joy that words could not express that God had put into my heart that night.

Being lost for words is not a problem when it comes to prayer, instead it can be an opportunity for us to become open to God in a new way that allows emotions, whether of joy or grief, to flow through us and from us in ways that touch both the depths and heights of our emotions.

Next time you encounter that sense of being lost for words when you are praying ask the Spirit to help you in your weakness, as you do not know how to pray as you ought, and the very Spirit will intercede in you with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, will know what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Victoria Williams - Holy Spirit.

Sunday, 26 October 2025

Windows on the world (542)


Colchester, 2025

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Grigory Lvovsky - Cherubic Hymn.

Jubilee - The work of releasing others from sin and debt

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Catherine’s Wickford:

When we have a General or Local Election, I wonder whether you read the manifestos of the candidates that you are able to vote for. I guess that most of us don’t. Often, they are quite wordy and many people don’t believe a word that is written in them.

The political parties know this, as is demonstrated by this quote from a post entitled Why manifestos still matter (even if nobody reads them) from Labour List:

“Given the amount of time and effort that goes into producing election manifestos, the number of people who actually read them is frighteningly small. Every campaign, parties make determined efforts to get them onto shelves but their sales hardly threaten JK Rowling or even the authors of well-known political diaries (still available in all good book shops) ….

But for the millions of voters who decide the election outcome … well for the overwhelming majority, life’s too short.” (http://labourlist.org/2013/02/why-manifestos-still-matter-even-if-nobody-reads-them/)

The passage that Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth the morning we have just heard about (Luke 4: 16 - 24) was the manifesto for his ministry and for the kingdom of God. We would do well not to ignore this manifesto because what Jesus spoke about here, he actually did in the course of his ministry. He did exactly what it says on the tin, as the advert goes.

Jesus’ manifesto is taken from Isaiah 61 and is all about release. Release from poverty, imprisonment, blindness and oppression. What Jesus is proclaiming would have been recognised by his hearers as the announcement of the Year of Jubilee – “the time when the Lord shall come to save his people.”

The word ‘jubilee’ stems from the Hebrew word ‘Yobel’, which refers to the ram or ram’s horn with which jubilee years were proclaimed. In Leviticus it states that such a horn or trumpet is to be blown on the tenth day of the seventh month after the lapse of ‘seven Sabbaths of years’ (49 years) as a proclamation of liberty throughout the land of the tribes of Israel. The year of jubilee was a consecrated year of ‘Sabbath-rest’ and liberty. During this year all debts were cancelled, lands were restored to their original owners and family members were restored to one another.

The people listening to Jesus knew about Jubilee but had never heard anything like his statement before. What Jesus was saying and how he was saying it was astonishing. They had heard teachers talk of the law before but this was something so amazing that they were in awe. Jesus was in another league because he claimed to be the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Isaiah 61:1–2.

Jesus stated that he had come to ‘proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18–19). That is the year of jubilee and so Jesus proclaimed his coming and the coming of God’s kingdom as the time of Jubilee – a time of release for all people from those things that enslave us and trap us.

Each one of us is a slave to sin and blind to the truth about God because we have chosen to live selfish lives turning our backs on God and the way of life that he had created for human beings to live. In turning away from God’s ways, we do not do away with gods altogether instead our desires run riot and we become slaves to them worshipping other gods; whether they come in the form of money, sex, celebrity or whatever.

Jesus comes to free us from all of these enslavements and to open our eyes to the way in which God created human beings to live; loving God with all our being and loving our neighbours as ourselves.

This isn’t something that is just for us as individuals however. It is also something which can impact all of society. After all, the Old Testament Jubilee was intended for the nation of Israel, not simply individuals within it. A contemporary example of this happening in practice is Debt Justice, formerly the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which is part of a global movement demanding freedom from the slavery of unjust debts and a new financial system that puts people first. Originally inspired by the ancient concept of ‘jubilee’, Debt Justice works for a world where debt is no longer used as a form of power by which the rich exploit the poor. Freedom from debt slavery is a necessary step towards a world in which our common resources are used to realise equality, justice and human dignity.

We can see from all this that, in order to understand what our release means, we need to be people who know and understand the Bible. Chapter 4 of Luke’s gospel shows us clearly that Jesus was immersed in the Hebrew scriptures and saw them as speaking about himself. When he was tempted by the Devil at the beginning of Chapter 4, he defended himself by quoting from the Bible. In that passage he used the Bible to tell the Devil what he will not be like and here, in the synagogue, he used the Bible to tell everyone what he will be like. We can do the same if we read and understand what God is saying to us in the Bible both about those things from which our lives need to be freed and those things to which we need to dedicate our lives, talents and time.

The people who heard Jesus were, initially, impressed by what he said but as they realised that Jesus intended this Jubilee to be for all people they rejected him and tried to kill him. What will our response to Jesus’ manifesto be? Will it be the rejection that he experienced from the people of Nazareth? Will it be the apathy and disbelief that we accord to most political manifestos? Will it be the cynicism or distrust that some feel towards campaigns like Debt Justice? Or will it be acceptance of the release from slavery to sin that Jesus offers to us and involvement in his work of releasing others from sin and from debt? Amen.

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Bruce Cockburn - Call It Democracy.

Saturday, 25 October 2025

International Times: Scrappy and unconventional and paradoxical

My latest interview for International Times is with artist, poet, priest Spencer Reece:

'So long ago, a scared, insecure American, studying at the University of York for a one-year graduate MA on the work of the Metaphysical poets, I stumbled into the life and work of George Herbert and it left a permanent mark on me. He is my hero. A guide. I wanted, and I don’t even really understand why completely, to be him. And here we are, at sixty-two, and I have become both poet and priest in the most secular time ever. I believe in the church, and I believe in poetry and I still feel George Herbert close to me, talking to me.'

For more on Spencer Reece, read my review for Stride Magazine, of his latest poetry collection, 'Acts' - https://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2024/06/spiritual-suitcases.html.

My earlier pieces for IT are an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a profile of singer-songwriter Bill Fay, plus reviews of: 'Down River: In Search of David Ackles' by Mark Brend'Headwater' by Rev Simpkins; 'The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art' by Jonathan A. Anderson; 'Breaking Lines' at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, albums by Deacon Blue, Mumford and Sons, and Andrew Rumsey, also by Joy Oladokun and Michael Kiwanaku; 'Nolan's Africa' by Andrew Turley; Mavis Staples in concert at Union Chapel; T Bone Burnett's 'The Other Side' and Peter Case live in Leytonstone; Helaine Blumenfeld's 'Together' exhibition, 'What Is and Might Be and then Otherwise' by David Miller; 'Giacometti in Paris' by Michael Peppiatt, the first Pissabed Prophet album; and 'Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord', a book which derives from a 2017 symposium organised by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art.

Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford in 2022. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

IT have also published several of my poems, including 'The ABC of creativity', which covers attention, beginning and creation, and 'The Edge of Chaos', a state of existence poem. Also published have been three poems from my 'Five Trios' series. 'Barking' is about St Margaret’s Barking and Barking Abbey and draws on my time as a curate at St Margaret's. 'Bradwell' is a celebration of the history of the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, the Othona Community, and of pilgrimage to those places. Broomfield in Essex became a village of artists following the arrival of Revd John Rutherford in 1930. His daughter, the artist Rosemary Rutherford, also moved with them and made the vicarage a base for her artwork including paintings and stained glass. Then, Gwynneth Holt and Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones moved to Broomfield in 1949 where they shared a large studio in their garden and both achieved high personal success. 'Broomfield' reviews their stories, work, legacy and motivations.

To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'.

I am among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a recent anthology from Amethyst Press. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.

'Five Trios' is a series of poems on thin places and sacred spaces in the Diocese of Chelmsford. The five poems in the series are:
These poems have been published by Amethyst Review and International Times.

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Spencer Reece - The Upper Room.

Wednesday, 22 October 2025

Windows on the world (541)


Thaxted, 2025

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Mavis Staples - Sad And Beautiful World.

 

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

Mars: Thaxted and Chelmsford Cathedral




















Today began with a DAC visit to Thaxted where Gustav Holst wrote much of 'The Planets' Suite and ended at Chelmsford Cathedral beneath Luke Jerram's Mars: War & Peace installation, a reminder of 'Mars, Bringer of War' from 'The Planets' Suite. Beneath the Mars installation, Francis Spufford gave a lecture entitled 'War (What Is It Good For?)'.

Gustav Holst first visited Thaxted in 1913 when on a walking holiday in north-west Essex. He decided he must return. The next year he and his wife rented a cottage in Monk Street, a small hamlet south of Thaxted. It was here that he composed much of his suite “The Planets.”

Conrad Noel, the vicar of Thaxted, and Holst soon became friends with Holst taking a great interest in the church choir. In 1916 Gustav organised a Whitsun Festival in the church. He taught music at Saint Paul’s Girls School, James Allen’s Girls School and was Director of Music at Morley College and some students from all those institutions came to Thaxted to be part of the festival. The Festival in this form was repeated in 1917 and 1918.

In 1917 the family moved into Thaxted to live in “The Steps”, 19 Town Street. A blue plaque is beside the front door. In those days it was a quiet place to work. Holst wrote several pieces specially for Thaxted including “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day.”

The Whitsuntide festival ceased after 1918. Holst was abroad for much of the year working for the YMCA, undertaking the role of Musical Organiser for troops of the Army of the Black Sea. From 1920 the Whitsuntide Festivals continued in various London Churches, Canterbury Cathedral and finally Chichester Cathedral. Yet, in Thaxted the tradition of great music in the church continued. Many nationally famous orchestras and musicians came to play. Eventually a music festival in the months of June and July was restarted in 1980 and flourishes still today as the Thaxted Festival Foundation.

Holst continued to take an important part in the music in the Parish Church in many ways. This included playing the Lincoln organ which has now been restored.

After a head-injury in February 1923, Holst began to show the signs of overwork and, on strict medical advice, retired back to his beloved Thaxted for a long holiday, spending only one day a week in London. He continued to be involved with the Parish Church and its choir up until 1925 when he left Thaxted to live in at Brook End, a large Elizabethan house, some distance from Thaxted.

Thaxted Church is one of the grandest in the county of Essex, 183 feet long and 87 feet wide, and so beautiful that it may well claim to be the Cathedral of Essex. The Church stands on a hill and dominates the town. From whichever direction the visitor approaches, the splendid spire can be seen many miles away. It has been described as the finest parish church in the country, and has both beauty and grandeur. 

The building began in 1340, and its growth continued through our great building centuries till the Reformation, and the result is a proud example of English architecture. It was completed in 1510. Perfect balance is achieved with the aisles and transepts, chapels and the two porches, the King's and the Duke's, for Edward the Fourth gave the one with his arms on it (North porch), and Lionel, Duke of Clarence gave the other marked with his coronet (South porch). Both porches are vaulted, and both have a spiral stair leading to a room above and ending in a turret. The Church was built in the form of a cathedral, with a fine crossing between the main body and the chancel. The hexagonal pulpit, with canopy and ogee-shaped base, dates from c.1680. The roof is early 16th century and comprises six bays.

The chancel is flanked by two side chapels. The left or North side is dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury, and is generally called 'the Becket chapel'. The right or South side is dedicated to Jesus' mother, Mary, and his maternal grandmother, Ann. Formally known as the chapel of 'Our Lady and Our Lady Anne, it is generally called 'the Lady chapel'.

The chapel in the south transept is dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria, who was condemned to death in 800AD nailed to a cart wheel. This area is now used as the Vestry but the statue to St Catherine can still be seen above the screen. The chapel in the north transept is dedicated to St Laurence, deacon of Rome, but has also been known as Trinity Aisle, and the Singers' Chapel. Since 1858 the chapel has been the home of the Lincoln Organ.

There are three organs: the largest was built by Henry Lincoln in 1820 and came here from St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, London, in 1858. The smallest 'Conrad Noel Memorial Organ' beneath the tower arch was built in 1952 by Cedric Arnold with money raised on the death of the late Fr Conrad Noel, vicar of Thaxted 1910-42. The Thaxted Music Festival has a Makin electronic organ which is located in front of the Tower and is used by the church for most of its music.

The organ built by Henry Lincoln around 1820 was rarely played due to its failing condition and its need of restoration. It was originally built for St. John's Chapel, Bedford Row, London but moved to Thaxted in 1858, and was in active use here until the 1960s. Over the 150 years in Thaxted, the instrument was not repaired or altered. The Organ was finally restored fully in 2013/2014 and returned to its place in the church during 2014. It will become an important musical resource for scholars around the country.

I was glad to see that a new and improved location has been found for their painting by Stanley Clifford-Smith, the most mystical of the Great Bardfield artists.

Clifford-Smith was an active member of the Great Bardfield Artists community during the mid to late 1950s and became the Honorary Secretary of the group. Clifford-Smith and the other Bardfield artists exhibited in the large 'open house' shows in the rural village in 1954, 1955 and 1958 as well as several one-off exhibitions and touring shows in the late 1950s. These exhibitions attracted thousands of visitors and made the art community famous thanks to press, radio and TV coverage.

Clifford-Smith's work in the 1950s was diverse and included Irish and Italian landscapes, images of ships, as well as hypnotic 'mother and child' portraits. He received many positive press reviews for his work while at Great Bardfield. In 1958 he moved to the Old Bakehouse in Great Bardfield with his family., and during the late 1950s he began to teach art in Cambridge. In the early 1960s the Great Bardfield art community fragmented and Clifford-Smith and his family (which now included four sons) moved to Little Baddow Hall near Chelmsford. During his time at Little Baddow he painted mainly thickly textured monochrome moon portraits, works inspired by the 1960s interest in space.

Following his death, several exhibitions were organised; a retrospective at the Minories, Colchester (1969), Little Baddow Hall Arts Centre (1979) and at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden (1998). His work is included in several collections including the University of Cambridge, Benjamin Britten Foundation, Aldeburgh, Suffolk; the Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend, Essex; and Thaxted Church, Essex.

Clifford-Smith's moon portraits connect with another of Jerram's installations, Museum of the Moon which was at St Martin of Tours Church in Basildon last year.

Another interesting work that I saw for the first time today as part of the DAC tour was 'The Vine Window' by Lewis Foreman Day, which is at St Mary's Great Dunmow. This window, which was designed by Day, was made by Walter Pearce in 1909. The window shows Christ the King in rich robes against a background of vines and grapes growing out of a green vase. Nine cherubs surround the head of Christ.

Mars:War & Peace is at Chelmsford Cathedral from 21 October – 12 November 2025. This incredible artwork, suspended from the Nave, follows the success of Gaia in 2022, which drew record numbers to the Cathedral. Crafted from detailed NASA imagery, Jerram’s artwork measures six metres in diameter with every valley, crater, volcano and mountain laid bare for inspection on the Martian surface. But this isn’t just an art exhibition; it’s a conversation. It’s a call to contemplate our place in the universe and our responsibilities to each other on Earth. Tonight, Francis Spufford assisted us in that conversation by reflecting on understandings of the Just War Theory drawn from the Christian tradition. 

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Gustav Holst - Mars, Bringer Of War.

Artlyst: Nigerian Modernism Explored - Tate Modern

My latest review for Artlyst is on Nigerian Modern at Tate Modern:

'... each room of the exhibition highlights different artists, societies and schools who carved independent visions for what modern art in Nigeria could be. The first of these, The Zaria Art Society understood the issues and challenges to a significant extent and developed the concept of ‘natural synthesis’ as a result. These artists, including Bruce Onobrakpeya, Uche Okeke, Yusuf Grillo and Demas Nwoko, began, as Bonsu explains, calling “for the merging of the best of indigenous traditions and forms with useful Western ones”. The members of the group took the concept of ‘natural synthesis’ in many different directions over the course of their careers. Still, it, essentially, became the foundation for much of the work that has been brought together for this exhibition.

As a result, spirituality features strongly in the work of many of the artists and groups found here. Onobrakpeya, who is a practising Anglican although he worked for many years at a Catholic Boys School in Lagos, combined Biblical themes with the visual and oral traditions of the Urhobo and Yoruba peoples. At the request of Fr Carroll, he created a set of prints of the Stations of the Cross which reimagines the stories set in Nigerian contexts. Later, he recreated these in his signature plastograph style as surrounds to a central image of The Last Supper. This plastograph image plus a set of the Stations of the Cross prints form an arresting group of works in the room dedicated to the Zaria Art Society.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
Articles/Reviews -

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Jide Chord - Another Level.