Between: June 2024

Saturday 22 June 2024

Windows on the world (471)

Cambridge, 2024

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Ty Tabor - True Love.

Wednesday 19 June 2024

Artlyst: Lunar Lullabies, David Lock and Concrete Dreams Three Shows To See At Firstsite

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is of three shows at Firstsite - Lunar Lullabies, David Lock and Concrete Dreams:

"‘Lunar Lullabies’ shows how science, art and imagination have intertwined over the centuries to shape culture and our collective fascination with distant galaxies. Matthew Turner – whose drawing of Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman to travel into space, is included in the exhibition – has written of his excitement when first seeing a rocket: ‘Standing there excited, in awe, overwhelmed by power, scale and raw materials, I felt small.’ It is this sense of awe and wonder that the exhibition principally communicates, feelings also clearly generated by Turner’s ‘Saturn V 1’ and ‘Vostock I’.

Turner is one of several artists included here who are members of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA) the world’s only guild of artists dedicated to creating images of space. Essex-based IAAA artist Jackie Burns aims to inspire people with the awe and beauty of space and astronomy. She led some of the workshops to develop the exhibition and has just become President of the IAAA. Her depiction of one of the most iconic spaceships in human history ‘Saturn V, Apollo 11, on Crawler to Launchpad 39A’ consists of different-sized circles of various colours that slowly reveal the image the longer you look."

Last year Jackie Burns exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford - see here and here. She has recently said "I’m always amazed at the unexpected directions my journey as a visual artist takes me. Last year I exhibited my artwork inside a local church and as a direct result of that I’m currently exhibiting in the largest public art gallery in Essex. Never give up…"

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Nirvana - Rainbow Chaser.

Prayer - Where God likes it best

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

Rickie Lee Jones is a singer-songwriter from the late 70s not known for writing about faith. However, her album, The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, is a collection of songs that were created through improvisations about the words of Jesus. A friend of hers, a photographer called Lee Cantelon, had published a collection of the words of Jesus. He had organised many of Jesus’ saying by their themes and published the result as a book called simply, The Words. Then, he began recording spoken words versions of selections from the book and asked Rickie Lee to read one of these selections to a musical accompaniment. Instead, she improvised a song to the music and then kept improvising – enough songs to fill this album, all of them improvisations inspired by the words of Jesus.

One of the songs is called ‘Where I like it best’ and is based on these words of Jesus that we have just heard from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6.1-18). Where God likes prayer best is in secret, instead of on show. Looking at the American Church from the outside – through watching TV evangelists – it seemed to Rickie Lee that much of the praying that went on was done for show and, as a form of emotional blackmail, to encourage people to give money to support the evangelist’s ministry. To her this seemed like the polar opposite of Jesus’ words and so she wrote the song. She says that this is the song that, in concert, seems to have the most powerful impact. “People get it, from the first bars of the song,” she says. “It makes me think that people are longing to pray, and are so damaged by their brush with religion. They want to look up and say, Hey! I'm down here, down here. They want to believe that their prayers are heard and have meaning."

This is my response to her song:

Listening to Rickie Lee sing on her latest CD,
improvising on the words of Jesus.
‘Where I like it best’ meditates on prayer,
the reaction from her fans – amazing!
People are longing to pray
but damaged by their brush with religion –
TV evangelists needing our money,
using their praying to influence our giving.
Praying for show – a big parade –
thinking God hears them louder
when they pray over and over
but Jesus said go
into your room
closing the door
and pray to your Father
in secret.

How do you pray in a world like this?
Rickie Lee sings
that you are the prayer –
the words you speak,
the dance you make,
the look in your eyes,
your hand on another’s cheek –
you are the Lord’s prayer.
You are the Lord’s prayer
when Jesus
looks through your eyes,
touches through your hands,
hears through your ears,
hurts through your heart.
“We have Christ among us,
speaking through each of us,
if we choose to listen.”
We have Christ,
his few words are enough
to last two thousand years.
In spite of distortion –
the big parade,
the endless repetition –
his words reverberate clearly
in the lives of Christians
who may not even know
they follow
the Nazarene.

Rickie Lee ends her song by saying that we are God’s prayer. That it is through our words and actions that God touches others and that our lives and prayers have meaning. We can be the words and actions of God in our world. We can be the Lord’s prayer building a better world and proclaiming freedom for captives. May that be our prayer and may our prayers not be for show but be for real. Amen.

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Rickie Lee Jones - Where I Like It Best.

Sunday 16 June 2024

The gratuitous, intuitive aroma of the love of Christ

Here's the reflection I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this evening:

As a child my faith was impacted by a musical drama of the life of Christ using scripture drawn from Genesis to Revelation which was called Yesterday Today Forever and was staged in Oxford in the mid-1970s. It was an ambitious production with three complete stage sets, a complicated lighting system, quadraphonic sound, a 50-piece choir, a 12-piece band, dance, narration, a great variety in music, and a back projected film. I was impressed by the integration of the Arts and scripture in a way that I had not seen prior to that point.

Included in the show was a beautiful ballad based on this story of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair (Luke 7.36 – 8.3). Called ‘Remember Mary’, the song imagines Mary’s thoughts as she carries out this extravagant gesture:

“I cannot look at your face - I dare not - for I have sinned so much and you know my heart. I want to look at you Jesus, but I have not the power to lift my eyes for I am guilty - oh so guilty. What can I do? For I am lost and yet you care - even for me. So I will pour this ointment upon your feet, dear Lord. The ointment smells so sweet; smells so. sweet; and yet I am a broken creature, I'm only but dust, only dust …”

Jesus responds: “You have done a beautiful thing to me Mary, in pouring this ointment on my body, you have prepared me for burial. Your sins are forgiven, for you have loved much.”

It was Mary’s own decision to pour ointment over Jesus’ feet and to dry his feet with her hair. No one expected her action – it was not done out of duty - and at least one person criticised her severely for it. It was entirely her decision, her personal way of giving to Jesus.

Giving in this way involved giving generously from her possessions because the ointment that she used was expensive (imported from countries such as India) and extravagant (half a litre was an enormous amount to use in this way). It also involved giving generously of herself as Jewish women traditionally kept their hair tied up in public and only unloosened their hair in the presence of their husbands. What Mary did in wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair was the ultimate sign of her love for and commitment to Jesus. She did all this, not with regret or out of a sense of duty, but gladly and generously.

In fact, her gift to Jesus is a response to the love that Jesus has shown towards her. She gives because Jesus has first given extravagantly and generously to her. This is the pattern that we see repeated in God’s dealings with human beings throughout scripture and which we see summed up in the most famous verse of scripture, John 3: 16: “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son …” God so loved that he gave.

Love is the reason for giving, not duty, not regret, but love. In Jesus’ life, death and resurrection God gave everything he had for us. Philippians 2 tells us that, of his own free will, Jesus “gave up all he had, and took the nature of a servant. He became like a human being and appeared in human likeness. He was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death – his death on the cross.” This is the extravagant nature of Jesus’ love for us that he would give up all he had in order to all the path of obedience all the way to his death on the cross.

‘This is what Mary saw in Jesus and why she responded by giving extravagantly and generously to him. Jesus then astonished the disciples by giving Mary the highest commendation anyone receives in the pages of the Gospels:

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” (Mark 14:6 -9)’

In reflecting on this story the artist Makoto Fujimura has said that he prays that, ‘there will be a new aroma in the air: an aroma of Mary of Bethany, who in response to Jesus’ tears in John 11 and 12 brought her most precious belonging, her most gratuitous, expensive nard. I pray that in the days to come, this aroma will fill the air whenever the words of Gospel are spoken, that outsiders to faith will sense this extravagant air and feel it, particularly for them. I pray that when our children speak of faith, this gratuitous, intuitive aroma of the love of Christ will be made manifest in their lives.’

May that be our prayer this day and throughout our lives.

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John and Ross Harding - Yesterday Today Forever.

The Kingdom of God as a mustard seed

Here's the sermon I shared this morning at St Catherine's and St Andrew's:

The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, begins as something small, unregarded, and insignificant.

We see this lived out in Jesus’ own life. In human terms his life was small and insignificant, like the mustard seed (Mark 4: 26-34). His birthplace was described as being least among the clans of Judea. His home town was a place from which no good was known to come. In appearance he was without beauty or majesty, undesired. In his life he was despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed. In his death he was made nothing. An insignificant man who died in a insignificant part of the world.

That ought to have been the end of it but instead it was only the beginning. From that small beginning, Christ’s body – the Church, the gathering of all those who believe in him – has grown so that for many centuries Christianity has been the largest religion in the world; and that remains the case despite secularisation in parts of the Western world.

The Early Church reveals the same pattern to us. Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth (1 Corinthians 1.26-31) and said, “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” He said in this letter that, in the eyes of the world, Christians are foolish and the message of the cross is foolish.

The same words could actually be applied to us: none of us are major intellectuals or academics; none of us have major influence or power in terms of work or politics; none of us, so far as I know, were born into the aristocracy. The reality is that wonderful as each of us are, we are not major players on the world stage and that makes us, in human terms, one among millions of other human beings around the world. When we think of ourselves in those terms it easy to see ourselves and what we do as being small and insignificant.

We may not like to think of ourselves as being foolish, as well as insignificant, but that is how Paul describes the Corinthian Christians from the perspective of those considered wise in their culture. It is no different today, Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that God is a “psychotic delinquent” invented by mad, deluded people and our faith in God is a “process of non-thinking,” “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”

BUT what Jesus demonstrates through his life, death and resurrection and what Paul states in his letter to the Corinthians is that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, puts it like this:

“Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

What Jesus has done for us, in giving us a clean slate and a fresh start – points forward in history to a time when the whole world will be given a clean slate and a fresh start. In Revelation 21 we are given a wonderful future vision of God making everything new; of God moving into the neighbourhood permanently, joining earth and heaven together, and making his home with us. Wiping every tear from our eyes as death, tears, crying and pain are all gone for good.

Now we don’t have to understand how this happens. Jesus told the story that we heard this morning of the man who scattered seed in his field without knowing how the seed grew. Farmers in Jesus’ day didn’t understand the science of how plants grew but they knew that the process of sowing seeds into soil worked and produced corn. It is not necessary to understand in detail the processes of germination and growth in order for the harvest to come.

Jesus is saying something similar to us. Just as we could not have anticipated that an insignificant rabbi for Israel who was killed after only three years of teaching would become the greatest figure in the history of humanity, so we cannot expect to understand in detail God’s plans for the future of the world; how the Kingdom of God will finally and fully come, how the vision of Revelation 21 is to be achieved.

What we do know though is what Jesus has shown us of the Kingdom of God coming through his life, death, resurrection, and through the change that he has made in our lives and those of others that we know. He introduces the Kingdom of God into the world and into our lives. He is the first fruits, the first sign of that coming Kingdom and, because we can trust him, we can trust that the Kingdom will come both more fully in our lives and completely in the new heaven and new earth.

This is not blind faith because, like the farmer, although we do not understand the detail of how the process or plan works, we know that it does work from the evidence of Jesus and from the evidence of his Spirit in the lives of countless Christians throughout history including ourselves.

And because we know that the process or pattern or plan of the small, the insignificant, the foolish being used by God to achieve great change, we can trust that our lives also have meaning and significance as we put our faith into practice in small acts of compassion here and little words of witness there; at home, at home, in church and in the community. We don’t know what God will cause to grow from these actions and words but we trust that they will take root and grow because that is the pattern that we, and Christians throughout Church history, have observed in practice.

So: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

unregarded

Birthplace,
least among the clans of Judea.
Home town,
a place from which no good was known to come.
In appearance,
without beauty or majesty, undesired.
In life,
despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed.
In death,
made nothing.
His followers,
not wise, not influential, not noble – fools!

The light of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the bodies and form of human beings.
Light shining
through the gaps and cracks of clay pots.
Light shining
in the unexpected places, despised faces, hidden spaces.
Light shining
in the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry.
Light shining
in the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers.
Light shining
in the persecuted, the insulted, the falsely accused.
Light shining
in the lowly, the despised, the nonentities.
Light shining
in weakness and fear and trembling.
Light shining
in the foolish followers of the King of Fools.

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Delirious? - King Of FoolsKing Of Fools.

Saturday 15 June 2024

Windows on the world (470)

Cambridge, 2024

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Judee Sill - The Living EndThe Living End.

Quiet Day: Faith Pictures

We've had a wonderful Quiet Day today at St Mary's Runwell reflecting on faith journeys and faith pictures. We've been reflecting on key moments in our lives and faith and thinking of ways to picture what we have experienced and learnt. It has been a very moving time for which we thank Gail and Stephen who led us throughout the day. We ended with a Eucharist in which our reflections were offered back to God.

Faith Pictures is a free resource from Church Army to help Christians of all traditions talk about their own story of faith with confidence. Faith Pictures is six sessions long, each one building on the last to help Christians to see where God has been present in their lives, how they can talk about that confidently, and how God is active in the world around us and wants us to join in with Him.

Today, we looked at our own journeys, where and how we have been aware of God, and how we might start to think about the shape of that journey. We also created images that helped sum up our own faith journey.

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The Accompany - Beside The Still Waters.

Thursday 13 June 2024

Kirby Laing Centre Conference: First Things First

This week I've been at the Kirby Laing Centre Conference in Cambridge.

The Kirby Laing Centre is an academic research centre concerned with public theology we seek to do rigorous scholarship across the disciplines addressing the great issues of our day from a Christian view point. They also seek to foster and nurture Christian scholarship that is rooted in spirituality and practised in community.

The theme for their inaugural conference was First Things First: Spirituality and Public Theology. Our aim at KLC is to accompany the Spirit on his mission, and in order to do this we need continually to attend to our spiritual formation. The journey in – spirituality – opens out to the journey out – our vocations in the world, and both are essential if we are to be salt and light. The conference explored the vital importance of deep spiritual formation for Christian public engagement, and promises thought-provoking key-note presentations, art, music, poetry, book launches, community, and many other avenues of enjoyment of God’s good world. KLC Director Craig Bartholomew gave two keynote addresses on The One Thing Necessary.

The arts track at the Conference was put together by Otto Bam, a musician, writer and researcher born and raised in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is the Arts Manager for the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology and editor of ArtWay.eu.

We heard from the following:

Violist Rachel Yonan, who has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in concert halls across the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and China. A lover of chamber music, Rachel co-founded the Marinus Ensemble with her brother, cellist Joseph Kuipers. Marinus aim to allow culture and excellence to reach broader audiences. She spoke on music’s gratuitous beauty in a logocentric world.
Playwright and author, Murray Watts, gave a lecture on art and spirituality. He has worked in TV, radio, film and theatre, winning awards and critical acclaim.and set up The Wayfarer Trust, a charity which seeks to encourage people from all walks of life to value the arts and to actively support all those striving for excellence and spiritual inspiration in the world of arts and media.
Fr Dominic White OP is a Dominican friar and priest at Blackfriars, Cambridge. He is the author of The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Contemporary Spiritualities, Christian Cosmology and the Arts (Liturgical Press, 2015), and How Do I Look: Theology in the Age of the Selfie (SCM, 2020). He is also an organist, pianist and composer.
Roger Henderson led us in celebrating the launch of his and Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker’s new edited volume, The Artistic Sphere, and unveiling the brand-new ArtWay.eu website (which will be online at the end of June), an online arts and faith publication founded by Marleen, which came under KLC’s stewardship in 2023.
Bishop Graham Kings guided us in thinking about the potential of art for facilitating missional and spiritual encounters, referencing Bulgarian artist Silvia Dimitrova’s paintings of Seven Women of the Bible, which he and his wife commissioned. The series includes Sarah, Miriam, Ruth, Esther, Magdalene, Lydia and Priscilla. Bishop Graham has written a poem on each painting and Tristan Latchford has written an anthem on each painting and poem.

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Oddo Bam - The MorningThe Morning.

Saturday 8 June 2024

Firstsite: Lunar Lullabies

This summer, an exhibition inspired by the timeless poem The Star (more widely known as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) by writer Jane Taylor (1783-1824) will send space enthusiasts, young and old, on a cosmic odyssey.

Opening today at Firstsite in Colchester, the birthplace of Taylor and her poetic masterpiece, Lunar Lullabies, commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Essex writer's passing. It traces the artistic journey of Taylor's nursery rhyme and its profound influence on contemporary media, including comics, video games, and pop culture hits like Will Smith's "I'm Not a Star" and Nicki Minaj's "Starships."

The exhibition transforms the gallery into an immersive playscape of imagination and discovery, featuring interactive space objects, immersive extraterrestrial landscapes, and robot sculptures. Visitors are able to touch and discover objects ranging from meteorites and asteroid rocks to Lego Star Wars sets and bring their own cosmic creations to life.

Showcasing stunning artworks, historical artefacts and contemporary cultural nods, visitors discover how science, art and imagination have intertwined over the centuries to shape culture and our collective fascination with distant galaxies.

The exhibition is the result of a series of workshops with Firstsite youth programme YAK and families participating in Firstsite's innovative Holiday Fun programme – where they provide families facing financial challenges with fun, free days out full of art and sport along with a free family meal. YAK members and Holiday Fun families have made their own work, alongside producing collaborative artworks with commissioned artists.

The exhibition features a range of books and poetry by Taylor and her sister Ann to kick off a journey through the next 200 years.

The Star became hugely successful and a mainstay of childhood imagination, in part because of the etchings of the nursery rhyme. This art technique was impacted by science and space visions. A range of 19th-century etchings of comets in the night sky features in the exhibition.

There are a wide array of multimedia projects on display, all connecting space with the imagination. These include fantastical futuristic spaceship animation rooms by Mark Garlick, paintings of space rockets that move when viewed, and a ceramic work by British icon Grayson Perry with Alien Baby (2008) inspired by a maternity ward that he likened to a spaceship.

The work of Colchester-based Peter Elson (1947-1988), an illustrator who spent a career bridging childhood wonder of space with explorations of the future, is prominently featured. Decades of science fiction paperbacks from the 20th century have Elson's renderings on the cover, featuring planets, spaceships and star systems. Hugely influential on a new generation of sci-fi depicters, with brightly coloured backgrounds and sleek designs, he has been widely credited for providing the visual aesthetic to early video game productions in the 1990s.

Contemporary artists also show how the artistic obsession with what lies beyond the Earth's sky continues today. Essex-based artist Jackie Burns is a Fellow of the International Association for Astronomical Artists; her earlier works include science fiction book cover designs, and throughout her career, she has created work based on the scientific reality of space travel, such as through portraits of astronaut Tim Peake, as well as popular culture imagery such as characters from Star Wars. Burns led some of the workshops to develop the exhibition and her depiction of one of the most iconic spaceships in human history will feature; the one that fulfilled Blake's dreaming and took humankind onto the moon. The acrylic work Saturn V, Apollo 11, on Crawler to Launchpad 39A consists of different-sized circles of various colours that slowly reveal the image the longer you look.

In the 21st century, artists can now be found alongside scientists working towards space exploration, and the exhibition includes a number of paintings produced by British artist Matthew Turner during his residency at NASA.

A number of artists whose practices have developed at Firstsite will also be featured. The futuristic Colchester landscapes of local artist and Level Best alumni Henry Linstead will be shown, as well as work by those who attend Holiday Fun, including models of science fiction and gaming figures by the artist known as 'S' whose room installation which features over 1000 models, will immerse visitors into a world of dinosaurs and creatures whose fate was changed by an asteroid from space.

In total, the exhibition features over 100 artefacts and more than 100 artworks, the majority by artists from East Anglia, which explore our need for discovery, from the dreaming and wonderings of poets to the reality of scientific endeavour. Through a changing programme during the exhibition run, art and content from community groups and activities will also be on display. With this ambitious approach, Lunar Lullabies at Firstsite charts how the first nursery rhymes laid the foundations for the current stories that can be found in today's comics, video games and consciousness, with Colchester at the centre.

Firstsite Director Sally Shaw says, "Lunar Lullabies shows the true power of art and creativity—charting the journey from Jane Taylor's imagination in 1806 to the realities of scientific exploration today. By combining art and science, the exhibition brings STEAM to the heart of Colchester, using art as a method of learning and discovery to help us connect with the science of space exploration in a meaningful way.

"Working with local families and young people to make this exhibition has brought new voices and ideas, which are reflected in the vibrant and diverse selection of works – some which will spark nostalgia and others which will immerse you in a whole new futuristic world. Most importantly, this approach has created a really fun, inclusive space where our visitors can let their imaginations run wild!

“We hope Lunar Lullabies will inspire everyone to explore their creativity, with the knowledge that something imagined today may spark a creative chain reaction that ignites future explorations and discoveries, much like Jane Taylor's influence has done for centuries."

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Electric Light Orchestra - Mr Blue Sky.

Stride Magazine: Spiritual Suitcases

Check out my review of Spencer Reece's 'Acts' for Stride Magazine:

'He has written that 'A poet, like a priest, works with facts and mysteries: the facts mysterious, the mysteries factual' and has said that what he is after in poems or prose is 'telling the truth in the art'. Time, he suggests, “must somehow be dilated or pass before I can understand much of anything” but, when time has passed, 'in poetry, the autobiography becomes something else entirely, somehow selfless.' This is the essential movement in his life and work which, in the words of Jonathan Farmer, means that he 'offers pastoral attention to the wounded and discarded of the world—including, frequently, himself.' Poems, Reece suggests, are 'spiritual suitcases' which provide 'comfort in the hour of need.'

Spencer Reece is Vicar of St Paul’s Wickford in Rhode Island. Wickford in Essex (where I am based) has links with Wickford in Washington County, Rhode Island, USA. To read about these links, including past pulpit exchanges by priests from St Paul's Wickford and St Catherine's Wickford, see Wickford Community Archive here.

My other reviews for Stride include a review of two poetry collections, one by Mario Petrucci and the other by David Miller, a revie w of Temporary Archive: Poems by Women of Latin America, a review of Fukushima Dreams by Andrea Moorhead, a review of Endangered Sky by Kelly Grovier and Sean Scully, a review of John F. Deane's Selected & New Poems and a review of God's Little Angel by Sue Hubbard.

To read my poems published by Stride, click 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'. My latest poem, 'The ABC of creativity', has been published by International Times. It cover attention, beginning and creation and can be read here.

I am very pleased to be among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a new anthology forthcoming in 2024 from Amethyst Press. Check in at Amethyst Review for more details, including a publication date in July and an online launch and reading in September. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.

Additionally, 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 last Autumn. 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.

For more on poetry, read my ArtWay interview with David Miller here and my interview with the poet Chris Emery for International Times. My review of 'Modern Fog' by Chris Emery is on Tears in the Fence. I have also written an article for Seen & Unseen 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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Spencer Reece - The Upper Room.

Thursday 6 June 2024

Love your Burial Ground and Churches Count on Nature week

Do join us during ‘Love your Burial Ground and Churches Count on Nature’ week (Saturday 8th to Sunday 16th June) when we will be teaming up with Wickford Wildlife to complete wildlife surveys in our churchyards and have several different events including:

Saturday 8th - Messy Church Goes Wild, 2pm at St Mary’s Hall - Surveying starts
Sunday 9th - Pet Blessing Service, 3pm St Mary’s North Churchyard
Monday - Friday - schools being encouraged to visit - surveying continues
Saturday 15th - Scavenger Hunt, 3pm St Catherine’s Churchyard - Surveying ends

You can find out more about the week and our partners here:

Video – Love Your Burial Ground Week – https://www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk/resources/films/video-love-your-burial-ground-week/
Caring For God's Acre – the conservation charity for burial grounds across the UK - https://www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk/
Wickford Wildlife - www.wickfordwildlife.co.uk

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Bruce Cockburn - O Sun By Day O Moon By Night.