SUNDAY

I was thinking again of Jean Vanier. Follow your star is a good motto for Epiphany. Conformity to conscience his motto.

MONDAY

Jean Vanier again. If I was to hold a meeting on some political issue, half a dozen would turn up. The room was packed for Jean with two hundred people there. Yet he has no “policies” or prescriptions or advice: he just tells his life story. Basically he just lives with people who nobody else wants to live with. They are often difficult, angry, selfish, or worse. One of his housemates spat his soup over a visiting policeman. Yet year after year Jean persists. A living saint.

TUESDAY

Russian Christmas

I didn’t pick up a lot of the sermon in Russian even with a quietly mumbled translation but there was something about the Nativity being the new light.

In the Western Catholic readings for the 7th of January, the Marriage at Cana is the subject for discussion. So here the first of the signs take place on the same day as the Eastern Orthodox Christmas.

WEDNESDAY

It was announced in Mass that Paul Goggins had died. He was only 60, and suffered a stroke out running. It makes you think. Why do we worry so much about the future? Be happy, and live for the day.

THURSDAY

I did a reading at the Epiphany carol service for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. I didn’t know what I was reading til I turned up. T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi. Rather alarming especially as in the poem the journey is rather depressing. Not here the cosy Christmas card picture of three kings on camels.

… and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.

Some of it didn’t make much sense. What does this mean?

And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all the way for
Birth or Death?

Anyway the service was grand and beautiful.

FRIDAY

I am back in Lincolnshire, the day before speaking on rural affairs.

I was looking for a bit of poetry about the countryside. I didn’t use this quote from John Clare. It arrived too late on a broken blackberry. Perhaps I should have done.

For Nature is love, and finds haunts for true love,
Where nothing can hear or intrude;
It hides from the eagle and joins with the dove,
In beautiful green solitude.

In our church I looked up Psalm 9:

Confiteor Tibi

I will give thanks unto thee, O Lord, with my whole heart.

SATURDAY

I looked up Psalm 11 in the Anglican Prayer Book:

Ut quid domine

Why standeth thou so far, O Lord, and hidest thy face in the needful time of trouble.