creation – stfrancischurchtairuanz

Surprises

Jesus – the Christ, the Messiah, the Word, the Creator – was birthed amongst what he had made, this world, so he was at home here, and acted to liberate humanity from all that spoils life here … [To read more, click on title]

The ‘Why’ of Repentance

We find ourselves once again on the banks of the River Jordan with John the Baptist. We should be used to it by now, but that wild prophet John still jars as a a party-pooper as we look toward Christmas … [to read more, click on title]

What’s Outside Your Gate?

Admit it: society thinks of the well-to-do as ‘somebody’, treating them with respect and honour, while we treat the destitute with scorn and judgment. We think of them as a ‘nobody’.

In Jesus’s story of a rich man and a poor man notice how he reverses that. The rich man is not named; other than his riches he’s nobody in particular. But the poor man is somebody. He has a name: Lazarus … [To read more, click on the title]

Musing on Trees and Gardens

Trees (and gardens) are on my mind this fortnight.

Liz Young writes, “As I counted the number of trees around my garden this week, I found that, twenty years ago, I had planted twenty different native species and varieties: four different pohutakawa from the Pacific (Lord Howe Island, Hawaii, the Kermadecs and Tahiti) and sixteen different New Zealand native species. As I expressed this with some pride to my brother in Canada, it occurred to us that in the garden that we grew up in, a centuries old ‘monastic’ house near Glastonbury Abbey, they had planted ten different English species there. The chicken run in which I played was under a yew and the swing was hung from a walnut tree. Impressive to me, but I was awed to read in JT Salmon’s book of NZ trees to learn that New Zealand, with its more temperate climate, has more than a hundred different species of tree.”