Dear Friends,

I was talking to a young mother recently and, as usual, I asked about the pleasantries – the weather, the summer, the forthcoming holidays. As the conversation went on, I asked a few more gently probing questions and she started telling me some of the very serious health difficulties they were facing as a family. As I listened it became clearer that there was great pain and she was carrying a heavy burden. I said to her that, if she wanted, there was a home for her here in the Church, where she would be welcomed and supported. She said ‘Thank you’, burst into tears. There are so many people that carry pain and heavy loads in our parishes, and, while many may feel adequately supported by their friends and family, many others still feel isolated or alone.

This is the way it has always been. When Jesus wandered the highlands of Judea, or the shores of Galilee, great crowds gathered around him. Many came because they had never heard anyone speak about life and hope in the way that he did. But a huge number came because he offered healing, health, and restoration. People were desperate, lonely, struggling to cope. Some were looking after loved ones with great needs and long-term difficulties; others were in physical or emotional pain; still others had mental health conditions that crippled their ability to live normal lives. Everyone who came to him with an illness or disease found they were listened to, and healed. Everywhere he went, people flocked to him, and he restored them to lifer. So much so, that when he looked at them, his heart was filled with compassion and he said they were like a flock without a shepherd.

But Jesus didn’t do all this healing because he was a wonder-worker. Miracle-performing was not his concern or his focus. In fact one might say he had absolutely no interest in working miracles. So what, then, was he doing?

Jesus’ mission, his whole existence, was predicated on something completely different, and yet intimately related. Jesus knew that God didn’t create a broken world. And yet the world we live in is broken. It doesn’t take a genius to look around and see the madness of the so-called ‘leaders’ of the world, the anger and the rage that people demonstrate on our streets, and the insanity of the wars being waged against unarmed peoples, does it? And we look at the climate crisis that is growing before our eyes, as heatwave after heatwave batters our crops and water resources, as record after record is broken, as wild fires rip through countryside and dwellings, as ice caps and glaciers melt at worrying rates. The measures of ‘normality’ in our climate are literally disintegrating before our eyes.

And not just climate. Wildlife is disappearing as we watch. This year at Greenholme we had only one pair of swallows return instead of our usual four or five. They arrived late and all their babies died before they fledged. We had a nest of pied wagtails in our other barn, and all those chicks died before fledging, too. Through most of the summer there have been no swifts at Bewcastle church this year, where normally there are five or six pairs. These are anecdotal observations, but looking at the Government statistics for salmon and sea trout rod and net returns for 2024 (the latest available) tells the same story – the numbers of these fish returning to our rivers has halved in the last ten years, and is a third of fifteen years ago. These are terrifying trends if you think about them and let them into your spirit. And its ALL ultimately a consequence of our economic ‘development’ and activity.

So I return to topic. God did not make a broken world, but we have broken it. That’s the story of Genesis, where Adam and Eve, the representatives of the human race, turned their backs on God, and decided to follow a path of self-interest instead. The dire consequence, as laid out in those first chapters of the Bible, was the disruption of the whole of creation from its intended harmony.

Now at last we can talk about Jesus and what he was doing. His entire mission is to restore the wholeness of the whole of creation. That’s what all the healing and miracle-working is about. He’s not performing magic-tricks to amuse or seduce, he’s restoring the beauty and goodness of God’s glorious creation, and that includes each one of us. Each of us is unique, special, loved, and God’s will for each of us is to find the wholeness and healing that comes from being restored to a tender and gentle relationship with him. That’s why, when the cripple was lowered through the roof on a mat by his friends, Jesus said ‘Son, your sins have been forgiven,’ which was the same as saying, ‘Rise up, roll up your mat, and walk.’ But the cost of this restoration was his own sacrificial death on the cross.

And so on Sunday 16th August, 10am at Stapleton church, I will be offering a ‘healing’ service with anointing for anyone in the benefice who wants it. This may be healing for yourself, for someone dear to you, or for a situation that weighs heavily on your heart. It may be for something specific, or for something more general like ‘the climate crisis’. Or it may be that you can’t articulate it, but you just feel in need of God’s touch. Whatever it is, please come – there is a home for you here in the Church.

Your friend and priest,

Robert.

Brown filamentous algae covering the bed of the White Lyne at Greenholme

Dear Friends,

I love rivers. I have always found them fascinating. Something about the never-ending movement of water means they are always changing, always new. As a young child, I guess like many, I loved to play in them. I remember my grandmother in Coventry used to take my sister and me to a secret glade in the local woods where, if we were quiet, we might catch a glimpse of the fairies dancing among the bluebells. A small brook ran through it and we would take off our socks and shoes, paddle and explore, lifting pebbles to see what was under them. It was a truly magical place. At university this developed into a love of white-water kayaking, where you become one with the river, reading it, sensing its movement, flowing with it, being submerged in its excitement and energy. And sometimes capsizing in the process. Actually, we capsized so often we developed a club motto, ‘better a wally than a wimp’ – in other words, its better to have a go and make a fool of yourself than never to try at all.

Since those days, I have spent my life studying rivers professionally as a hydrologist. Not in the way a fisherman might, who comes to intimately know the moods and character of a particular river, but from a more scientific perspective. I have travelled around the country looking at rivers of all sizes, measuring their flows. Each one is different. I try to understand why and how they behave during both floods and droughts, how the underlying geology shapes their response to rainfall, how the steepness and breadth of the catchment concentrates or attenuates the flows, what kind of ecology it supports, what effect different types of land use have on the baseflow and the water quality. And, of course, trying to quantify the effects of climate change on their behaviour.

As I’ve said before, one of the things that unites us as a benefice is that all our parishes lie within the River Lyne catchment. But the Lyne and its tributaries have many different characters. The upper part of the river comprises the two main tributaries of the Black and the White Lynes, the latter of which I gauge as it passes Greenholme. The Black Lyne is the larger, but both rise high up in the Bewcastle Fells, just metres from the headwaters of the North Tyne. These are the rugged moorland peat bogs with rough grazing and forestry plantations, of deep cleughs and waterfalls, of gills, sikes, grains and burns, where the river is young. This is where the migratory sea trout used to find their spawning gravels in days of yore. But the forestry practice of ploughing straight up the hillslope has a drastic effect on the response of this part of the catchment to rainfall, increasing both the speed of runoff, and hence flood peaks, and the sedimentation load, while reducing the amount of water held back to sustain lower flows in the summer. Gradually over the years as the saplings start to grow runoff slowly diminishes, both in response to heavy rainfall, and in dry conditions where the soil now dries out. When the trees are clear-felled, again a dramatic change occurs with flashier responses to rainfall in the winter but still drier in the summer.

Then the rivers start maturing and enter more in-by land, eventually uniting at Low Luckens to become one – the Lyne, joined later by the Hether Burn draining Bolton Fell peat moss. Here the gradients aren’t so steep, but there are still plenty of drops and rapids. The rivers widen and develop flood plains. Banks are wooded with alder, ash, rowan, beech and bird cherry. Farming practices here have a different kind of impact. Field drains lead water that was once held on the land quickly to the rivers, again increasing response times to rainfall, giving higher flood flows and lower baseflows. But perhaps less obviously, heavy machinery used in spreading slurry and cutting silage compacts the soils over the years, allowing less infiltration and increasing overland flow and soil erosion. Coupled with the application of fertiliser and slurry to improve sward growth, and glyphosates to control reshes, this in turn means higher nitrate and glyphosate-related chemical concentrations, and persistent pollutants (such as PBDEs) found in slurry, entering the rivers with devastating consequences on aquatic ecology, especially fish. These have all but disappeared from our river, as any old-time fisherman will tell you, and the White Lyne river bed, for one, is now covered in grey filamentous algae. Farmers are not to blame, we are; a theme I hope to expand on in future.

Now the Lyne fully matures and meanders through the low-lying land and gentle gradients west of Cliff Bridge. There are fewer riffles here, just the occasional weir. Flat fields proliferate with less grazing and more cultivation due to richer soils and drier weather. Nitrate concentrations again increase. Eventually it flows into the Border Esk upstream of the M6 crossing, before entering the Solway Firth to become part of the wide Atlantic Ocean.

The River Lyne comprises all these different tributaries, aspects and characters. The river’s life, as a whole, is defined by each part of it; what happens in one stage affect the others, be that water quantity, quality, or ecology. Far from having just a ‘passing interest’, they all interact with, and depend on, each other. Indeed, we couldn’t understand the river, and it couldn’t exist, without each of them – they are all part of the one river. Much like the church, really. We could say ‘we are one river because we all share in the one water.’

Your friend and priest,

Robert.

The Fallen Angel (1847) by Alexandre Cabanel

Its not for everyone. There are far more important aspects to approaching the mystery of holiness than philosophical questions.

There is grace, for instance, the awareness that what we receive is not earned, but gift, given freely without conditions, which is freedom from guilt, from self-condemnation, from pressure, performance, and expectation. It is pure acceptance; a realisation that we are already loved and there is nothing left to prove.

Then there are the Beatitudes that turn our understanding of ‘success’, of ‘a life well lived’, completely on its head; where power, strength, fame, and wealth, along with self-seeking pleasure, are exposed as false, shallow and cheap gods, chased after by the superficial and insecure; where the humble, the poor, the weak, the simple, and those who long for justice, who exercise kindness and compassion, are celebrated as the true humans, the ones in Christ’s image. To such as these belongs the kingdom of God. Such as these will inherit the earth. No philosophy or theology is needed here.

But for some the question is deeply troubling, unsettling, and requires facing.

In response to my Letter from Bewcastle for April 2026, I received the following from one reader:

Many thanks for this.
What worries me, though, is that if we can derive a belief in God
from the existence of love, it seems that we could also derive 
a Manichean belief in the devil from the existence of evil.  
What is meant, do you think, by 'lead us not into temptation, 
but deliver us from evil' ?
Is it an accurate translation?
Forgive me for sharing my doubts

They were happy for me to share my response (slightly elaborated here). Not that this is a systematic treatise on the problem of evil, but just some pointers from a Trinitarian perspective that may help someone:

Thank you for sharing – please don’t ever not. I really value the conversation.

One of the aims of the letter was exposing the absurdity of so-called ‘atheism’ (that no one really believes in), and challenging the apathy of agnosticism, rather than a defence of monotheism (which is your challenge). 

One thing I would say, though, is that we don’t derive a belief in God from the existence of love. Instead, our belief in love and care and compassion reveals we already believe in God without realising it; love matters to us because we are made in the image of the God of Love. Otherwise it couldn’t – that’s the point about blind chemistry. In other words our compassion, love, appreciation of beauty etc, is a revelation, the ‘eye-opening’, of the other, rather than a basis for belief. So there’s a reversal of logic, a kind of anti-logic, going on. You may think this pedantic, but its a vital epistemological point – knowledge about God comes from revelation, not from logic. (If the latter, God would always be contained by [human] reason, and therefore subject to our understanding, rather than the Mystery for which we search.)

But you are right to push it further. There is undoubtedly a potential for dualism in Christianity, and the problem of evil is one that dogs every faith. It is why Manichaeism proposes a dualistic theology, as does Buddhism (permanence/impermanence), Chinese yin and yang, gnosticism (matter and spirit), and all the ancient near-Eastern religions of the Old Testament (OT). In Hinduism and the animist religions there are multiple gods for the same reason. In these systems, the gods are always played off against each other, and the battle between them explains why there is suffering and evil in the world. Hence the gods always need placating, first one, then another, in order to maintain ‘balance’. Or in the case of Buddhism, the denial of the existence of personal life, itself.

The radical point of the Hebrew faith (and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam) was its monotheism, which leaves it with a unique problem; if there is only one god, how do you explain the presence of evil, if not to say that this god is the source of both good and evil, in which case there is an internal contradiction and a whimsical instability. 

As I’m sure you know, the devil or Satan is described in the OT in terms of the fallen archangel ‘Lucifer’ (= ‘morning star’) – created, and originally pure and good. The main passage is Isaiah 14:3-23, but particularly vv12-15:

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! 
How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! 
You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God; 
I will set my throne on high; 
I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; 
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; 
I will make myself like the Most High.’ 
But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit."

He is the one attributed as being the serpent in the Garden of Eden that tempted the first woman and man. In this sense, the source of evil is the rebellion of a created being; one of the most powerful of the archangels, but created nonetheless.

But that only kicks the ball further down the road, because the question still lurks: if Lucifer was created by a good God, from where did his rebellion come? At a certain level, the answer must remain unknown.

However, in the monotheistic faiths evil is never given an ontology of its own. In Christianity, because of the revelation of the One God as a Trinity of Love, evil is described as the absence of love, a separation from God, non-participation in the Trinitarian dance, a non-entity, nothingness; and therefore dualism never arises. As a consequence, ‘good’ can never described as the opposite of ‘evil’ (since that would make it dependent on the existence of evil for its definition, like yin and yang), but rather as a defining characteristic of God – ‘God is good’. Evil, instead, derives from the breakdown of communion, of the choice instilled in created beings to choose to love, which implicitly means there is the choice to not love.

And this is where the language of ‘temptation’ and ‘evil’ derives in the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Temptation’ can be seen as our choice to love or not love (‘lead us not into temptation’), whereas ‘evil’ can be seen to relate to the effect of the non-loving choices of others on us (‘but deliver us from evil’). This doesn’t mean evil has no force, or cannot take on a form of life, but rather that it is parasitic – it is given existence and life by agents such as ourselves. (One could expand on this, comparing it to the almost independent ‘super-entity’ that is formed when a crowd seems to take on an uncontrollable existence of its own – which is why I am terrified of large gatherings).

But therein lies the crux – if love is a choice for us, then there must, by implication, exist a similar ‘choice’ in the Godhead. In other words, the concept of ‘choice’ could only exist in creation if it already existed in God. Which we see manifested in the ‘choice’ by God to freely create in the first place. But here we need to stop, because our language concerning ‘choice’ can only exist in, and necessarily implies, temporal space, where there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and these concepts and logical constructs cannot be applied to the mystery of the eternal God.

So this is where we travel the ‘via negativa’, and can only speak of what God is not: there is no evil in God; there is no ‘before’ or ‘after’ in God. And yet we must also say that the revelation of God in Christ, quintessentially in the Incarnation and Cross, shows that God’s love really acts, and interacts, in and with us in our temporality. This is how the language of the Spirit of God derives in the OT, in order to speak of the unapproachable holiness of God that yet involves himself in creation. And so we are left with mystery that is beyond our comprehension. Which is as it should be.

To respond to your doubt, then, I am not afraid to admit to the power and presence of evil. One has only to look at human history to see it manifested through the ages in different ways and through different agents, including the Church. But I do not give it the power of ontology – it is the negativity that belongs to non-existence, separation and denial, and that can therefore only exist parasitically. And I believe in the mystery of God’s Love, that, infinite as it is, has the power, through the unfathomable sacrifice of Christ wherein all evil is consumed and extinguished, to redeem and bring all things back into communion with him. Perhaps, one day, including Lucifer, himself.

Rodin's 'Thinker' (1904) in the Musée Rodin, Paris

Dear Friends,

The great festival of Easter is here, a festival bursting with light and joy, and dancing and singing, and hope and colour and, well, just LIFE! This is the great turning point around which the world revolves, as TS Eliot put it ‘At the still point of the turning world/Neither flesh nor fleshless/Neither from nor towards; at the still point/There the dance is…’ He is referring to the interweaving and never-ending Dance of joy and love and peace of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in which dance the Three are One and the One is Three, who are filled with so much life and love that it spills over to create the revolving cosmos, our solar system, the Earth, the plants, the animals, and us; a life and a love that nothing can stay, nothing can tame or chain down, not even death. It is the revealing of this Dance of Love in God by Jesus that lies at the heart of Christianity, and that distinguishes it from every other form of faith.

Yet this is also where we are faced with the extraordinary event that so many folk struggle to accept – that God could overcome death through the power of his Love. And sometimes it is difficult to believe, when we look at the world, that there is a God of love. Our news bulletins are filled with stories of the hubris, arrogance, stupidity, cruelty and violence of ‘leaders’, of people being bombed, or shot, or mutilated, or violated. Or stories of how greedy corporations oppress farmers, destroy landscapes, leave pollution and poison behind in pursuit of profits, and try to cover it up. Or social media, politicians, and parts of the Press that tell about ‘invasions of foreigners’, stirring us towards anger, hatred and bitterness, even if we’ve never met a ‘foreigner’, let alone been personally aggrieved by one. Or perhaps its much more personal. Someone we love or know well has suffered through a fatal illness and died. Perhaps it was a child. Perhaps it was your child. And the pain is still as raw as the day it happened.

I met a lady a few weeks ago who said she had lost her faith in God. I will call her Dawn. How could there be a God of love, Dawn said, that would allow her daughter to suffer a terminal disease in her early teens. She nursed her through her increasingly difficult days until her end. She carried the pain as if it was yesterday, still mourning, some fifty years later. She was waiting to die; ‘anything has to be better than this living hell’, she said. Her other children, now all grown up, sat around, listening. My heart nearly broke.

Dawn is not alone. Hers is the story of myriads of others around the world, and through the ages. And it seems there is a great wave of sadness, pain and hurt that people carry, some silently, others loudly and abrasively, trying to find a way to cope. The injustice of suffering, particularly of the young and innocent, the seemingly pointless deaths of those who have been robbed of the chance to live, wells up and spills over, creating an aching sense of loss and anger in those left behind. And we long for justice and rightness to be restored, for suffering and pain to end. We long for LIFE, not just for ourselves, but perhaps even more for those we have loved.

The great paradox is that this pain, itself, is only there BECAUSE of love. We feel the pain because we love. The heart that hurts does so because it was joined to another by love. And when it is ripped apart, the rawness of the wound is intense – the greater the love, the greater the pain. And we are angered by the injustice because we care. But love and compassion only exist, only matter, because God is. If there was no God, nothing would matter for everything would just be accidents of chemistry and biology. There is no place for love in a world without God, a merely mechanical world where nothing matters, no such thing as ‘free will’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘justice’ or ‘cruelty’ or ‘beauty’ or ‘love’ or ‘pain’, only chemical reactions. There is no such thing as evil if all that exists is atoms and molecules. All our anger, frustration, brokenness, all our joy, delight and sense of freedom and love, can only exist, can only have meaning, in a universe created by God. Otherwise there is nothing but the blind force of chemistry.

There are no easy answers as to the ‘why’ of pain. Pretending God does not exist is certainly not one of them, and doesn’t solve anything at all. It’s like burying your head in the sand and thinking you’ve found safety. But I am certain it has something to do with the brokenness of our communion with God, each other, and the natural world – our ‘trinity’ of relations.

But what the Easter story tells us is that God is intimately involved with us in the midst of our pain. Because God exists, love exists, is real. It is really real. But more than this, our love for each other actually derives from the source of all Love, God himself. And that means that when we feel the pain of loss, it is felt in the heart of God too.

So Dawn is not alone. Neither are any of us. All our suffering and the injustice we experience are taken up into the great Dance of the God of Love, and healed. Healed. That is why, at the heart of the Dance, the Risen Christ still bears the healed wounds of the Cross in his hands, his side, and his dancing feet. And so the Easter story is actually the ONLY one that can give us real hope that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’

Have a blessed Easter.

Your friend and priest, Robert.

Greenholme snowdrops 2026

Dear Friends,

February is one of my favourite months. It’s the last one of meteorological winter, but also usually the driest and coldest, giving those clear crisp days that beckon you outside. White carpets of snowdrops nod gently in the woodlands, crocuses start colouring the garden, and daffodils begin to sunlight the roadsides. On bright mornings birdsong fills the air for the first time and the days are noticeably longer. The early lambs appear in the fields and the awakening of the good earth begins. Signs of resurrection after the stillness of winter. Plus its my birthday.

The year is still new, and a new year brings the hope of new beginnings, a reflection of the soil, of which we are made, once again giving birth to new life. But although the deepest days of winter occur around the solstice in the second half of December, and so you might expect that to signify a new beginning, the New Year number used to change on 25^th March until 1752. So you had 24^th March 1649 and the next day was 25^th March 1650. Why 25^th March? Because its exactly nine months before the 25^th December – Christmas Day, the day of Jesus’ birth. It’s the day on which the Church celebrates the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary (called ‘The Annunciation’) to announce to her she had been chosen to bear God’s Son, and to which she said ‘yes’ (known as Mary’s Fiat). That was the day the world changed. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her and she became pregnant without impregnation. God was to be born as one of us. And so the world chose to change its year on that date because it really did herald a new beginning and a renewed hope, not due to our own doomed ‘new year resolutions’, or the arbitrary turning of a page on the calendar, but because, beyond anything we could hope for, or do for ourselves, God’s help was coming.

Help and hope are desperately needed. There are so many who are struggling in our parishes at the moment. For some, its finances; for some its relationships that are breaking, or have broken, down; for some it’s sheer loneliness or the heartache of grief; for some it’s the terror of being abused at the whim of someone near; and for others its unending chronic pain, or the fear of impending death as the years process, or the diagnosis of a potentially terminal illness. Often these are carried in silence. They are the unshared, sometimes unshareable, burdens.

We often use the terms ‘battling’ and ‘fighting’ when speaking about illness, as if there was some kind of violence with which we can counter our difficulties. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ as Dylan Thomas wrote. It speaks of a spirit of defiance in the face of death, a fist-shaking, despite the inevitability of our mortality. But raging against death is as useful as King Lear’s shouting at the sea. It is born out of a terror of the blankness of unfaith, an utter fear that there is nothing beyond. It belongs to a world that, paradoxically, denies the human spirit, and that has fallen for the ruse that life is mere biological mechanics. The deeper trouble with this attitude, however, is that it blinds us to the opportunity of preparing for the inescapable, to make our peace with God and with each other, and thus with ourselves. Compare it to St Francis of Assisi:

And thou, most kind and gentle death, / waiting to hush our latest breath,
              O praise him, alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God, / and Christ our Lord the way hath trod.

Here is the changed world that the turning of the year on the 25^th March celebrated, a world carved with hope, and no longer enthralled to fear. It’s a world awash with peace and joy and quietness and love, in which we can rest.

I’m writing all this about the New Year in March in a letter for February. Why? Because this is the month between the years, as it were, when we’re in the old year and the new year at the same time. The new and the not-yet-new. And it seems to me that this is a space in which we live much of our lives. It’s the story of the Gospel of Jesus, and a metaphor of baptism; baptism signifies our death to the claims, goals, and rules of this world, and a birth into God’s universe, which operates by a very different vision of what life is all about, where Love is the force of life. But it’s a universe we still wait to see, one for which we hope. And there you have it. Hope. Not the ‘hope’ that comes from a degraded and demonic understanding of the world where ‘might is right’ and resentment is seen as a virtue, but the Hope that comes from a knowledge that Love has eaten Death from the inside out, and Risen again. Its a quiet, gentle, vulnerable Love, born in a dark stable, unnoticed by the world; a Love that is, at the same time, fierce, loyal and unyielding; a Love that treads to the farthest, darkest, loneliest corners of the world, and the soul, to reach out a hand to those cowering in fear and say ‘Come, my child, you’re safe now’. And I have yet to meet anyone who, deep inside, doesn’t long to hear those words. That’s a Hope worth living for. That’s a Hope worth dying for.

Your friend and priest,

Robert.

(c) Gregory Hunt

Dear Friends,

A wild and wet wind is howling outside. Branches, stripped of leaves in the fallow time of year, toss and shake, bend, not break, as the dark sky thunders across the bleak fells encircling the Bewcastle bowl. Rooks and ravens, jackdaws and crows play, lifting on the gust, then, folding wings, tumble down, round, and up again, thrilling to the ride – its difficult not to smile when watching them. A smile. Who would have thought it in conditions such as these? Perhaps its easier to be on the wing than balancing in a violent tree; but the ground, sodden and soft as it maybe, is still at least stable. Yet they rather choose the air…

Our summer visitors have long gone; the swifts and swallows, the martins, willow warblers and chiff-chaffs, all chasing the sun across the desert to sub-Saharan Africa. And our winter visitors are here now; the fieldfares and redwings arrived from Scandinavia on 14th October, and the first yapping skeins of Barnacle Geese overhead from Svalbard a week or so before. This year we also have a small flock of friendly redpolls for the first time, who flit along the hedgerows on the roadside, feeding on the fluffy seeds of the uncut rosebay willowherb. But what have all these come here chasing? The gales and the rain? Or perhaps just the haw and rowan berries. [Update: since the roadside verges were all ‘tidied up’ a few weeks ago, the hedges cut and the dead thistles and willowherb mowed down, the redpolls have heartbreakingly disappeared. Where?]

Berries and fruit. This has been a year of overwhelming abundance, a ‘mast’ year, one of those occasions when many trees seem to agree that this would be a good time to bless the earth. Apples, quince, hazels, oaks, horse chestnuts, beech, and many more, all have had a heavy crop (although that didn’t stop the grey squirrels from taking every nut from our many cob and hazel shrubs). ‘Agree’? How do trees and shrubs, across huge areas like the whole of northern Europe, coordinate to synchronise their year of abundance? Spring weather alone isn’t enough to explain it. No one knows. It seems that plants are able to communicate with each other in ways we know little about – part of a vast, interconnected network of living beings in a complex relational ecosystem. Its a salutary reminder of how little we actually understand the world of which we are a part.

Perhaps one of the most obvious and exhilarating examples of this wonder of communication is the murmurations of the starlings. They started flocking in late October in the fields around us, small groups that fly in from different directions to expand the already sizeable, restless flock gathered on the pasture. Waves of birds rising and falling over the grass, like dark swells on a green sea. And then as I stand still, watching, listening, the soft swishing and hissing as they circle overhead in a twisting, turning cloud like an unfurled flag flapping in slow motion on a strong breeze. Then down again, like a rippling carpet over the ground. It is difficult not to be in awe and moved with an aching love for such beauty.

Most mornings I sing an ancient song called ‘Benedicite, Omnia Opera’, or just ‘The Benedicite’ for short (pronounced ben-e-dye-city). It is well over two thousand years old and the title literally means ‘O bless ye, all works’. It has these lines in it, ‘O ye mountains and hills bless ye the Lord, O all ye green things upon the earth bless ye the Lord, O all ye fowls of the air bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever.’ It is a wonderful song to sing walking through the fields and down the lonnings, not just in Advent but throughout the year, giving voice to our role as that part of this web of creation called to wittingly lift worship to God on behalf of the whole created order.

It seems a very long way from the horrific sectarian violence that we see in different places around the world, where human pride, greed, ignorance, and fear are used to propagate stories of resentment and bitterness, difference and exclusion, reaching even to our own streets. And from the depressing political and economic systems we have adopted, that treat this intricately interconnected and living creation as nothing more than an inert, unlimited and uncosted material resource to be exploited for capital gain and profligate profit, of which the arrogant denial of anthropogenic climate change is just another expression.

And yet this is exactly why Christmas exists. In the midst of all this hubris and turmoil, a single grain of wheat falls to be cradled in the earth, and dies to give life to countless others. God comes to us in the depth of our darkness, in the wilderness of our winter, vulnerable, helpless, dependent on the love of a gentle mother and a concerned father, and the meagre hospitality of an overstretched innkeeper. This is how the world-changing fire begins…

‘O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.’ A song and a smile, and a burning hope.

Wishing you a peaceful and joyous Christmas. And do please join us to lift your voice, too, in worship and wonder at one of our Christmas services.

Your friend and priest,

Robert.

Dear Friends,

Listening, really listening, takes, I find, a lot of concentration, and a lot of practice. Its about the hard work of paying careful attention, and it’s not easy, even though I am blessed with good hearing. As I’ve mentioned before, every morning I go out on my prayer walk, in the middle of which I stop, stand in silence, and listen and watch for around 10-15 minutes. First I ask myself the question ‘what can I hear?’, and then, ‘what have I not heard?’. This second question isn’t in the Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ sense of ‘what should I hear but no longer do?’, although that may be a good question to ask, but in the sense of ‘what have I not noticed?’

First are the obvious sounds close at hand; the gentle cascading cadence of the willow warbler, the brash pace-bowler-run-up of the chaffinch, the quivering bursting of the wren, the jaunty swinging of the chiff-chaff, the alarmed staccato of the blackbird, the mournful plaint of the robin, all against a constant background of worried ewes and crying lambs. Then listening through these, to make out the silver rain of a skylark, the strident declaration of the distant song-thrush, the twittering chattery of a charm of goldfinches, perhaps a single rising reedy bubble from a peewit that makes me turn suddenly, the occasional frantic meowing of a buzzard as it searches for a thermal on which to soar. Beyond these again, in the woods over there, the enchanting fluting of a blackcap, or in that far-off thicket, the mellifluous conversation of a garden warbler, the occasional soft incitement of a wood pigeon, ‘steal TWO cows, Taffy!’. Then I become aware that I’ve been oblivious to the noisy arguments emanating from the rookery half a mile away, the sporadic sharp yak of a jackdaw, the harsh rasping of a few crows, the sweet purring of a passing rook, and a disturbed dog barking way over yonder. Now I’m straining to hear what I haven’t noticed. Was that the faint call of a cuckoo towards the Bewcastle Fells? I can just make out the monotonous hum of a distant car engine. The near silent drone of a tiny glint carrying a few hundred trusting souls 30,000 ft above. And now, close beside me, the quiet breath waving the water avens, a red-tailed queen bumble crawling among the stalks of creeping buttercup, an orange-tip alighting on an upright cuckoo flower. Am I hearing now, or just seeing? Have the two senses become one? And what was that? Can I hear the grass growing?

All these sounds are happening at the same time, yet somehow we are able to distinguish them. But what I find almost unfathomable is that there is, in fact, no such thing as ‘sound’. There is only the ‘simple’ vibrating molecules of air. We ‘hear’ them as they flutter on our eardrums. If we didn’t have these tiny films of skin, the world would be quiet to us – deafness. We actually live in a silent world. But because we have a thin, tympanic membrane that vibrates in response to collisions from these particles in the air, and three miniscule bones (wonderfully called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup) that convert those vibrations in the air to vibrations in our brain, we can interpret them as ‘sound’. And that becomes birdsong, wind, engines, talking, music, thunder – one of the five ways through which we sense the world around us.

But listening isn’t just about discerning different sounds in our environment. My mother used to sometimes say ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason’. She wasn’t referring to any evolutionary principles of natural selection here! But she was identifying one of the most important elements of human relating – the ability to listen carefully to the other person before commenting or passing judgement, and an interest in them before ourselves. And I wasn’t very good at it.

This aspect of listening is perhaps even harder work than distinguishing the sounds we can hear. It certainly takes as much practice and patience. Almost all arguments and misunderstandings arise from an unwillingness to do the hard work of listening first. We can see it in our own relationships, in our families, and increasingly in our noisy and strident politics. The ability to listen carefully and sympathetically to others, especially those with whom we think we disagree, or those of a different gender, or from a different culture or country, before passing any comment, or coming to any decision or judgement, is a fundamental component of our being human. But its not one that seems to be valued by many political leaders, or social media ‘influencers’. Understandably, we all want our point of view to be heard, our circumstances understood, which means being listened to by others – asking them to treat us as worthy of being listened to, of being human. The irony is the less we listen, the less human we become because we aren’t treating others as ourselves. So listening carefully has something to do with becoming fully human, and isn’t that something we want for everyone? As Jesus never tired of saying, ‘he who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

Your friend and priest,

Robert

Sea Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) (c) Dorothea Oldani

Dear Friends,

Frailty and dust at the beginning of Spring? Lent is the season when we remember our mortality even as the world around us breaks into life at the end of the long winter. It derives from Jesus being driven into the desert, fasting for forty days and nights, and facing dark temptation. It includes his crucifixion on Good Friday and his lying in the womb of the earth on Black Saturday. It is broken, like the seal on the garden tomb, by his resurrection from the dead, being born again from the earth, early in the morning of Easter Sunday. It began on Ash Wednesday, when I marked the sign of the cross on the foreheads of those who came to our last communion service before Easter, using the black ashes of a burnt palm cross from last year’s Palm Sunday service. As I mark the cross, I say to each one “remember you are but dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Those words hold a profound truth. They draw from the creation story in Genesis where God created Adam out of the dust and breathed life or spirit into his nostrils. But this story is built on the recognition that ‘we are what we eat’, and all we eat ultimately comes from the soil, be that animal, vegetable or mineral. In other words, we are made of the soil, or dust, of the earth, and it is to this that our bodies return after we die, whether we are buried or cremated. The ash of the cross represents this soil – our mortality. Our lives, then, are soil that has been ‘enspirited’ for the time we are alive. Quite literally, we are ‘living soil.’ So we have an extraordinarily close relationship with the earth. But what does this mean?

Very early one morning, Cuthbert set out on a long walk from his monastery at Melrose on the banks of the Tweed, to head into the hills around what is now Hawick, to minister and share God’s love with the poor living in the rough uplands. He was expecting, as usual, to be gone for several days, maybe even weeks. He was accompanied by a young lad who had asked to come along. They headed south east down Dere Street, the old Roman Road, until they reached the River Teviot, some ten miles distant, then turned right to head south west, upstream, following the river towards the mountains. Once they left the road, their journey took them over rough ground, through woods, and along the occasional footpath. It was hard going. After many weary hours of walking they were both tired and famished, miles from anywhere. Cuthbert said to the lad, “Where shall we find refreshment? Do you know anyone in the area who might give us something to eat?” “I was just wondering that” said the boy, “as we haven’t brought any provisions with us. No, I don’t know anyone who might feed us, and we still have a long journey ahead which we can’t hope to manage without eating.” Cuthbert replied, “My son, learn to have faith, and trust in God, who will never let those who trust in him starve to death.” Then looking up, and seeing a fish eagle flying high overhead, he said, “Do you see that eagle? It is possible for God to feed us even by her.” They continued on their way. A short time later, they rounded a bend in the river, and there on the banks ahead of them sat the eagle, perched on a rock. “Look,” said Cuthbert, “there is our handmaiden, the eagle, that I spoke to you about. Run and see what provision God has sent us.” The boy ran and found a good-sized fish which the eagle had just caught, and brought it back to him. “What?” exclaimed Cuthbert, “Why have you not given part to God’s handmaiden? Quick. Cut the fish in two and give her half, as her service well deserves.” The lad did as he was asked. They carried the other part with them on their journey, and when they reached a village, they broiled the fish and shared it with those with whom they stayed while Cuthbert told them of God’s extraordinary love.

Cuthbert knew what it meant to be ‘enspirited soil’. He understood that the change in creation, wrought by Christ’s death on the cross, his resurrection at Easter, and the gift of God’s Spirit at Pentecost, brought new life to all living beings with whom we share soil and breath. The Anglo-Saxons saw all animals and birds as brothers and sisters, precious to God and therefore precious to them, worthy of sharing God’s gifts with us. This story is just one example of many, and is one of the reasons why there are so many animals on the Bewcastle Cross.

In a world that seems to have gone mad, we could do worse, as part of our Lent, than to look on the bursting out of Spring with new eyes of enspirited dust, and, whether we’re milking cows, lambing ewes, walking dogs, catching mowdies, watching birds, even caring for each other, to give thanks to God for all life. To be ‘Singing Soil’ while we may.

Your friend and priest,

Robert