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i have a depressed feeling that i might just be helping provide a sort of end of life care before its possible closure in the not too distant future but i heard three stories while i was there as notices were being given out i learnt that the church s authorised lay minster had taken communion into a particular care home as she does every month and had gone upstairs to a room to pray with a former church member who then died the following morning shaking hands at the door at the end of the service i was introduced to one person there i hadn t seen before he was ukrainian and was introduced by a member of the congregation who said she d been helping him learn english for two years and he had now asked to come along with her that morning over after service refreshments in a side aisle people were exchanging stories about where they had been the day before one outlined what he said was his fixed routine for every saturday between shopping first thing and going to the pub at lunchtime he had made his weekly visit to a relative living with dementia who no longer recognised him taking communion to the dying and providing long term support to an eager refugee and to an unresponsive dementia sufferer that felt as if there was something fundamentally fruitful going on the picture is a detail from the tenth or eleventh century tournai marble font in thornton curtis parish church there are very few in the country of which one is in lincoln cathedral the picture was taken yesterday when a group of cathedral tour guides went over to see it posted by peter mullins at 09 01 no comments wednesday 12 august 2026 being kicked off a gym booking a rich australian asked a new generation ai assistant to book him a session at the gym and it did so by finding a vulnerability in the gym s on line booking system and removing an existing booking to make room for him the reports say it hacked the system and the removed person was kicked off both of which imply agency and venial intent but that is to misunderstand the neutral operation of a hugely well designed and resourced calculating machine when a human finger or ai system triggers our final nuclear destruction it will not be because the launch system thus initiated had any agency or was in any sense evil and what any of the reporting of the gym booking hasn t said is that any closed system will behave in this way even when not automated tell a school that its future viability depends on achieving a specifc level of attendance and it might cope by excluding more vulnerable children than previously ask civil service how to ensure the availability of prison places and it will present options including greater levels of early release than it and the wider population are happy to tolerate tell a cathedral to replace dangerous candle lighting systems within a limited budget and the new provision will lack aesthetic quality tell delivery drivers they will get less money if a certain number of drops are not achieved each day and it is likely they make obvious but questionable decisions about what counts as a drop granted the headteacher civil servants cathedral staff and delivery driver are unlike an ai system individual moral agents who might therefore decide to act differently but the desirable aim remains to keep a school open to keep fresh dangerous criminals off the street to keep a cathedral finanically viable and to buy a delivery driver s children new shoes enforce a closed system ai or human to produce a desired good outcome and it will plot a pathway towards that outcome and then take the simple steps to get there the monk stands at the entrance to bardney abbey deep matted dry grass and thistle cover would be hard to contain if it ever caught fire posted by peter mullins at 09 52 no comments saturday 8 august 2026 aesthetic disaster i m guessing that lincoln cathedral has identified a couple of problems with the places in which people light candles at the east end the culmination point of any pilgrimage through the building defined as focal shrine space one is disabled access there is always a step up to where large sand filled bowls are positioned and the need to bend or kneel down when placing a candle in them the other might be fire safety as candles are so lit and placed possibly as a result three new candle stands have just appeared each of a metal trolley type in two cases with basic embossed crosses on them the aesthetic design might have originally been to sit at the foot of a raised plaster statue or against a wall or pillar most often in a victorian or later building where one s eyes would be looking up and over them the areas in which they now stand will have been developed under the scrutiny of arts based permission granting bodies over the last fifty years the gilbert pots by potter robin welch in 1985 at the north end beneath a window of mediaeval glass the fourteenth century st hugh head shrine enhanced by brass covered spikes by jeweller david poston in 1986 in the centre the statue of our lady of lincoln by aidan hart in 2014 with circular benches by wood worker nicholas hobbs as part of a scheme for the whole shrine areas in 2017 defining a gathering space in front of it in the south again beneath mediaeval glass the new candle stands been placed free standing at the foot of the steps in each case they become part of a reshaped visual ensemble and not one for which anyone would claim they contribute any artistic merit in their own right the spiritual need to light candles in this shrine space is strong and they are instantly well used but i cannot believe that an advisory group of artists and disabled access advisers reflecting over time with others about this space would have recommended this solution posted by peter mullins at 20 33 no comments sunday 19 july 2026 the heresy of wholeness some approaches to christian healing might be saying to some disabled people god prefers another version of you but god was subject to our bodily limitations in the incarnation and still bore the scars of them in the resurrection so we might better be looking for things to be transfigured rather than ignored or erased this was one of the striking things said at lincoln cathedral yesterday by canon timothy goode from york minster speaking as a disabled person himself another was his reminder that everything from our church buildings to our forms of church leadership are shaped by ableism one can see around which idealised forms of human being they were designed or developed the only depressing thing was that his insights were greeted as innovative i ve reflected here before about being taught theology in birmingham in the early 1980s where john hull s understanding of his blindness stephen pattison s analysis of what structures reveal about those who create or accept them frances young s relationship to her son s disability and invitations to observe radical care taken with the design of the balsall heath church centre led us to think the church would always think this way if wounded grace was more central to our theology and lives goode said we would be less fearful people because we would not have to feel we needed to prove ourselves against a perfect ideal not dissimilar things were being said by dr graham daniels of christians in sport on radio 4 s sunday worship today responding to sporting success and failure rather than to disability our achievements matter but we cannot always win his most careful thought was that successes and failures are expressions of our identity but not the sources of our identity we are not winners or losers but human beings who experience successes and failures peter failed but he was not a failure thinking this way he said means excellence cannot enslave we can lose without being destroyed and we can celebrate success without worshipping it meanwhile the photo is taken from the shepherds law hermitage in northumberland the home of franciscan friar brother harold for many years now redeveloped but as yet untenanted a few days in the north east brought me there and nearby to josephine butlers grave anglican contemplative and active traditions at their most rigorous and i ve had the news of the widow of a cousin of my father s aged 98 she must have been the last survivor among the guests at my parents wedding just over seventy years ago posted by peter mullins at 15 10 no comments sunday 5 july 2026 day two and god said let there be a dome in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters so god made the dome and separated the waters under the dome from the waters that were above the dome and god called the dome sky and there was evening and there was morning a second day two sets of jacqui parkinson s mammoth biblical tapestries arrived in the cathedral this week the boxes in which her threads through creation arrived were labelled in a way which made me smile i ve been particularly taken by her representation of the snake in the garden of eden which looks like a snake a falling angel and to my mind a missile she cites isaiah 14 12 15 the fall of an over mighty day star and son of the dawn which patristic writers and then paradise lost interwove with genesis 2 to make it look as if it was lucifer who tempted eve in my mind the bible tradition reason trio comes out nearer to paying close attention to the bible as text as interpreted in the past and as interpreted in our context the snake all that genesis 2 says is that it was more crafty than other creatures the lucifer interpretation not actually part of the genesis 2 story and deep awareness of the damage contemporary knowledge can do each felt to me to be there but it was the second day of creation in genesis 1 which came into particular focus for me too she has god spoke light for day one which is a sharp way of putting let there be light and she has god spoke water for day two which is a bit of a distortion the chaos of water over which god s breath and spirit moves is there before day one and although i m not sure what this points towards day two is also one of the days on which the writer does not say and god saw that it was good saying light on day one was about separating light and darkness now on day two it is saying sky which separates the waters still perceived to be above the heavens and the waters below what if it is the actual act of separation of making space of opening up which is the fundamentally creative act it continues on day three when the waters below are gathered into one place separating out dry land which god saw to be good and then vegetation followed which she has as god spoke a green earth and which god again saw to be good the only day this is said twice the cathedral s new chancellor gave his first lecture to mark the arrival of the art work although he didn t seek to respond to any of it he highlighted the chaos and dangers of darkness and of water now being contained and i pressed him a little to emphasise the spaces the separating out created he noted that god saying light making spaces which are not dark saying dome making spaces which are not water and saying green making spaces which are not barren over three days allowed the spaces to be populated on the next three days in turn with sun moon and stars with birds and fish and with land animals including human beings he also hinted forward to revelation where there will be no need of light god will be the light the sea will be no more and death animal mortality will be no more jacqui parkinson s work on revelation is also with us so that is where i ll need to look next posted by peter mullins at 10 10 no comments wednesday 24 june 2026 wildpeace again there is a plant called the oxford ragwort i m not a botanist or a gardener some of you may well know more about it than i do it is bright yellow a distant relative of the daisy it has nothing to do with oxford it is native to the volcanic slopes of mount etna but eighteenth century plant collectors did bring samples back to the botantical gardens in yes oxford from where it was said to have escaped i don t think it escaped i think it did what any plant does it produced prodigious amount of seed most of which landed where it was never going to grow but a few seeds found the cracks in the limestone walls of university buildings to be ideal places for it to do so so much grew that yes it came to be mistaken for a plant native to the city the next bit of the story is the best the railway came to oxford and the beds of the railway tracks turned out to be the best things since the slopes of etna all the better when ash fell from trains oxford ragwort followed the railway across the country it was less than welcome in most rural areas to cattle it is quite poisonous farmers have come to spend a lot of time having it pulled up but elsewhere large quantities ended up growing at the end of railway lines including around the docks at hull and after the second world war it came to love and colonise the bomb sites of the city etna ragwort oxford ragwort railway ragwort hull bomb site ragwort when i pray thy kingdom come on earth i m not sure that i pray any longer for an ideal setting shaped just as god would want it to be i think i think about tips of green emerging out of rubble when i pray for those in whose lives some sort of bomb has gone off i m not sure i can pray that the pain and consequences will be magicked away but i think i can pray that new things will begin to seed and sprout and my recent prayers for the peace have been shaped by newly released u2 music which includes the use of a modern hebrew poem which is weary with unremitting generations of conflict and ends up asking simply let wildpeace come like wildflower i say all this because among all the possible things to pick up from the scripture read at this service one strongly draws attention to itself as the most difficult jesus says i came not to bring peace but a sword i came to bring hostility within families what can be going on a few chapters earlier jesus had said blessed are the peacemakers they will be called children of god john s gospel even has him say my peace i give you it might be an example of a saying of jesus for which we have lost the original context the original context might be an expectation that when the messiah comes there will be a new world of justice and peace jesus is recognised as that messiah so why have things not changed perhaps because the expectation was also that the inauguration of the new age would be traumatic elsewhere jesus himself compares it to the pain of giving birth it is worth looking at the context in which matthew then sets the saying jesus is sending his disciples out for the first time we had an earlier part of this chapter last week say a word of peace to every house you enter if it takes seed there all well and good but if it is not the right place for it let it rebound onto you the implication is that there will be many places where...