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cted at every level across the university it s measured reported and celebrated but it s not the only thing of far more interest to me and of equal importance are the inner journeys that take place here those developments of mind and spirit and the overall growth in maturity and virtue that inform and make up our character who we really are this great chapel cambridge s most remarkable and iconic building stands to the glory of god but also and intentionally it creates space for the spirit space for the soul you never really feel that by looking at it from the outside but whenever you pass though the south door you walk into a space that is almost ridiculously large and capacious as well as beautiful and inviting some of you will have sometimes come along late on a thursday evening for heartspace a time just to be and rest and enjoy we tried doing heartspace on zoom during lockdown it was fun to put together a playlist and choose photos but it really wasn t the same the space and atmosphere of the chapel simply isn t communicable at least visually i sometimes think that our radio broadcasts give more sense of the place as the special acoustic is so evident that magic sound hints at the scale and warmth of king s and the encouragement of generosity and liberality that were the hallmarks of king henry vi s vision when he planned his college for 70 poor scholars cambridge is a place of achievement and you graduands deserve all the praise you are receiving but it is more profoundly a place of inner learning only you can really say how the inner you has been challenged and stretched encouraged and developed these last three or four years you probably haven t had much chance to think about that yet but maybe there will be a few moments in the days to come when you can sit and ponder or maybe walk and ponder not only how your mind has developed but how your heart has grown in this space a space and place where yes we are both traditional and on trend where we are often scruffy and sometimes superformal but where we do what we can to keep things open and vibrant and fresh and humane that is why we have readings at our chapel services not only from the bible but also from the likes of civil rights mystic and activist howard thurman from whose meditations of the heart you heard a few paragraphs earlier in the service i ll be honest and tell you that i hadn t heard of thurman until a few years ago but having come across one small quote from his writings i have looked out much much more it s inspired and inspiring in 2020 i even managed to slip a prayer of his into our televised christmas carol service this is how it goes the work of christmas when the song of the angels is stilled when the star in the sky is gone when the kings and princes are home when the shepherds are back with their flock the work of christmas begins to find the lost to heal the broken to feed the hungry to release the prisoner to rebuild the nations to bring peace among people to make music in the hear maybe there s a prayer called the work of graduation that needs to be written maybe it would go like this when the noise of the may balls is stilled when the rides from the front court are gone when the students and parents are home when the fellows are sadly alone the work of the graduate begins to find solutions to speak with clarity to be wise in judgement to be bold and creative to stand up and lead to continue to learn to be the one who makes peace to let gratitude fill the heart posted in uncategorized tagged howard thurman leave a comment hello again june 29 2022 by stephen cherry long time no blog but i ll be offering a few over the summer so do stay tuned i am going to be thinking a lot about forgiveness so there may be a blog or two on that subject a huge amount has been written about it since i published healing agony reimagining forgiveness back in 2012 and just this week the bbc has a series of forgiveness stories every day on bbc radio 4 https www bbc co uk programmes m0018npb meanwhile i will publish the address i gave yesterday at a service in king s college chapel cambridge for our graduating students posted in uncategorized leave a comment easter 2021 the importance of sadness and the abiding of love april 3 2021 by stephen cherry i have long been troubled by the insistence that easter should be celebrated with unalloyed joy three days may be all it takes for god to raise the dead but we all know from experience or observation that it can take a very long time to get over traumatizing experiences i suppose it would make sense if the resurrection were merely the reversal of a bereavement we thought our friend had died but no he s back among us hurray let s party but for those who have travelled the long and hard path of the so called holy week that careered from hosanna to crucify and ended with the various cries from the cross never mind the shrieks and wails of the sympathetic onlookers and the taunts and jeers of the rest for those of us who have let at least some of the suffering in as we have meditated on the sights sounds and smells of the betrayal abandonment torture and murder of a friend for those of us who have taken at least a few imaginative steps down the via dolorosa it s not so easy and in fact it s probably neither very mature nor very healthy simply to flip from desperation to joy it s always a mistake to connect our feelings and our faith too closely feelings come and go but faith like hope and love is the sort of thing than can should must and will abide remain endure and it s this solid reliable stuff that the traumatized and disillusioned the broken and the disappointed need don t just take my word for it shelly rambo puts this point at the heart of her deep and powerful study spirit and trauma a theology of remaining in the authorized version of the bible the two disciples on the road to emmaus ask jesus to abide with us for it is toward evening and the day is far spent these words from luke s gospel inspired the great hymn as abide with me fast falls the eventide as victorian clergyman henry francis lyte witnessed the death of his vicar and then moved knowingly and prematurely towards the end of his own life i don t suppose that hymn will be much sung over easter and yet i feel it might accurately reflect not only the truth of where many find themselves to be on their spiritual journey at the moment but also the depths of what they long for abide with me is often sung by sad people at funerals or memorials but is it not also true that we are if we are honest increasingly aware that sadness is not a feeling that comes and goes but a profound and dignified constant in the human condition a chance remark in a zoom discussion a few days ago reminded me of gillian rose s memoir love s work which then became my good friday reading i was arrested by this thought earthly human sadness is the divine comedy the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the ever surprising outcome of our actions she goes on to say more about this comedy quoting hegel who writes that it characterises someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable about it at all this in turn leads to sureness of self but for rose it is a very particular kind of sureness it is the sureness of self that is ready to be unsure and it s the unsureness not the sureness that she argues makes for the holy comedy of our condition and which requires of us the work of love which is also the abiding of love the point of the resurrection is not that joy quickly trumps sadness but that love abides love that is the partner not of supercharged and switched on happiness but of faith and hope the truth is that sadness persists and it s right that it does when we think of all we regret not only in terms of our own actions in the past but also in the injustices that are perpetrated every hour and in the untold suffering of millions in places of deprivation violence sickness or any other misery every day and every night we can never be content with a kind of joy from which sadness is excluded and yet the persistence of sadness is not the end of faith any more than the unsureness of self is the contradiction of appropriate humble and compassionate self confidence the persistence of sadness is the beginning of faith and hope it is not denied but it is answered by the abiding of love and therefore we rejoice posted in uncategorized tagged easter hope love trauma 1 comment thy will be done a question for every chapter february 13 2021 by stephen cherry my 2021 lent book thy will be done doesn t include questions for personal or group study however since publishing it i have written a question for every chapter i offer them here hoping they might be helpful to anyone using the book in lent part 1 heaven do you agree that the lord s prayer falls naturally into two halves heavenly and earthly to what extent is motherly father a helpful phrase for you who are the our in our father how big a problem is patriarchy for those who pray this prayer in these words which do you find it harder to believe that god is powerful or that god is intimately close what does it mean to say that the lord s prayer is not a spell part 2 earth bree newsom took the lord s prayer to the top of a flagpole in dangerous protest where might you take it how might christianity be different if jesus had defined the kingdom of god can you think of any good things that have happened while you were waiting for something or someone what are the best and worst aspects of monarchy what does it mean to see care givers high achievers what do you make of the phrase my own special god in my heart part 3 bread is bread ever simply bread what does it mean to say that food is a spiritual issue might it be helpful if the word ordinary replaced daily in the lord s prayer is there a distinctive or clear christian sense of what we mean by now how does praying for daily bread impact on our relationship with the hungry do you feel that the author might be being a bit hard on the foodie generation part 4 forgiveness is it true that christianity doesn t encourage us to sweat the small stuff of morality or scrupulosity how unusual is weird christian thinking would the lord s prayer be better if the word trespasses were replaced by debts do you agree that the word sin today lacks the full range of meaning and means either trivial or super serious offence does forgiving involve forgetting the remembrance of injustice how helpful is it to think of both the grace of forgiving and the grace of not forgiving part 5 temptation what are the strengths and weaknesses of distancing as a way of avoiding temptation how do you hope that god might respond when you pray and lead us not into temptation how do you understand the difference between a test and a trial is it more helpful to pray deliver us from evil or deliver us from the evil one do you agree that there s nowhere to hide from the tempter has the pandemic had an impact on the way you understand what it is to be spiritually tested part 6 glory how much does it matter to you that the final petition of the lord s prayer is not biblical how does the word fulfilment feature in your spirituality how does the example of power as empowerment given here connect with your belief about the power of god when how and why is it right to say that glory is more than beauty how do you respond to the version of the lord s prayer presented in this chapter is there a more profound or important prayer than thy will be done posted in uncategorized tagged lent 2 comments the lord s prayer for lockdown lent and life january 12 2021 by stephen cherry readers of this blog will have noticed that there hasn t been much to read for a while one reason for this is that i ve been writing books and not blogs in fact last year i published two the first was psalm prayers the second thy will be done which bloomsbury are calling the lent book 2021 as i was writing the lent book i was trying to imagine what we would be feeling about the coronavirus after the pandemic was over anticipating that by the time it was being read lockdowns masks and social distancing would have been mere memories i couldn t have been more wrong i think i was right however to choose the lord s prayer as the theme for a lent book as i read through expositions of the prayer from different historical eras and made new connections of my own i had a strong feeling that going for full immersion in the lord s prayer would be spiritually enriching and renewing the idea was a good one for any time but i now feel that it was an especially good one for this time of pandemic in a time of uncertainty the familiar can be especially important for us it s comforting for sure but that s not the whole story if you stay with the familiar for a while you realise that its more than comforting and that it begins to open up new realities and truths and insights i ve come to feel that there s a real connection between engaging with something as deeply well known as the lord s prayer and the practice that many of us are engaging with in this lockdown as in previous ones of getting know our neighbourhood not to mention the inside of our home much more deeply day after day we are walking the same paths sitting in the same rooms having meals with the same people this can be wearisome indeed for those of us most of us all of us who have based our lives on busyness and novelty seeking but if forced to slow down to calm down and to pay attention the local and dare i say it the parochial we begin after a while to realise that the whole of life really is there or rather here in our locality our home and among our familiar companions if william blake could see eternity in a grain of sand then the rest of us might just be able to see an awful lot more in our neighbourhood than we had previously noticed and its the same thought that might lead us to hope to find not only daily bread but a feast of spiritual nutrition in the prayer that jesus taught us no apologies from me then for writing a book about the most familiar prayer there ever has been thy will be done is available as a paperback in all the usual places and also as an ebook and as an audiobook by the way next week launde abbey is hosting an online study day on the book next monday so do consider joining us it would be great to see you check in here https www laundeabbey org uk event deepening discipleship day twbd posted in uncategorized 1 comment a festival of nine lesson and carols 2020 december 23 2020 by stephen cherry details of this year s service from king s college chapel cambridge together with links to help you find where it is being broadcast in the uk or overseas can be found here https www kings cam ac uk chapel a festival of nine lesson and carols 2020 posted in uncategorized 1 comment older posts follow blog via email enter 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