Jameswoodward’s Weblog

As a result of these various trends, Christian ministry comes to be understood as being less about the application of expertise and more about facilitating the vocation of all Christians through processes of understanding, analysing and reflecting. The purpose of theological education, therefore, is to equip people with skills and strategies to enable them to reflect theologically. There is a renewed emphasis on experiential learning and on the agenda for learning coming from the learner from the dilemmas and questions generated by the practice of ministry. Theology emerges as a practical problem-solving and inductive discipline, which connects with practical issues in a way that illuminates and empowers. It also emerges as a way of reflection that draws on other disciplines in its analysis of experience in order to do justice to the complexity of any given situation.

Love is the cure.

 Your pain will keep giving birth to more pain.

Just let your eyes breathe out love

as easily as a flower breathes out its sweetness.

Rumi, Love is the cure,

In other words: the process of finding ourselves through narrative, not mathematics, is the most trust­worthy form of access to truth, and finally the one our humanity cannot do without.

Chartwell was the principal adult home of Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill and his wife Clementine bought the property, located two miles south of Westerham, Kent, England  in 1922. Extensive renovations simplifying and modernising the home were undertaken directly, completely transforming it when complete.

When it became clear to the Churchills in 1946 that they could not afford to run the property, a consortium of wealthy businessmen organized by Lord Camrose purchased the estate. The arrangement was that for payment of nominal rent both Sir Winston and Lady Churchill would have the right to live there until their deaths, when the property would be presented to the National Trust. When Sir Winston died in 1965, Clementine decided to present Chartwell to the National Trust immediately.

Churchill employed architect Philip Tilden to modernise and extend the house. Tilden worked between 1922 and 1924, simplifying and modernising, as well as allowing more light into the house through large casement windows. He worked in the gently vernacular tradition that is familiar in the early houses of Edwin Lutyens, a style stripped of literal Tudor Revival historicising details but retaining multiple gables with stepped gable ends, and windows in strips set in expanses of warm pink brick hung with climbers. Tilden’s work completely transformed the house.

Similarly to many early 20th century refurbishments of old estates, the immediate grounds, which fall away behind the house, were shaped into overlapping rectilinear terraces and garden plats, in lawn and mixed herbaceous gardens in the Lutyens-Jekyll manner, linked by steps descending to lakes that Churchill created by a series of small dams, the water garden where he fed his fish, Lady Churchill’s Rose garden and the Golden Rose Walk, a Golden Wedding anniversary gift from their children. The garden areas provided inspiration for Churchill’s paintings, many of which are on display in the house’s garden studio.

During the Second World War, the house was mostly unused. Its relatively exposed position so near to German-occupied France meant it was potentially vulnerable to a German airstrike or commando-style raid. The Churchills instead spent their weekends at Ditchley, Oxfordshire until security improvements were completed at the prime minister’s official country residence Chequers, Buckinghamshire

 Blessed are those who have the courage to do nothing.

They demonstrate to us a different level of living for one another.

Blessed are those who no longer expect anything and yet are able to smile.

God’s goodness is shining through them.

Blessed are those who are able to listen without harping on the same issue.

They make our inflexible views more relative.

Blessed are those who endure their powerlessness without rebelling against it.

They calm our agitated hearts.

 Blessed are those who do not dwell in bitterness of living alone.

 They put time in God’s hands.

Blessed are those who never tire of showing confidence.

They are giving us the courage to face every day with renewed enthusiasm.

Blessed are those who can no longer help others, but who weep for us.

Their tears will carry a lot of weight in the eyes of God. 

Blessed are those who pass their days peacefully and quietly.

They are creating safe havens for us.

Blessed are those who have nothing to say any longer, yet do not fall silent.

Their words announce hope and confident optimism.

Blessed are those who empty their hands and extend their arms.

They are teaching us to cling to nothing.

 Blessed are those who do not consider their own needs all that important and instead only look out for others. What would our life be without them? —

BEATRIX KOLK, O.S.B.

Hampton Court Palace is a royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Greater London; it has not been inhabited by the British royal family since the 18th century. The palace is located 11.7 miles (18.8 km) south west of Charing Cross and upstream of Central London on the River Thames. It was originally built for Cardinal Wolsey, a favourite of King Henry VIII, circa 1514; in 1529, as Wolsey fell from favour, the palace was passed to the King, who enlarged it. It would serve as the location filmed for the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, directed by Fred Zinnemann.

The following century, William III’s massive rebuilding and expansion project intended to rival Versailles was begun.Work halted in 1694, leaving the palace in two distinct contrasting architectural styles, domestic Tudor and Baroque. While the palace’s styles are an accident of fate, a unity exists due to the use of pink bricks and a symmetrical, albeit vague, balancing of successive low wings.

Today, the palace is open to the public, and is a major tourist attraction. It is cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces which receives no funding from the Government or the Crown.

The palace’s Home Park is the site of the annual Hampton Court Palace Festival and Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Along with St. James’s Palace, it is one of only two surviving palaces out of the many owned by Henry VIII.

Moore’s Figure in a Shelter 1975 finds its origins in the Helmet Head series first produced in 1939-40. By making the central figure smaller, widening and dividing the space around that figure, and even eventually removing it entirely from its’ protective armour to produce Bronze Form 1985.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me;

 let me Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

From T.S.Eliot, Marina

Perry Green is the name of Moore’s former estate, which includes the farmhouse home of Hoglands and garden, his studios, and less formal gardens and fields containing many of his larger sculptures. The grounds also feature the Sheep Field Barn gallery with changing exhibits of his work, and the Aisled Barn with a display of nine large tapestries based on his drawings.

The Foundation’s headquarters are located on the grounds at Perry Green, and its collections of his work. The collections include sculptures in stone, wood, plaster and bronze, drawings and sketchbooks, graphic work, and preparatory materials such as found objects and maquettes.

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.