Thought for the Day
A one-minute read to inspire or challenge. Written by members of the church and updated every few days.
23rd April 2025
I’ve just seen a miracle. A Herring Gull is riding on the wind blowing up from the Portishead beach: wings perfectly still, barely a feather twitching, it hangs with a poise no hang-glider could ever manage, then suddenly wheels round and back to exactly where it was before. A wonder to behold.
The dictionary says a miracle is ‘A surprising and welcome event that is not explained by natural or scientific laws and is therefore the work of a divine agency.’ This would exclude what I’ve just seen, because of course the gull’s airborne skill can be attributed to the combination of aeronautical laws and instinctive skills instilled into the bird by evolution and its genes. But ‘miracle’ comes from the Latin and old French words for ‘wonder’; and the gull’s flight, irrespective of scientific explanations, evokes my wonder for its sheer grace and beauty, offered as a gift to me. The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem about, not a gull, but a Kestrel, ‘The Windhover’, hovering in the ecstasy of brilliant flight. He addressed his poem ‘To Christ our Lord’ whose mastery over all things he saw reflected in the bird’s airborne freedom.
There are two incomparable miracles. The first is the very existence of the world, created out of nothing. The second is the resurrection of Christ from the dead, new light out of darkness. No surprise that our world is full of wonders, for creation is itself a miracle, and the new creation has emerged at Easter. As Hopkins wrote in another poem, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Watch out!
Keith Clements
Good Friday, 18th April 2025
What to write on such a day in the Church’s calendar? Here I borrow heavily from a piece, kindly shared with me, in which the writer had set out what Easter means to them: The first Easter feels like a pinnacle moment of history – like a great arch that puts everything that’s gone before […]
16th April 2025
Here we are, half way through Holy Week. We have celebrated Jesus’ spectacular arrival in Jerusalem, and tomorrow we will think of the Last Supper. The tragedy of Good Friday will soon be followed by the glorious miracle of the Resurrection on Easter Day. But what about the days in between? What about Monday, Tuesday […]
11th April 2025
Palm Sunday is approaching. At Church we will (probably) sing “Ride on, ride on, in majesty” and will (probably) be given a palm cross – a precisely cut and folded piece of dried plant material, allegedly palm, which is to remind us of Christ’s crucifixion. (These seem mostly to be made ‘by Masai villagers of […]
9th April 2025
Last Sunday morning in the deacons’ prayer meeting – those few minutes before the service when the deacons pray for all who have gathered for worship – Sam was joking about how he has upset some of the ‘rules’ we cherish. For as long as anyone remembers, communion at Tyndale has been served by four […]
4th April 2025
EYE AND TOOTH. Martin Luther King Jr is on record as saying ‘If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will soon be a blind and toothless nation’ – a sobering thought where certain international events seem to embody two eyes and two teeth, and even more, for […]
28th March 2025
I hope you were able to see the exhibition of Jen Ford’s art that was on display at Tyndale in March. The title was “Silenced women of the Bible” and it aimed to “to change the way in which the church views women, by re-introducing those women in the Bible who have been wrongly shamed, […]
24th March 2025
Of great concern to many at the moment is the situation of the creative arts in the UK. The recent abolition of the music department at Cardiff University is just one example of diminishing government support at national and regional level, seen also in the steady disappearance of music, the visual arts, drama and dance […]
19th March 2024
If you’re a follower of the ‘beautiful game’, you’ll understand that, as a Newcastle United supporter, I’ve known a lot of pain over the years. The glory days were long past, and every time we seemed to be about to claim the honours, strangely lacklustre performances by the lads in black and white stripes cruelly […]
17th March 2025
Tidying my bookcase, I rediscovered “Open our Hearts, Daily prayers for Lent and Holy Week” by Ann Gerondelis, published in 2018. I flicked open the page for today and read: How do we respondto the unrelenting horrors we call the news?God, help us not to grow silently numbto pain and suffering –or become eager to […]