June 2012
1 post
Kindling and Extravagant Hope
At key moments in human history circumstances have led to seismic shifts in human consciousness and the rise of new ways of thinking and acting. The emergence of agriculture in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago saw hunter – gatherer people’s domesticate animals, raise crops and create the first cities. Other shifts in human consciousness have taken place...
February 2012
2 posts
This World Our True Home
January 2012
2 posts
The Ragged School Minister
Thomas Guthrie 1803 - 1873
Thomas Guthrie grew up in what is now the county of Angus but used to be called Forfarshire. He studied in both Edinburgh and Paris and pursued an interest in medicine as well as theology but chose to become a minister, though he would undoubtedly have excelled at either profession. He became minister of Arbirlot parish in Angus and was soon involved in a project to...
The Power of Arts and Crafts
The Greyfriars Kirkhouse is now home to the Grassmarket Community Project. You can visit their website at www.grassmarketcommunityproject.co.uk We still have our Tuesday night Parish Meal and still offer the hospitality and friendship that has always been a characteristic of the Kirkhouse. Now, however, we are doing a great deal more to assist people to move ahead in life, develop skills and...
December 2011
2 posts
Sermon – 4th December 2011
“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God, speak tenderly to her and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received double for all her sins” Isaiah 40: 1-2.
These words come to the people of Israel from the prophet and strike a note of hope and promise in the midst of prospects that seem to most to be bleak and unlikely to be resolved. They are spoken...
Pilgrimage in Scotland
Launch of the Green Pilgrim Network, Assisi, Italy, November 2011
1. Pilgrimage is making a comeback and it may be that we do not fully realise what the Spirit has in mind by prompting people to consider this as a spiritual activity but there are some key elements:
· The pilgrim travels light and, in a time of recession and climate change and the realisation that there are limits...
November 2011
7 posts
A Reflection for Graduates - November 2011,...
The world is full of experts. Fairly soon, those of you who are graduating today will join them – that is if you can find a job. This is not straight forward in these difficult economic times.
It is wonderful to be an expert, to be a professional person in a specific field. But, as you proceed into the world of professionalism with your particular expertise, never stop listening to those who have...
Remembrance Sunday – 13th November 2011
What did you do during our 2 minutes’ silence this morning? Were you able to use that time well?
Did you manage to reflect during those 2 minutes on those who are affected and suffer due to war? Were you able to think about what it might take to work for a better and different world where it will be possible truly to say that those who died in conflict did not die in vain; that their...
Greyfriars Recycling of Wood Project |... →
A Piece of Scottish History →
The GROW team have recently been hard at work on an ambitious collection of limited edition lamps. These lamps are being fashioned from a lovely oak balustrade which used to enclose an area in front of the Moderator’s chair in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh.
The balustrade was removed during renovations at the General Assembly in 2009 and was eventually...
Pilgrimage Sermon
Greyfriars, Tolbooth & Highland Kirk
Sermon – 6th November 2011
“You know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich”. 2 Corinthians 8:9.
I spent a good part of last week in the city of Assisi in Italy. I was there with representatives of many faiths from around the world. We were talking...
October 2011
5 posts
Pilgrimage Statement
In undertaking a pilgrimage journey, we are bound to encounter a stranger. We are also certain to pass through new and unknown territory. Both the stranger and the unfamiliar place can unsettle us and render us fearful, for they take us out of our comfort zone.
However, it is just such encounters and journeys that the Spirit is surely prompting us to make in the days through which we are living....
A Prayer about Debt Relief
Jesus said, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.
Lord, there is so much in our lives that needs forgiving – so much that we need to forgive.
There are so many who are weighed down by our demands.
It is perhaps no accident that it was an African who carried your cross, Lord Christ,
that continent carries so many burdens still.
Like your disciples on the journeys you took through...
Theological Statement – Faith, Conservation and...
In undertaking a pilgrimage journey, we are bound to encounter a stranger. We are also certain to pass through new and unknown territory. Both the stranger and the unfamiliar place can unsettle us and render us fearful, for they take us out of our comfort zone.
However, it is just such encounters and journeys that the Spirit is prompting us to make in the days through which we are living. The...
A Prayer of Oscar Romero
Here is a prayer I found many years ago by Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. A great minister of the Gospel, gunned down in his church as he served Communion in 1980.
“It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is...
August 2011
1 post
Pilgrimage
St Margaret’s Chapel, Edinburgh Castle
Pilgrimage Proposal for Scotland
Andrew Patterson, Dane Sherrard and Richard Frazer have been invited to attend a conference that will launch the Green Cities Pilgrimage Network – A New Global Network of Green Pilgrim Cities of All Faiths.
The Network will inspire Pilgrims to:
prepare mindfully for their pilgrimage…
walk lightly and travel...
May 2011
4 posts
http://www.growgreyfriars.com →
The Greyfriars Social Enterprise Experience
The Background
“This is not just about woodwork……we teach people transferrable skills and this place allows them to participate in their own community. It is about accepting people. I have a team of volunteers who are so motivated, much more so than in some places where people are getting paid for...
April 2011
5 posts
The Road to Emmaus
“Were not our hearts burning within us?” Luke 24:32
If there is one thing that makes me really uncomfortable, it is a stuffy, airless room. Ever since I was a child I have always slept with the bedroom window open and only when we were sick would my mother come and light a fire in our bedrooms. It was always a rare treat to watch a flickering fire through the haze of some juvenile, high...
The King of the Jungle - But also the most...
The tiger is the King of the Jungle, and yet the tiger turns out to be the most vulnerable of species as it struggles to adapt to changes to its environment and the pressure on its habitat by human expansion.
The nature writer Richard Mabey writes of the Barn Owl as a sort of barometer of the health of the British landscape, its decline since the introduction of large scale use of chemical...
MESSAGE FROM THE WEST AFRICAN NETWORK OF...
We, African agricultural producers, represent the vast majority of those who are poor and hungry! But we do not want to live off charity and humanitarian good will! We do not want to build our rural societies on food aid, however generous it may be! We want above all to live from our work!
We want agriculture and farmers to be valued for their work and multiple functions: nutritional, social,...
Sir Iain Noble
Recently, at a Memorial service for Sir Iain Noble held here in Greyfriars we heard the following words read out. Iain Noble was a man of vision, who set his sights on a destination that was beyond achieving, but that did not daunt him.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs...
Pilgrimage 2011
Pilgrimage is a subject that is making a comeback. It was an important discipline in the lives of our ancestors. King Robert the Bruce made several pilgrimages to Whithorn in Galloway the “Candida Casa”, cradle of Christianity in Scotland, the bright mission place established by Ninian. St Andrew’s, Luss and later Iona were also destinations for pilgrims through the centuries. Our Protestant...
February 2011
1 post
A Timber Miracle
The GRoW (Greyfriars Recycling of Wood) social enterprise that manufactures fine furniture from redundant church pews received a wonderful and exciting commission recently. They have been asked by the Assembly Arrangements Committee to make two new lecterns for use in the Assembly Hall and a new desk and lectern for the Moderator to be used during the sitting of the General Assembly.
The...
December 2010
6 posts
Christmas Eve Sermon
Greyfriars Sermon - Christmas Eve 2010
The years roll by and Christmases come and go. And year by year, amidst all the stress and the glitter and the hype and nonsense, I hope there is a moment when you catch a glimpse of the meaning of this birth – when the power of the story takes your breath away because it is the story of your birth and the birth of every child that comes into the world.
What...
Greyfriars and the Path to Modernity
In 1638, here in Greyfriars the National Covenant was signed. It was a document that insisted on spiritual freedom for the church and was, in many ways, ill tempered and intolerant. And yet, as a development of reformed thinking it was laying the foundations of democratic governance, universal education and enlightenment thinking. Through its innate distrust of earthly authority whether of...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymuF7uG6wis&feature=... →
Henryk Gorecki
Just a few weeks ago, the Polish composer Henryk Goretski died. He was a relatively obscure figure until Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta made a recording of his 3rd Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. It was a piece of music that Goretski had written in honour of the many millions who had perished in the holocaust. It is hard to imagine what could be done to transform the dark shadow...
Priests of the earth
I love the idea that Homo - Sapiens might one day evolve to become Homo – Eucharisticus, the priests of the earth, the purpose of our intelligence being to cherish what is left of the earth and see it flourish, to see the sacred in the every day and re-enchant nature by our care, mercy, justice and humility. One of the great gurus of the environmental movement, John Seymour died a few years ago....
October 2010
2 posts
Doctrine - what people kill for Faith -...
“The longer I am a minister, the less religious I am becoming. Of course, the institutional church is something I still love, (and get frustrated by in equal measure!) I wish to follow Jesus, probably with more determination than ever, but the trappings of the church, that I admit once held out a certain appeal, seduce me less and less. Of course the risen body of Christ needs to be incarnated...
September 2010
1 post
Read the Earth Charter →
July 2010
2 posts
The Origins of GRoW
I spent a few years as a member of the Church’s Art and Architecture Committee in the 1990s. As I travelled around, about the most common aspiration of congregations was to remove the pews and replace them with softer, kinder and more flexible seating. Pews are often made from lovely wood but are hard and often quite uncomfortable, (perhaps made deliberately so to keep the poor worshipper awake...
May 2010
20 posts
Vaclav Havel
“We either have hope with us or we don’t, a dimension of our soul, not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out”.
This world, our true home.
All human kind are one vast family, this world our true home. We sleep beneath one roof, the starry sky, we warm ourselves before one hearth, the blazing sun. Upon one floor of soil we stand and breath one air and drink one water and walk beneath the luminescent moon. The children of God we are, brothers and sisters of one flock, and members of one worldwide family of God, who is our shepherd, our...
Our True Ministry
I remember a colleague, who ministered in a rural parish as I did at the beginning of my ministry, telling me it was my responsibility to “know where the burns rise in your parish”. He also said that I would find that one of my chief tasks would frequently be to protect those on the fringe of the church from those at the centre.
I have always loved this idea of ministry focussed beyond the centre...
Iona Bendicite
An Iona benedicite
O angels of the Lord, bless the Lord,
O saints of these parts, bless the Lord,
O servants of Christ who here have sung praises to God, through many generations,
O souls of the faithful who rest in Jesus, bless the Lord,
O kindly folk of this place, bless the Lord
O sheep and horned cattle, O lambs that jump in the fields,
O fish that...
Life For Others
As Christ breathed his last on the Cross, he uttered several “last words”, one of which was, “ it is finished!”
We know that the phrase, rendered in English, does not capture the full meaning. Some translations render the phrase, “it is accomplished”. His last word was a word of triumph, a note of victory or achievement, as though this moment of apparent defeat was what he felt his life was all...
It may seem odd that the pursuit of spiritual curiosity and following the path of faith has also given us science too. So many people think that science disproves faith but that is not the case at all. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding is the very heart of the true spiritual path. You do not have to leave your intellect at the church door to be a person of faith. Faith always seeks...
The river flows to the sea. Every river does, ultimately. Sometimes I think that this is a good metaphor for the human relationship to the Divine. Imperceptibly, our small trickle of life is drawn to the great ocean that we call God. Like water to the sea, there are times when the flow turns into a torrent, other times of calm and even stillness, but when we are not moving, like water itself we...
