Tag: Margery Spencer

When I first looked at our readings for today, I thought “O Good, the gospel of Luke. It will be a nice parable. But Oh no. A very difficult piece –and when I read the other passages it did not get much better” I didn’t get it. It was doing my head in.

My sister was on a course for very important nurses. She was, at the time, the senior nursing officer for Cambridge and attended the course with matrons from all over the country – a fierce regiment of women. During the night the fire alarms went off and gathered on the lawn of the house were these redoubtable ladies in dressing gowns and hair nets…

Seeing is believing – or is it? Do we believe everything we read in the newspapers or see on television or on film? Not always and rightly so. You only have to see what can be done to a digital photograph using the latest computer technology to know that the old adage “What can’t speak can’t lie” is no longer true.

I don’t know if you have made any new year resolutions? I haven’t. From past experience, intentions to eat more healthily, take more exercise and, in the past, to stop smoking would all be consigned to the rubbish bin by January 4th.

I used to play the piano at a nursery school, so that the children knew that music didn’t always come from a machine. There was a 3 year old who had major problems who called me Mrs. Piano and he was a gem…

So if it is true that royalty, sex and religion sell newspapers then if there had been a tabloid newspaper in Galilee in the first century, the events we heard about in our Gospel reading would certainly have made the headlines. Even without a newspaper, stories about that birthday party would have spread rapidly throughout the region. It is a sordid, shabby and shameful tale.