All Things Seen & Unseen

Many readers will have viewed this charming and engaging BBC TV series but the TV series is based on a book by Jennifer Worth. (It can be purchased for under AUD$12 and can be highly recommended.)  It's superbly written by a talented author with a wonderful gift for the language who has obviously lived through a tumultuous time all but forgotten: deep joy, ecstasy, huge sorrow and pain, wonderful camaraderie, amid the great dedication of nurses and mid-wife Anglican nuns to their respective callings in the squalor and material deprivation of the East End of London following WW2. Jenny at 22 (the author) comes to work as a midwife with a group of sometimes feisty nuns of the Midwives of St Raymond Nonnatus (patron saint of childbirth, midwives, children, pregnant women) and other non-professed, young midwives at a residence called 'Nonnatus' near the London docklands. She is fleeing a love affair that ended badly but soon finds herself baptised into a life of relentless wor...

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was an prodigious writer with around 80 detective novels and other collections of stories published , giving us sleuths of the calibre of Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot .   She also wrote, The Mousetrap which holds the record for the longest-running play ever (60 years and 25,000 performances in 2012). Her works have sold an astonishing four billion items with her sales eclipsed only by the Bible and Shakespeare's works. What is usually not so well known is that Christie was a Christian (Church of England) who took her faith seriously enough for a reader to detect it within her works. However, her writing is not evangelical for her vocation was detective novel-writing for the glory of God. One of her major theme-ideas was the often hidden but nevertheless real sinfulness of men and women. 1 This sinfulness was also to be found in English villages which romantic writers liked to think pristine and wholesome. Next time we will look at Christie's The ...

Just recently, I've again come across the writings of Dr J. I. Packer, now in his 80s, who has been a pastor and academic.  He was once a great hero of mine when I was an orthodox Calvinist d e cades ago. He was an Anglican but recently left the Canadian church because of its well-publicised slide into li beralism . Interestingly, although he classed himself as an evangelical he had a great l ove for The Book of Common Prayer ( BCP: 1662). (B eing an evangelical Anglican and having a love for the BCP seems rare to day. ) Packer was brought up on the BCP and I can understand his strong affection for its r h ythms and its implicit piety. (I was not nurture d in it but first e ncountered Anglicanism through An Australian Prayer Book (AAPA: 1978) .) Packer has made a study of the 1662 BCP and found that a sin-grace-faith pattern exists throughout its services.  To check this out f urther, I would like to go back to the second Prayer Book (1552) of Edward VI's reign ...

Increasing our faith may take place during times when the presence of God is most evident. However, paradoxically, it is perhaps likely to take place when we are being sorely tested. It is at just those difficult times when we can learn to practise exercising faith when circumstances don't encourage us. But we need to practise exercising it by remembering in whom we believe.