Category: The Daily Sip

The Pilgrimage within the Pilgrimage

A ten minute walk from the Saint Columba Hotel, where our little pilgrimage is staying next to the benedictine Abbey, is the Augustinian Nunnery (Convent) which are now in ruins after 1400 years.  This image of a square room with low, white benches on either side, is the remnants of...

crumbs, crowns and mitres

Yesterday, I sat on a bench with a friend by the Sound of Iona and had tea with a scone as big as my head. It was too much for even me to eat and so as we sat in silence watching the water, I began to feed the birds...

Blessing by the Stag

The green of God’s life I bind unto myself this day. The blue of The Spirit’s waters I bind unto myself this day. The browns of Jesus’s earth I bind unto myself this day. May the green, green grasses, wet with rain, soften my feet. May the waters rushing down...

Pilgrimage- Day One – Iona

Pilgrimages are meant to be challenging. One is meant to fight, climb and scramble over and around barriers to be on a pilgrimage. There are some flat, lovely passages, but so often there are boulders and fallen trees which, so often, are the greatest gifts of a pilgrimage. Sometimes the...

The dog and the author

This is an oil painting of a Skye Terrier named Bobby.  He lived as the companion of a police officer named John Grey whose beat was the Grassmarket between Greyfriars Church and Edinburgh Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1858, Bobby’s master, John Grey, died of tuberculosis and for fourteen years...

Presence

  Last night, in a tiny apartment in Haymarket outside of Edinburgh, Scotland I slept for 16 hours without waking or turning. My hands were in the same position. My body was in the same position as when I went to sleep a few seconds after going to bed at...

The Mathematician

My observation is that life and the planet seem to have a kind of perfect mathematics to them which reveal, to me, a God.  I no longer believe that the God is anything like what we write about or talk about or picture in stained glass just as I would...

Friendship

  Friendship is the molten core of the Gospel of John and is the molten core of our faith. Not worship.  Not service.  Not Advocacy of the poor in money or faith. Not church buildings.  Not organs or choirs. Not vestries or Bishop’s edicts. Not memos. Not feasts nor fasts. ...

Another Lord’s Prayer

God, you are The Supreme Existence. We, and all creation, are in you; and you are in us. “Father” is not who you are, as much as Cosmos, or perhaps, Supreme Lover of Souls. You exist in what we call “heaven” because we have no language which fits time outside...

our inner tour-guide

I was once visiting a house museum and was taken on a tour by the museum tour guide whose job it was to take my ticket and show me around, watching that I did not snitch anything off tables and explaining what I was seeing.  It was an old house...