Every Tuesday morning at 10am

Simply tune in on Zoom and enjoy a few moments of quiet, prayerful reflection as the week unfolds. It will last no longer than 10 minutes.

Meeting ID: 892 2955 4820 Passcode: 836488

A time to pause, pray, reflect and reconnect.

No preparation needed.

Time for conversation for those who can stay.

“….Waiting on God, learning to be passive in a way creative for your inner life, is not a question of thinking about God, but of growing in stillness. It has to do with prayer, and with music or from the simple contemplation of the world about you.” (Michael Mayne, ‘A Year Lost and Found’)

Lancelot Andrewes was born in 1555 near All Hallows, Barking, by the Tower of London. He was an English bishop and scholar, who held high positions in the Church of England during the tumultuous reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. During the latter, he served successively as Bishop of Chichester, of Ely, and of Winchester and oversaw the translation of the King James Version of the Bible.

In 1571, at the age of 16, he was sent to study at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, proceeding to a Master of Arts degree 7 years later. His academic reputation spread so quickly that on the foundation in 1571 of Jesus College, Oxford he was named in the charter as one of the founding scholars. In 1576 he was elected a fellow of Pembroke College and in 1580 he was ordained a priest. Once a year he would spend a month vacation with his parents and would use the time to learn a foreign language.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, he became vicar of St Giles, Cripplegate, in the City of London, and developed a reputation as a preacher. He also firmly vindicated the reformed character of the Church of England, although he was no Calvinist and regularly criticised Calvinist doctrine and decried the Calvinistic notes in the Geneva translation of the Bible. By March 1590, he had become chaplain to Elizabeth I, where he continued to preach outspoken sermons, even in front of the Queen.

On the accession of James I, Andrewes rose into great favour. He assisted at the coronation, and his name was first on the list of those appointed to compile the Authorized (‘King James’) Version of the Bible, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611. Here he took charge of the first books of the Old Testament (Genesis to 2 Kings) and acted as a sort of general editor for the whole project.

In November 1605 he was consecrated Bishop of Chichester, and, following the Gunpowder Plot in the same month, preached a sermon to be presented to the king on the need to celebrate deliverance from what could have been a disaster for English democracy.

In 1617 he accompanied James I to Scotland with a view to persuading the Scots that they were better off with a church system based on Bishops, rather than their preferred Presbyterianism. As history shows, he was not entirely successful in this venture. In 1619 he was made Bishop of Winchester, a diocese that he administered with great success.

Lancelot Andrewes died on 25 September 1626, in Winchester Palace, the bishop's residence in Southwark, and buried in St Saviour's Church (now Southwark Cathedral, then in the Diocese of Winchester). His tomb can be found immediately behind the high altar. He is commemorated each year on 25th September in the Anglican lectionary.

He is chiefly remembered for his style of preaching. But his major contribution to Anglicanism is in the way he positioned the church as equally removed from the Protestant and the Roman positions. He had a clear sense of proportion and maintained a distinction between what is fundamental to the faith and what is subsidiary. He embraced the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism and emphasised a positive and constructive statement of the Anglican position.

Picture above: Lancelot Andrewes in a stained glass window in Chester Cathedral cloister by Mum's taxi. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, as well as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner, living in 12th century Germany. She is one of the best-known composers of simple single-instrumented sacred music while at the same time regarded by many scholars as the founder of scientific natural history.

Hildegard was born around 1098, and, as a child, experienced both poor health and extensive religious visions, which started when she was only 3 years old. At the age of 14, she was enclosed in the convent in Disibodenberg, in Rhineland-Palatinate, near Mainz, as a member of a community of women attached to a monastery of monks. She was elected Mother Superior in 1136.

Hildegard and approximately 20 nuns requested to be able to move to a simpler monastic life at the St. Rupertsberg monastery, some 40 km from Disibodenberg. But her request was denied by the Abbot at Disibodenberg and not granted until 1150, when she was deeply unwell and the Abbot agreed to her request.

On 17 September 1179, when Hildegard died, her sisters said they saw two streams of light appear in the skies and cross over the room where she was dying.

Regional calendars of the Catholic Church have listed her as a saint for centuries. But only on 10 May 2012, did Pope Benedict XVI extend the liturgical cult of Hildegard to the entire Catholic Church, and 6 months later, on 7 October 2012, named her a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of "her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching."

In recent years, Hildegard’s life has become of particular interest to feminist scholars, who recognise how she used reference to herself as a member of the weaker sex to gain recognition and at a time and in a place where few women were permitted a voice. She has also become a figure of reverence within the contemporary New Age movement, mostly because of her holistic and natural view of healing, as well as her status as a mystic.