Another Way Into the Bible

During a talk at St Luke’s in January, Denise Ward introduced us to a form of meditation called ‘Lectio Divina’ or Holy Reading. Conceived by someone called Origen, who lived a couple of hundred years after Jesus, and developed by Benedict, three hundred years later again, this is an approach to prayer which invites words from the Bible to speak by listening to them rather than simply reading them.  

Drawing on the words from Psalm 131, read earlier in the service, (‘Put your hope in God, both now and forever’ ) Denise outlined four movements in the practice of Lectio Divina in which we can 'use a short piece of the Bible to make space, to calm your soul, to be attentive to God.'

1.      Reading or Lectio. Read and repeat the words of a verse or line of scripture several times. (‘Put your hope in God, both now and forever’ )

2.      Meditation or Mediatio. Reflect on what this verse says to you, today. (What would it mean for you to choose to hope.)

3.      Praying or Oratio. Respond. (For example, in the light of hoping and trusting in God pray for our world and the people who are on your mind.)

4.      Contemplating or Contemplatio. Rest. Allow yourself a moment of quiet, allow space for what might come to you.

The Gospel According to Gary

It has been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services we sometimes feature an additional Gospel reading – from the Gospel of this Church.

On the last Sunday of 2025, we heard a reading from the Gospel of St Luke’s West Holloway, according to Gary.

‘‘I’ve always wanted to be accepted. 

Since the break up of my family when I was a child, and going into care when I was nine, I’ve felt alone and rejected. 

I’m in my sixties now but about four years ago things had become bleak and I was coming to the end of myself. I felt lost. I had to find some positives in my life when there was so much negativity?

Eventually I got the bottle up to come and poke my head in at St Luke’s Church. I knocked on the door of the vicarage and it was answered by Rev John MacKenzie.

I asked him how would I start coming to church and he invited me in. I explained the state I was in, what I’ve been through all my life. I shed a few tears but he took it all on board.

He said, ‘Garry, have you been baptized?’ 

I wasn’t sure. 

‘If you want to be baptized,’ he said,’Let’s do it. We’ll do it fast. We’ll do it next week if you want.’

So we did, April 11th I think, a weekday, just me and him at the font and he sprinkled me with water and said the prayers. 

When my parents split up my three older sisters could look after themselves but my dad took custody of me and my two younger brothers. 

Dad couldn’t cope. Me and my brothers got involved in a gang, bunking off school and it wasn’t long before we were taken into care. Those six or seven years weren’t good for me. They thought I was a problem child but there was a reason I was being disruptive. I became very dejected.

At 16 I ran away, back to my mother in Islington. She took me in for a year or so but eventually kicked me out and this was the start of my life being homeless. That was to last all through my teens and into my thirties. 

At first I was in the west country, living in buses and tents or squatting. I was part of something known as the peace convoy, a kind of traveling anarchist community. 

It was a bit odd but also I felt kind of happy about it and slowly it pulled me out of the mire I’d been in since I was a kid.

But my relationships broke down, I let people down. This has been a trend in my life.

I headed back to London, living in hostels or squats, until eventually, in my forties, with my mum’s help, I got my own flat where I’ve been for twenty years. 

With my own address I could get work as a labourer and the boss discovered I was good with gardening. 

Whenever a new development was nearing completion I was the one given the task of sorting out the garden. 

I became known as ‘the front and back man’ because I was the one they turned to to do the front of the house and then the back. 

As soon as I’d finished a garden the boss put me back on the labouring but it was the gardening I loved. 

I thank my dad for that and a trick he played on me when I was a kid. He wanted his garden dug over to lay a new lawn, so he started digging and a shilling dropped out of his pocket into the earth. He planned that, of course. I got digging to try and find it and that was when I realised I enjoyed the digging. It could be hard but I found it liberating.

Even in the years I’ve been homeless I’ve always turned to gardening. It’s kept me busy, given me a purpose. 

Sometimes it earned me a few bob but often I've done it for for nothing, or for food and shelter.

There was always something pulling me towards the soil, towards the plants and trees, and I went to college to study landscape gardening and horticulture and got my NVQ.

If someone asks what I do I say gardener every time, although I might also say multi-skilled labourer, painter and decorator.

After John had baptized me at St Luke’s I thought I needed to start coming along to Sunday services but leaving my house and coming down the road  I became full of thought. 

I felt myself resisting it. Swimming, a bit anxious. Do I want to do this? 

I was anxious about introducing myself to new people, about  explaining the life I’d lived.

When I walked through the door that first morning, I was fine - although for a couple of months I still got anxiety about opening my heart to people. 

There was a lot of negative forces inside me. In time they settled down and one morning when I walked to church I thought, ‘I'm not anxious anymore. I'm not worried about it.’

I appreciate the services, especially the quieter ones and it was in one of the monthly Iona services that something happened which I will never forget. 

I was sitting there in a prayer and then there was a song and suddenly I felt like I was being lifted off the ground or as if I was being filled up like a glass. 

I raised my hands in the air and felt goosebumps on my arms and back. 

The hairs on my neck were tingling and I sensed there was a ball of light above me, something which is carrying me through my life and knows what I am going through.

I felt as if I could hear a voice saying, ‘You belong here. You are very welcome here.’

It touched me so deeply and after the service I wrote out the words of the song and I keep them pinned on my fridge door.

Take this moment, sign and space
Take my friends around
Here among us make the place
Where your love is found.

Take the time to call my name,
Take the time to mend
Who I am and what I’ve been,
All I’ve failed to tend.

Take the tiredness of my days,
Take my past regret,
Letting your forgiveness touch
All I can’t forget

Take the little child in me
Scared of growing old;
Help me here to find my worth
Made in God’s own mould.

Take my talents, take my skills,
Take what’s yet to be;
Let my life be yours, and yet
Let it still be me.

I'll stop by my fridge every now and again and read a little bit of it to myself. 

All my life I’ve felt rejected and lonely - how my parents were not able to raise me and then my experience in that children’s home - but now I felt like I was accepted, I felt I was safe.

To someone like me, living with loneliness, the garden at St Luke’s and the people who help look after it, are a godsend. 

The gardening helps me feel I am being useful, like I am contributing to the community.  

In the garden it feels like God has got an eye on me, like God is watching me and looking after me.

Coming down down the road to St Lukes is only a short distance, but it's probably one of the biggest steps I've taken in my life.’

A Spiritual Exercise To Start the Year

In the C16th a former Spanish soldier converted to Christianity and in time founded a religious order that came to be known as The Jesuits.

To help people follow the spiritual way, the founder, Ignatius of Loyola, wrote The Spiritual Exercises.

In a recent Sunday morning talk at St Luke’s we heard that one of these Spiritual Exercises is called The Examen.

It’s the kind of exercise you can do each night before you go to sleep, reminding yourself that this day, this year, this life is inside a mystery that we name God. 

 This spiritual exercise has five simple steps. 

Step One. Give thanks.

Scroll through the day you’ve had and note the people or moments you’re grateful for.

Step Two. See if you can find God in that day.

Was there a moment of forgiveness or compassion? A sign of courage. Of unexpected love or kindness? You may not have noticed at the time but now perhaps you can see this was God showing up.  

Step Three. Was there something you’re sorry about?

Some word you regret uttering? Some action you failed to take?  A message you’d have preferred not to have sent. Someone you ignored. There’s usually something.

Step Four. Receive God’s forgiveness.

If you think there’s a slate, then visualise it being wiped clean. Then forgive yourself.

Step Five. Ask for grace for tomorrow.

Grace to practice faith and notice the Light more often.

The Gospel According to George

It has been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services we sometimes feature an additional Gospel reading, from the Gospel of this Church.

On Easter Sunday 2025, we heard a reading from the Gospel of St Luke’s West Holloway, according to George Nelson.

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‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of all this life we live, if it ended when we die?’

‘Life and things in general.’

 That is a quotation from Larry Hayworth, a radio broadcaster whose programme we used to listen to when I was growing up in Trinidad. ‘Life and things in general.’

I will be 88 on my next birthday and I have fewer years ahead than are past. I like company - and my son Terrence calls every day - but I am on my own a lot and so I tend to think about life and things in general.

I’ll give you an example: when I was young another child in the neighborhood died but I don’t remember thinking too much about it. Or being that sad. Did we think it was normal? Did we just carry on? 

But in 2012 my dear wife Idalia died unexpectedly and that hit me very hard. Then in 2020 my daughter Janelle also died. She was a school teacher, working in Brent Cross and only in her forties. This loss was devastating. 

I look around my home and see the many things she bought me and that makes me think about life and death more often. I begin to dwell on what life is all about. But in the morning I see a photo of my wife or my daughter and I say, ‘Well, a pleasant morning to you ladies.’

Life and things in general. 

I tell myself: your mother died, your father died, your wife and your daughter, they also died, so what is happening now is that you are facing life as it really is. People who mean so much to us and then they are gone. Here today, gone tomorrow. I conclude that we should live this life so that we leave others with pleasant memories of our time here.

All through the ages, all of us people have been thinking that there is someone, somewhere greater than we are. My conclusion is that this is Nature. I say God is Nature. Look at the trees as I do and you have to conclude they are part of something greater than I am and that this is Nature itself.

We arrive in this flesh, in these bodies, and then we return to the ground and we become dust after a while. In time - after one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years -  in time you can’t distinguish us because we have all been assimilated back into the soil from which we came.

In some mysterious way we are related to the plants and trees we see around us and we will in time go back into the earth and replenish it and come back again in ways we can’t explain. Who knows? 

What I do know is that we are a lot more than we appear to be.

It was in 1971 that I landed at Heathrow from Trinidad. If it had been possible I would have run off that plane and got straight onto the next one going back home. 

What a dismal looking place I thought. What am I doing here?

I was 34 at the time and I had come on a scholarship to study accountancy. Fortunately for me, no sooner had I visited the Trinidadian High Commission in London than I was off to study in Glasgow, where I would spend the next four years of my life. 

Glasgow was so much prettier than London. I was single at the time and lived in the YMCA, going to college in the daytime and spending my evenings watching the news. On the news here I felt I could learn so much more about what was happening in the rest of the world. 

But not just the news, also the Eurovision Song Contest. 

I remember watching it one year with a room full of people at the YMCA, the year that Sweden won with a group called ABBA and a song called Waterloo.

I made good friendships in Glasgow but it was a condition of my scholarship that I had to return after graduating to work for the government at home. 

While I was living in the UK I had been corresponding with Idalia, who I had known from home since my twenties. Idalia had come to the UK ahead of me, to study nursing, and at Glasgow airport, before returning, I proposed to her and she accepted.

We travelled to the United States to get married as my mother had moved, with my sister Pearl, to New York and in time we set up home in London. Not long after along came Terence, our son, and then Janelle, our daughter.

Our children went to a local catholic state school in north London because my wife had been raised Catholic. 

Sometimes I would go with them to services at the Catholic Church but more often I would go to the Church of England as my home church was Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Anglican Cathedral in Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago. That’s where I made my first communion. 

I first came to St Luke’s in 1984 and in recent years I have been coming every Sunday.

The company I worked for in England was in social care, supporting families of children with special needs or with disabilities but it was not always easy as a black person arriving to live in England. 

You observe behavioral patterns which are not necessarily in keeping with what you would expect or hope. 

You school yourself that you're living in a world comprised of people of different characters, behaviour and passions. 

Even when people's behavior towards you is less than ideal, you have to remind yourself that this is the world and your task is to navigate a way through. 

When life is difficult I find saying the Lords Prayer very powerful - asking that our sins are forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us. We cannot withhold our forgiveness of others if we expect forgiveness for ourselves. This is a prayer that asks us to be generous and loving and kind in our forgiveness.

It is important to me to make the effort of getting to church on a Sunday. On the mornings when I wake up tired and may not want to do it, I think of going to church as a kind of penance - you are letting the Lord know that you are trying your best.

In recent times I have been asked to help distribute the communion, to hold a chalice as people receive the wine. This is a privilege as I never imagined I would be able to do this. It is also very helpful that a younger, stronger person, like David or Joe, stands with me to support me, just in case I wobble.

Life and things in general. 

I love to spend time with my son Terrence, his wife Jeanette and my grandson Ethan and I think…  wouldn’t it be a waste of all this life we live, if it ended when we die? 

I have no idea in what form we will continue to live but I have faith and, as we say in church during the communion service, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

A Red Herring

We recently unveiled the painting ‘Red Herring’ at St Luke’s, a work commissioned to remember the Rev Tim Pigrem, vicar of St Luke’s until the early 1990’s. Malcolm Doney, the painter of Red Herring, spoke in our morning service. Read it here.

Solar Panels Are Up!

Fit for the future, David and Enitan tell the story…

We're excited to announce that our 32 solar panels are now resting upon the beautiful Welsh slate roof tiles and generating power! Good for the planet and also helpful in reducing our energy bills, as is the sheep’s wool which has been used to insulate the roof space. Martin blessed the solar panels last Friday with a poem written by Amelia.

We did anticipate that there would be a few surprises along the way and there were! In addition, the PCC also agreed as scaffolding costs are so high, that it made sense to commit to doing some repairs, which we had not budgeted for, whilst we had the scaffold in place.

We know that many of you have already given to the ‘Go Green’ campaign, but we also know that there are people who have offered to contribute to the ‘Fit for the Future’ campaign.  If you would like to and are able to you, you can make your donation directly on Sundays using the card machine or the hat, or here via Stewardship.  No gift is too little because together our gifts add up. 

As ever, thank you for your support.  The heat pump and the solar panels together help St Luke’s to reduce our carbon footprint and hopefully will inspire other churches and organisations to do likewise.  

With best wishes, 
Jacqui & Joy

A Version of Psalm 23 by Amelia Turncliffe

God is my Solar Panel,
I shall not be in the dark.
God energises me, leading me into hope.
I am full, my battery is powered up.
Even in the days of cloud,
I know the divine presence is there.
As each day the sun rises
- hidden sometimes but ever present - I grow not weary or afraid.
I know the power will return and the light will shine through.

And some background about the project…

Our 5 yearly building inspection identified that our south aisle roof was in need of replacement.  We had experienced several leaks, damaging the inside of the church.

We are fortunate to receive grant funding from our local charity Cloudesley. They funded a full replacement of the roof including an upgrade of sheep’s wool insulation and a full roof of solar panels. While the scaffold was in place we repaired areas of crumbling stonework, rusted gutters and old lead flashings

Maintaining the legacy. We now have a new Welsh slate roof, new lead flashings and repaired and new gutters that will keep the building dry and maybe last another 164 years (the age of the church).  We have repaired some stonework, but there is more to do! The quality of the work carried out by the contractor, Universal Stone, was excellent. We feel that we have done our old church justice, repairing and maintaining it to the high standard of workmanship that the Victorian builders applied in 1860.

Comfort and economy. The new sheep’s wool insulation and airtight roof construction will keep the church and its occupants warmer in the winter and reduce our heating bills and carbon footprint going forward.

Green energy. We have 32 solar panels with a peak output of 15kW which will meet about half of our historic electricity use, and reduce our bills by around £2-3,000 a year.

Epiphany, a short poem by Rev Martin Wroe

Epiphany

The answer you weren’t looking for
The way you went by mistake
The known unknown you never knew
Til it was staring you in the face

Arrives just after you give up
No formula or calculation
The star, the sky, the vaguest hunch
No map marks this destination

Emerges slowly as morning
Dawns on you like a new day
As if all your previous light was dark
And all of the dark made this way.

Martin
Associate Vicar 

A letter from Rev John as he moves to a new parish in Wyke Regis

Dear St. Luke’s 

Thank you for your wonderful gifts to Sophie and me - not only the presents you presented us with on Sunday (which were amazing!) but also for your love support and encouragement over these 4 years - I am only sorry to be leaving you at such an exciting stage in our community’s life. 

The heat pump is operational - the works have well and truly begun on the south roof and after that has been insulated and tiled an array of solar panels will be installed. Joy said on Sunday that an Eco-Church gold award is within our grasp - a very rare thing indeed - so keep up this fantastic work as St. Luke’s leads the way and helps others take the right steps in doing our bit in the climate emergency. 

Thank you too for that great community lunch after church - it was very pleasing to see people from the church community and the wider community there, joined by Claire - our local councillor and friend of St. Luke’s. Special thanks to all who prepared our food- I don’t know who you all were but I know that Rosie and Rachel where in the kitchen when I arrived before church in the morning and still there as Sophie and I left!!

Sophie and I were very moved seeing lots of old friends at the service and we received many messages from those unable to attend. As I said on Sunday - you are an amazing community and it has been an honour to be your Vicar, my prayers are with you all especially Jacqui and Joy, Martin and the PCC as they guide you through the next few months - you couldn’t be in better hands - please do use your voice as the community discerns who you are looking for next - and I know that you will choose a great new Vicar. 

Much love as always,

John

Hot Air and Heat Pumps

The air-source heating system which we've been fundraising for in the last couple of years is now being installed. It works like an inside-out fridge. It captures heat from outside – even in below-zero temperatures - and moves it inside. It’s powered by electricity and we’ll help generate that by installing solar panels on our south facing roofs. 

The heat pump is forecast to reduce our annual heating carbon footprint by approx. 28 tonnes, 86% of our heating footprint and as the heat pump is powered by the electricity grid which is getting greener year by year, our residual carbon footprint will continue to decrease going forward.

The solar panels are forecast to reduce our electricity carbon emissions by approx 2 tonnes which is 56% of our electricity footprint.

This will take us a small step forward into the future… and a small step backward to a world where people understood how everything was connected. This talk one Sunday morning has more hot air about all this (click here).