The science is clear. We are living in a warming world due to fossil fuel emissions. The world’s most vulnerable are already suffering...

Do not come to me now in the rush. Not in the swell of the room. Not in the chase for one more high place, one more moment to prove you are here. I am tired of mistaking intensity for presence. Tired of thinking you must always arrive in thunder, in tears, in the room lifting itself towards the rafters. No. Come as the whisper. Come as the breath that barely moves the dust in the chapel light. Come as that still small voice that does not force itself through the speakers but

I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” After the Chorus Do not come to me now as soft advice. Not as the bright smile at the church door. Not as the chorus swelling through the speakers, all uplift and upward hands. The room is singing its predictable liturgy — the slow one, the anthem, the key change meant to lift the heart — and something in me lock

Simeon had waited so long his bones had learnt winter. Dust in the folds of his cloak, incense caught in his beard, Rome at the gate, taxes like teeth, the poor bent double under empire. Still he came. Morning after morning to the place where promise thinned the air, where stone and heaven almost touched. Waiting for the consolation of Israel, for a God who would tear the sky open and come down. Not comfort as the world sells it. Not the soft lie that tells the bruised to mov