Rev. Joe's Weekly Blog Stuff
January 19th and 27th 2026
Stuff Reborn
Hello, I haven’t done one of these for a while, for a variety of reasons. Firstly time, then a bit of a health issue, Christmas, inspiration, annual leave. However, I’ve realised over the last few months that I miss the process of writing them and the process of thinking and researching them. I’ve also had two people ask me when the next one will be, so if only for the three of us here is …… Stuff Reborn! (and yes, that is an Alton Tower reference – Nemesis Reborn).
Having said that, Nemesis Reborn looks, to me, very much like Nemesis before it was reborn, apart from the new video. So, will Stuff Reborn be different? Probably not but it is just worth me revisiting why Stuff was born at all.
Initially, it was in the early days of COVID in 2020, when churches were closed and it all seemed a bit odd and scary. Because I didn’t have much else to do, I started sending out a daily email, to maintain contact with people and provide some kind of faith reflection on what was going on, as well as a distraction from it. I was then asked to write a weekly piece for the local papers, which went on for 2-3 years until the papers closed. Stuff continued, however, but became less frequent as lockdowns and limitations eased and my work built up again.
The purpose of Stuff was to reflect on things that were going on in the world at the time. It was also to reflect on things about religion that annoyed or confused me, ideas from books or the radio that intrigued or stimulated me, questions about faith and belief, or just mulling over the seasons (I have been told that I wrote too much about gooseberries, for example).
I cannot see Stuff Reborn being much different, so it is more like Stuff re-started than Reborn. Reborn just sounds more dramatic.
So, as always, I invite questions to be examined and feedback on what I have written. I give out opinions, not necessarily facts or truths. In light of that, my next Stuff will be about a quote I picked up from Alastair McIntosh’s, ‘Poacher’s Pilgrimage: an Island Journey’, about a trip to the Outer Hebrides. He wrote,
“Raw spirituality may be God-given, but religions, at least in part, are fashioned through apprentice human hands”
If anyone has a joke to go with that then please let me know.
Peace and prayers, Joe
27th January
“Raw spirituality may be God-given, but religions, at least in part, are fashioned through apprentice human hands”
One thing the writer of the above quote (Alastair McIntosh, in ‘A Poacher’s Pilgrimage’) is getting at is that many people have a raw spirituality. A sense of God, of other, of the divine, that there is more than just us out there, a Creator, what Paul calls in 1 Corinthians 12:9, a gift “of faith by the same Spirit”. That faith may be entered by what McIntosh calls a variety of ‘religious doorways’. For him it was a soft spot for Hindu scriptures and Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist. He is now a Quaker.
This raw spirituality is then fashioned into certain beliefs and rituals about that ‘Other’. What these beliefs and rituals might be can be brought about ‘in part’ by divine insight, as Abraham in the Old Testament and Paul in the New claim. However, the development is also contextual. For example, the Picts in the Hebrides were unlikely to come up with an elephant-God like Ganesh, as few elephants were to be seen north or west of the Cairngorms. Instead, one of their gods was Anu, symbolized by a boar. Religions, therefore, are fashioned in part through human hands. And these human hands are apprentices. Apprentices learn, adapt, apply their natural talents and new-found skills to create something else, sometimes something new, or simply replicate what has gone before.
All religions, however, develop certain foibles, teachings that the individual believer can find hard to accept. McIntosh is writing during a pilgrimage in the Outer Hebrides, much of which has a hardline Calvinist set of beliefs, certainly on Lewis. He is therefore not keen on pre-destination or all-male ministry, but is moved by Calvin’s words that,
“Mankind is knit together with a holy knot … we must not live for ourselves, but for our neighbours”’
which may have been the religious doorway for many Calvinists over the centuries.
The apprentice hands who have fashioned Christianity have expressed themselves into 45000 Christian denominations worldwide, with 400 in the UK alone. Scotland has a Church of Scotland, a Free Church of Scotland and a Scottish Episcopal Church, to name but three, whilst Uttoxeter has nine different denominations operating in its boundaries. I grew up in the Church of England but, if I had been born a Native American, my spirituality would have been shaped by the apprentice human hands that preceded me or nurtured me there.
Alastair McIntosh urges us to remember our raw spirituality from time to time, to, “Listen for the voice of a deeper calling”, to draw back “from the head into the heart”, regardless of religious differences.
What Alastair McIntosh is warning us about, I think, is that humans are not perfect. That the divine can be misshapen in our hands, as well as acknowledged, worshipped and lived out well. Be aware, but also fall beautifully into that God-given raw spirituality that is given us.