‘Despite my doubts, I feel the church’s pull at this time of year’ writes Stephen Bleach in Easter Sunday’s Times…

‘Every week 685,000 people (in the UK) go to a C of E church, 650,000 to Catholic Mass, hundreds of thousands more to the pick-and-mix- bag of services held by Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals and others. Compare that with say with Premier League football which gets a lot more media promotion than Jesus but only pulls in about 400,000 a week and only then during the season (which admittedly seems eternal).’

Why?…

‘For me it boils down to this: sure I don’t believe in big swathes of church doctrine, but I believe in atheism even less. Everyone I think has a nagging feeling there is more to existence than the baldly material or the strictly rational…(which) say nothing about goodness or meaning or love. You can ignore that nagging feeling, and many of us do, or you can spend some time wondering about those questions. If so, it helps to have a few like-minded souls to do the wondering with, and a framework in which to do it...’

‘I’ll go to church today in the hope that, despite all the evils of the world, there is something benign and eternal in the universe that lives within each of us.’

‘I find the dogma quite difficult to believe and I think a lot of people do. But I find as I get older what I do believe in I believe more strongly...the existence of God, the love of God...because through a long life I have so many instances when He has been there for me…’ PD James.

‘Lord I believe. Help my unbelief.’ (Mark 9:24)

with love and prayers

Jenny