Month: September 2025

Hypatia is not a person who is well known, but in 415 in Alexandria in Egypt, she was a celebrity. She was a leading philosopher, noted for her learning. She was also a pagan. In that year, she was attacked by a mob and killed; some attributed her death to rabble-rousing by the Bishop of Alexandria, St Cyril. Cyril was undoubtedly a bruiser, although it is not clear if he really was behind Hypatia’s death. None-the-less, by any standard, the murder of Hypatia, for her beliefs, was an inexcusable act of brutality. I am sure everyone has head of Charlie Kirk, the US political thinker, recently murdered whilst giving a speech; another inexcusable act of violence. The link between both is that their deaths were due to their beliefs. Can either be called martyrs? Hypatia, as a pagan, was clearly not a Christian martyr but could a case be made that she was a martyr for freedom of thought? Some have called Charlie Kirk a martyr; I cannot see that he was killed for his religious beliefs, although he was a Christian. Like Hypatia, perhaps there are stronger grounds for freedom of thought. The wider issue is that when someone is murdered because of their beliefs, the murder is always wrong. The beliefs, be they religious or not, need us to examine them; we may or may not think they are worthy.

Rev David Poyner

I’m in the middle of harvest festivals at the various churches at which I serve and a friend recently sent me this poem by EE Cummings. It speaks to me.

I am a little church (no great cathedral) far from the splendour and squalor of hurrying cities

– I do not worry if briefer days grow briefest I not sorry when sun and rain make April

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;

my prayers are prayers of the earth’s own clumsy striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness.

Around them surges a miracle of unceasing birth and glory in death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols of hope, and I wake to a perfect patience of mountains

I am a little church (far from the frantic world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature

– I do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

I am not sorry when silence becomes singing winter by spring, I lift my diminutive spire to merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

This weekend is Ride and Stride, the annual fund-raising event for the Shropshire Historic Churches Trust. I offer one of my favourite poems by R.S. Thomas by way of response.

The Chapel

A little aside from the main road,

becalmed in a last-century greyness,

there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal

to the tourist to stop his car

and visit it. The traffic goes by,

and the river goes by, and quick shadows

of clouds, too, and the chapel settles

a little deeper into the grass.

But here once on an evening like this,

in the darkness that was about

his hearers, a preacher caught fire

and burned steadily before them

with a strange light, so that they saw

the splendour of the barren mountains

about them and sang their amens

fiercely, narrow but saved

in a way that men are not now.

Rev David Poyner

Last month, I ticked off one more item from my bucket list; I descended Gaping Gill. Gaping Gill is one of the most spectacular underground caverns in the country. It is 300 feet from its opening to the bottom, a cavern the size of a cathedral and several water falls descending from the top. The easy way is to go down on a winch, which is what I did with a friend. I am very pleased I did it; I look back on the experience with great enjoyment. And yet, at the time, my reaction was more muted. Yes, it was spectacular, but I have been in big underground caverns before. It has been an experience I have needed time to process, to look back on and reflect, to fully appreciate it. Sometimes if we want instant gratification we will be disappointed; we need to wait and contemplate. Yesterday, talking about something completely different with a colleague, she sent me this email; “Perhaps it’s like most things the harder you try the further away it gets and the more it alludes you.  Perhaps we should all quietly sneak up on it.” You can’t exactly sneak up on Gaping Gill, but the full satisfaction of going down it has quietly sneaked up on me. And, because I’m a vicar and I try to see God in everything, I also know this to be true of my spiritual life. I regularly pray, I try to actively think about God (sitting on a winch over a 300 foot drop is conducive to this), but so often, at the time, I feel nothing. Then, hours, perhaps days later, God quietly sneaks up on me.

Rev David Poyner