Candles...

...at Westminster Cathedral for Candlemas, but alas I was late for Mass because of various meetings...everyone had lovely guttering candles, I was sorry to have missed getting one...

And so the  40 days of the Christmas season ends...and I spent part of the afternoon at Premier Radio, doing an interview about Ash Wednesday.Why do we get ashes on our foreheads? The interviewer asked "I've seen Catholics with crosses marked on their forehead with ash on that day, and often wodered about it..."and so we went on, and tackled Shrove Tuesday, pancakes, Lent...

Sat in a cafe to tackle some emails, and a chap was reading a large Hebrew Bible opposite me. We got talking - long intense conversation. He came from the Czech Republic...to one of my generation (he was rather younger) there is something interesting, and rather depressing, about meeting people formed by the aftermath of post-Communism. They are not atheists, certainly not socialists,  they are not paricularly idealistic although they are interested in spiritual things, and they are almost  as ignorant about such things as their counterparts in Western Europe. This one was a bit different from most, being uninterested in the sex-and-shopping cult that dominates life for so many.I remember Fr Werenfried van Straaten in the early 1990s talking about the people who belonged to "what-comes-after-Communism", the emptiness and the sense of not particularlybelonging anywhere, of not havng a spiritual home...now we are into the second generation of that experience.