‘I WILL LIFT UP MY EYES TO THE HILLS ....'
PSALM 121.1
In a world of religious and atheistic fundamentalists and in a society paradoxically multi-faith and secular, Mayfield Salisbury celebrates what it means to be human: a rich blend of intuition and reason, knowing and unknowing, affirming and seeking, succeeding and failing, brokenness and wholeness. In our services of public worship we wrestle intellectually with the basic questions of life: why are we here? who and what are we? where do we find meaning in life?
by Sheriff Nigel Thomson C.B.E. (1926-2011)
NIgel Thomson's fascinating booklet of recollections and photographs of earlier times at (the then) Mayfield Church can be downloaded and read in its entirety here: Memories of Mayfield
Mayfield Salisbury Parish Church,
18 West Mayfield,
Edinburgh,
EH9 1TQ
0131 667 1522 / 0780 801 1234
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Scottish Charity Number: SC000785
Because God is both knowable and unknowable the tension of the symbol, the multilayers of the myth and the openness of the poetic are all vital to our desire to celebrate the Mystery to whom we relate and in whom we have our being.
Mark Oakley
You must love him as he is: neither God, nor spirit, nor image; even more, the One without commingling, pure, luminous ...
Meister Eckhart
The purpose of our life is God's glory. However lowly a life is, that is what makes it great.
Oscar Romero
Faith may justify bigotry or fanaticism, as Church history tragically witnesses. It needs a safeguard. If it is not animated as it were by the greatest of the theological virtues (love), faith can become defective.
Thomas Norris
Dry not, dry not, your tears of love eternal! Only to eyes that fail to weep does this world seem so dull and dead. Dry not, dry not, those long, sad tears of love.
Johann von Goette
The post modern paradigm manifests itself as a unity which preserves diversity and diversity which strives after unity.
David Bosch
There is only one assertion that requires no evidence. Children are a sacred trust...Unless we care properly for our children, we shall never build a better world.
'A Good Childhood’ The Children’s Society
These are only hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses; and the rest is prayer.
'The Dry Salvages' T.S.Eliot
According to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.
Origen
Myth is a story about the way things never were, but always are.
Thomas Mann
In the darkness ...The child of your love - and now become as the most hated one - the one You have thrown away as unwanted - unloved ..... The darkness is so dark .... I have no faith.
Mother Teresa
I love the Bible. I owe my faith and my life to the Bible and its liberating message. It is in the Bible that I first met Jesus ... I too am included in God's embrace.
Gene Robinson
It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply ....
R.S. Thomas
Faith is not a proud self-consistent philosophy. It involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis. It is therefore a living response to the grace of God as revealed in fragile lives.
Mark Oakley
Any religion which does not say that God is hidden is not true.
Blaise Pascal
The contemporary Church is losing aspects of its wide and generous memory and therefore condemning itself to become a 'swimming pool Church' - one that has all the noise coming from the shallow end.
Mark Oakley
For all your doctrinal headaches take Paradox.
Mark Oakley
The true vision and the true knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.
St Gregory of Nyssa
Death, death be hanged, the Lord has promised me that I shall live. This I believe!
Martin Luther
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life have not been put to rest.
Wittgenstein
Religion is the flight of the alone to the Alone.
Plotinus
Stupid clergymen appeal quite directly to a Bible passage directly understood ....
Soren Kirkegaard
What is the point of the arts of reading and criticism as long as the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible, Protestant as well as Catholic, is cultivated as ever?
Friedrich Nietzsche
A figure like Ecclesiast, rugged and luminous, chants in the dark a text that is the answer, although obscure.
Wallace Stevens
Myth is the poetry of the soul.
Sara Maitland
Our loss of the ability to think mythically, poetically, allegorically, creatively, theologically, and artfully is a greater threat to our religious experience than anything good scientists have to report ...
Sara Maitland
In general, Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
Douglas Hofstadter
'God' is a one word poem
Rowan Williams
What is today? Today is eternity.
Meister Eckhart
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Meister Eckhart
The most powerful hunger we have, mostly suppressed and misdirected, is the hunger for God.
Miroslav Volf
We frequently judge that things are as we wish them to be, for through personal feeling true perspective is easily lost.
Thomas a Kempis
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore
God is the beyond in our midst.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
'God is not the answer, God is the question.'
Herbert McCabe
