Can I recognize God in this place

and in the ordinary people around me? Can I become aware of God’s presence here now? Interpela a voz de hoje em Pray as you go. Sim, em timbres de voz, em certa forma de sorrir, nesses "instantes límpidos, incomparáveis, de que não conhecemos as regras, [que] são portadores da possibilidade de sentido e redenção para a vida," de que fala Tolentino; nas memórias desses instantes partilhados com estes dois amigos que partiram demasiado cedo neste Verão, Stephen van Loo (1950-2015) e Fátima Araújo (1955-2015).

Acabou de chegar...

Lembram-se dos Communards? Do teclista, Richard Coles? Pois hoje, a designação correcta será Reverendo Richard Coles. Estas são as primeiras linhas do recentemente publicado Fathomless Riches, or how I went from pop to pulpit:"In a plain little room out of the sun, religious zealots in robes and beards meet to study the teachings of the founder of their sect. In the hum of their discourse and the rhythm of their prayer summaries of his teaching emerge, are worked up, recorded and broadcast to the communities he founded, fractious and disobedient, in the cities and towns of that hot volatile region. The teacher we know as St. Paul. He lived in the first century in Palestine, and those summaries we know as his epistles, or letters, to the communities he founded. Paul was born a Jew and became a brilliant scholar, so devout and so rigorous he was charged with putting down a weird little sect that had sprung up and around an itinerant rabbi from the north, Jesus of Nazareth, whose teaching was so scandalous, so threatening, that he had been handed over to the Romans and executed. And then something extraordinary happened. Paul, who had never seen Jesus or heard him teach, encountered him in a way that was so dazzling he was first blinded by it. When he recovered his vision he saw something never seen before: the God who created the universes fully realized in a man, the expectation of the Jewish people not only fulfilled but surpassed, and the offer of salvation to all."