photography

Awe and Glory: A Reflection for Holy Week (Wednesday 1st April 2026)

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Given at Christ Church, Bulkington

Reading—Mark 9. 2-8

A vast, open landscape photographed at dusk or just after sunset. The foreground shows a recently harvested field, its dry golden-brown stubble occupying the lower third of the image, with a grass-edged farm track running diagonally from the lower right toward the horizon. At the centre of the horizon stands a single solitary tree, silhouetted in dark brown-black against a spectacular sky. The sky is the dominant feature: deep, rich cobalt blue at the top gradually softens through lighter blue into a luminous pale glow near the horizon, which itself blazes with bands of warm amber and orange where the sun has recently set. The effect is one of vast space, stillness, and solitude — the lone tree the only vertical element in an otherwise horizontal, almost minimalist composition.
Awe in the everyday. ‘I Touched Infinity’, Potterne Hill, 27 July 2024, © Gerry Lynch.

A perfect sunset, a chord by Fauré, the giggle of a baby, the stars on a dark night – all of those can give us the most extraordinary sensation, for which we use the word awe. We become aware that we have encountered something that is more glorious than the language we have to describe it – much greater in scale and complexity, much greater in beauty and moral grandeur. We sense that we are part of something far bigger than ourselves. Wonder mixes with fear. We are lifted up out of the drudgery of our routine lives. Yet we also realise how small we are; if we are lucky, our ego deflates a bit.

Awe is more than just a feeling. It seems to remind us of facts of life that we often forget. The universe is indeed vast; each one of us is small and lives for the briefest of spans; yet we are distantly related to all life on Earth; the complex elements that make up our bodies were forged in the furnaces of long-dead stars. Everything does indeed connect.

Much of contemporary life seems as if it were designed to minimise the number of times we experience that sense of awe, and from thinking too deeply about it when it does happen. The constant buzzes and beeps, the 24-hour TV schedule, and the infinite scrolling websites aim to keep us chained to our screens so we never notice what is beyond.

To notice the truth of our lives, we need to escape their humdrum.

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Magnificent Kyrgyzstan in Photos

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No sermon this Sunday or last Sunday as I’ve been on my summer holidays, in Kyrgyzstan. A lot of people asked me why I was going on holiday to Kyrgyzstan. I hope the photos below explain why!

Classic Kyrgyzstan scene, near Karakol.

Is the Skaza Canyon real life or a Star Trek scene?

Kyrgyz cowboy, near Karakol.

Last light on the Terskey Ala-toos, shot from the main road near Karakol.

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Photo Recharge for Your Soul – NI September 2023

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A man reading a newspaper at a café table in a richly decorated room.

A baker’s dozen of the best shots I took while back home this month. All photos © Gerry Lynch.

Looking west from the fancy new viewing point-cum-picnic area at Magheracross just west of Dunluce Castle. The peninsula that ends just below the setting sun is Portrush.
The tasks of early autumn—making silage near Meigh, County Armagh.
Reading the Financial Times in the beautiful Northern Room in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library: a 1990 decorative effort on Victorian themes.
I shot Scrabo silhouetted against the setting sun from the shore of Strangford.
RISE is the official name given to the public art sculpture located at Broadway Roundabout in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It has been given unofficial, colloquial titles that you may be more familiar with.

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Accepting Our Limits: Sermon Preached on 23rd October 2022 (The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – 2 Timothy 4: 6–8, 16–18; Luke 18: 9–14

“…the time of my departure is at hand.”

On Tuesday, I went for a long walk on my day off, as is my wont. It was an extraordinary day for the time of year, almost cloudless and with temperatures in the high teens. As I walked over the fields into Bishops Cannings from Devizes, I was confronted by a magnificent sight – two trees at the very peak of their autumn colour, framing that majestic parish church and lovely village pub with a riot of reds and golds. The light was absolutely superb.

St Mary the Virgin, Bishops Cannings, St Luke’s Day 2022, © Gerry Lynch.

Yesterday, I drove through Bishops Cannings and noticed that those trees had lost some of their leaves in the storms of Friday, and that their colours were losing a little of their lustre. Although the temperatures remain extraordinarily mild for the season, it was a cloudy day, without the translucent light of Tuesday morning. It was still a pretty scene – but no longer possessed of the sort of transfiguring beauty it held just four days before.

Autumn is a particularly transient time of year. Fresh beauties emerge from the landscape and vanish again in a matter of days. Soon will come the bare trees and bare fields of winter. That is also the pattern of our lives. Everything has a finite end, a limit. Nothing lasts forever, and many things that enlighten and energise our lives are around only for a very short span.

The present moment is all we have.

In our epistle reading this morning, St Paul is near the end. He clearly expects to die soon – he has run his race. This has not made him a perfect person, and he still seems to have energy to vent his spleen at those who he feels let him down in his hour of great need, in the passive-aggressive tone Paul often adopts.

I love Paul, and I love his writings, but I can definitely see why almost everyone seems to have lost patience with him at one time or another. Even the man who was perhaps his closest companion, Barnabas, a man so sweet-natured that he was nicknamed ‘The Encourager’, took his leave of Paul once in Antioch when his constant arguing became too much.

Paul was not perfect but, to be fair, at the core of his writings is the idea that salvation is not a reward for passing a particular standard of goodness but something that God gives us as a free gift, because God is love. And for all that Paul was a man with obvious faults, he was also a man with tremendous gifts. Here, he contemplates the end of his life without fear, absolutely trusting God will receive him in heaven.

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A Clergyman’s Diary: A Wiltshire Transfiguration

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The Wansdyke near Baltic Farm, 10 October 2021. © Gerry Lynch.

Nobody is quite sure when the Wansdyke was built, but the most commonly advanced theory is that it was built by the Romano-British after they were abandoned by the Imperial power to defend their stronghold in what is now Gloucestershire, Somerset, and northern Wiltshire, in the face of Saxon expansion spreading northwards from the English Channel. This would date it to around the end of the 5th Century. Regardless of exactly at which point in the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England it was built, it seems that the much later Anglo-Saxons had lost any idea about its purpose when, despite several centuries of Christianity, they named it Woden’s Dyke, after Odin, the king of the Norse gods, around the 9th Century.

The eastern section, in Wiltshire, has been much less disturbed over the centuries by agriculture and building than those further west, and this section, north of the village of Bishops Cannings, is particularly dramatic when lit by low late afternoon sun from the south in autumn and winter.

On a rainy day in midwinter, with the rain belting down for weeks, it can be a little disappointing, a flat bank of mud surrounded by dirty puddles. Yet the sun can transfigure it into mysterious magnificence in all seasons, always easy on the ankles, even for someone with my short legs and my fat belly. The ground remains springy and fast when in a hot dry spell when the surrounding terrain is drained and hard; and also when it is surrounded by wet muck.

Looking east from Morgan’s Hill towards Tan Hill, the Wansdyke just visible in the bottom of the valley, 10 October 2021. © Gerry Lynch.

It is as much as 4 metres high in places. It is followed by a long-distance footpath for all of this stretch. The view in the distance reaches to Tan Hill, at 294 metres above sea level the joint highest point in Wiltshire.

This is deep England. The countryside is not especially dramatic but rolls with a heart-healing, gentle, beauty. I walk here regularly, with various circuits of 12-18 miles (19-30 km) starting and finishing from my home in Devizes taking in stretches of it. When the light is like this, it makes my soul sing and fills me with gratitude for being alive.

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Wisdom and the Cross: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 12 September 2021 (The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

Readings – Wisdom 7:26 – 8:1; Mark 8:27–38

“She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On a bright weekday morning three summers ago, I began my day with Morning Prayer at Coventry Cathedral. Coventry was a convenient place for an overnight break on the long overland journey between Salisbury and Belfast, and I had long wanted to see the Cathedral. I was able to talk my way into spending the hour between the end of the service and the start of public visiting wandering an empty Cathedral on my own, with my camera and tripod.

John Piper’s great Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch
John Piper’s great Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

If you haven’t yet been there, I recommend a visit, and also making the effort to visit in the morning, for that is the time when John Piper’s baptistery window is at its best, ablaze with sun from the east, all twenty-eight metres of it.

Just occasionally people tell me they don’t like Coventry Cathedral. I couldn’t disagree more; few church buildings on earth incarnate the reality of the Resurrection more powerfully.

The parish church Cathedral of St Michael, one of the finest medieval parish churches in Europe, was blown to bits during The Blitz on 14 November 1940. As he went into the ruined Cathedral the morning after the destruction, the then Provost, Richard Howard, was struck by what he called “the deep certainty that as the Cathedral had been crucified with Christ, so it would rise again with Him.”

Less than twenty years later, the very different modernist Cathedral was dedicated, also to St Michael, surrounded by the still imposing ruins of 14th Century building, and incomprehensible without their presence.

Coventry Cathedral also showcases two interconnected British revivals of the two decades after the end of the Second World War – a revival of Christian faith and a revival of high culture. Unquestionably it was the high point of British modernism in the visual arts and architecture: Basil Spence’s cathedral housing John Piper’s windows, Graham Sutherland’s tapestry, still in 2021 the largest in the world, and one of Jacob Epstein’s last and finest sculptures. Yet this indubitable gem of 20th Century Christianity could not have existed without the destruction of the magnificent medieval St Michael’s.

The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch
The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

Resurrection follows death. Resurrection is not possible without death. Yet that does not make the death any less real, or any less painful, nor does it make the loss of physical presence that death entails any less final or less disturbing. That is the central paradox of the Christian faith. It is, in every sense of the word, disturbing.

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