A Simple Life

John Miller’s account of the life and ministry of Roland Walls and The Community of The Transfiguration, A Simple Life, is a fascinating and humbling account of a life and community devoted to God, and always looking to serve the other, and especially the poor.

Roland’s approach was rarely conventional but always inclusive of something really helpful and demonstrative of serving God. As one example, the book records how one who came to be with the community for a while, Robert Haslam struggled with the slow pace of life, having come from a busy parish ministry in Sheffield.

“When I first arrived, I suffered very much from lack of things to do. I got so bored. I had come from the hectic life of Rawmarsh and now there was nothing to do.” Roland kept saying, “You have to BE, not DO!” “Get bored! With God!”

That is well worth pondering.

The village of Roslin lies at the foot of the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh and is where the community, founded in 1965, was based. Everything was simple and all trappings of wealth were avoided as they sought to be a place of prayer and hospitality.

In Black and White

I have just finished reading Alexandra Wilson’s In Black and White – a powerful and challenging read, making, for me at least, a highly worthwhile contribution to the need to recognise the reality of racism.

Faced with that reality, she decided to do something about it, and has trained, and now practises as a barrister. The book is aptly sub-titled a young barrister’s story of race and class in a broken justice system. The stories she tells of clients who have so valued someone like her representing them as against the times when she has been assumed by the ‘system’ to be in court as an offender make some powerful points.

In a sense, I wish I didn’t believe her, because the picture that emerges is of an unfair society that has huge dollops of racism. Sadly, that is absolutely the truth. We so need folk like Alexandra Wilson to do the kind of thing she is doing, but also to tell the story.

I can’t say I enjoyed it, because you shouldn’t enjoy a book like that, but it was well worth reading, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.