Friends, Foes and Families

This Lent book will explore biblical stories and characters that exemplify a whole range of relationships, in good times and bad. Relationships will be defined very widely, to include even people who don't see themselves in relationship. The stories will be related to common emotions - love, friendship, rivalry, conflict, trust, hatred, fear - and linked with 21st-century attitudes, culture and moral dilemmas. The book will cover OT stories as well as NT, and explore dysfunctional as well as functional relationships to make clear how experiences of loss and failure - which culminated, for Jesus, in the Cross - are inevitably part of our relationships, but can be healed by the Resurrection. The making of choices is pivotal in our life journey and these meditations will focus on key moments of decision, and their consequences. This will often involve reflection on the power of temptation: the ways in which biblical characters respond to it, and their varying success in withstanding it. The reflections will range widely, but will start with Jesus' temptations and conclude with stories from Holy Week and Easter, so that the relevance to Lent is maintained.