Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2026: 89, Tuesday 4 August 2026

Looking out from Preveli Monastery in Crete towards the island of Gavdos, said to be the Ogygia of Calypso where Odysseus stayed for seven years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and the week began with the Ninth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity IX, 2 August 2026). The calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today recalls Jean-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859), Curé d’Ars and Spiritual Guide.

Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a reflection on the Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

‘And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit’ (Matthew 15: 14) … looking into the crater at the top of Mount Vesuvius (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 15: 1-2,10-14 (NRSVA):

1 Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, 2 ‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.’

10 Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘Listen and understand: 11 it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ 12 Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offence when they heard what you said?’ 13 He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14 Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’

Homer, who is traditionally said to have been blind, tells of the 10-year return journey of Odysseus to his home in Ithaka (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Reflections:

‘Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit’ (Matthew 15: 14).

There were two choices in the lectionary for Gospel readings at the Eucharist yesterday (Monday 3 August): Matthew 14: 13-21, or Matthew 14: 22-36. The first choice was also the Gospel reading on Sunday, and so in my reflections yesterday I looked at the second choice (Matthew 14: 22-36).

Once again, the lectionary offers two choices in the Gospel readings at the Eucharist today (Tuesday 4 August): Matthew 14: 22-36, which I read and reflected on yesterday, or Matthew 15: 1-2, 10-14, which I am reading and reflecting on this morning.

At a surface level, today’s Gospel passage is about religious rituals, purification rites and liturgical niceties. However, the challenge in this reading is a question of pure religious rather than ritual purification: What defiles a person? Is this a liturgical nicety or a moral problem?

It is far too easy for me to want to be seen to do the right thing, rather than doing the right thing, whether or not anyone sees what I am doing, or even when those nearby are blind to what I am doing … or even to what I am not doing.

What leads me to do the right thing? Am I too easily led by others? Do I blindly follow the demands of others and allow their expectations to lead me into a pit, into a moral abyss, dragging others down with me in the process? And once I am there, how can I get out of that dark cave?

Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ (The Republic, Book VII) imagines a deep, dark cave in which some chained prisoners are forced to look at a wall. Behind them flickers the pale light of a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, various objects cast a shadow onto the wall.

The prisoners, born into this condition, know only the shadows and think that they are all there is to the world. And so, they become shadow experts, and spend all of their days classifying, studying and examining them closely.

One day, a prisoner breaks free. He rushes from the cave and finds himself out in the dazzling sun. After savouring all of the marvels of the world, she is overcome with pity, and drags herself back into the cave to save her friends. But since her eyes are still dazzled from the bright sun, she cannot see so well in the dark cave. When she tells the prisoners of the wonders to be seen outside, they mock her inability to see shadows, tell her she is a fool, and threaten to kill her.

Plato’s story is a metaphor, telling us how we need to look behind the first impressions and what appears to be the case to see the truth of the matter. We need to exercise introspection and to examine our thoughts with reasoning and the bright glare of truth. We cannot let the blind lead the blind.

Those particular Pharisees and scribes seem to be more worried about what they have not seen the disciples doing on occasion rather than commending the good they may actually be doing, noticed or unnoticed, day-by-day.

Moral leadership often comes not in the form of great tomes or well-argued books on ethics and philosophy, but in the form of the expectations that are laid on us or projected onto us from within our own peer group, from our contemporaries, from those we do not want to let down, from those we seldom question yet often follow blindly.

It is easier to follow those pressures blindly than risk finding ourselves in the dark and alone simply for doing the right thing for no other reason than it is the right thing to do.

I was talking recently with someone about Chrisopher Nolan’s new film Odyssey, which is continuing to take cinemas everywhere by storm. In a witty response, that person joked: ‘It’s no wonder it took him 10 years to get home. Homer was blind. If I was following his directions I’d be straying take 10 years to get home too.’

In his reflections on ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 about two weeks ago (24 July 2026), the Revd Dr Giles Fraser talked about some of those blind alleys and diversions that delay Odysseus and frustrate his epic journey home.

On the island of Ogygia, the beautiful nymph Calypso tries to entice him to stay with her, promising he would never age, never die. She offers eternal life, youth and freedom from pain, danger and death if he stays with her on Ogygia. And yet, after seven years, Odysseus eventually refuses the temptation to achieve immortality, preferring risk and death over immortality and agelessness, refuses the goddess and chooses to leave, fully aware that his mortal home of Ithaca is exposed to risk, decay, and death.

Giles Fraser refers to an essay on why Odysseus is right to refuse this, in which the American philosopher Professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago argues that there are some things that the immortal gods are not able to do that mortal human beings are: not least amongst them is to show courage. If I cannot risk everything because I cannot die, then how could I possibly be courageous?

What sort of life would Odysseus have if he stays with Calypso on her perfect deathless island, and gave up any need for all his craft and resourcefulness?

‘And what would love mean’, he asks ‘if you could never put anything on the line for others? That’s why we cheer Odysseus on as he decides to refuse Calypso her seemingly unrefusable offer.’

Martha Nussbaum, who is Jewish, suggests that there is something about this refusal of invulnerability that explains one of the key features of Christian theology: of God becoming human, of God who is prepared to suffer and die in the name of love.

‘What is attractive about both Odysseus and Jesus is that they are prepared to have skin in the game, which is pretty much the very definition of incarnation’, Giles Fraser says.

He suggests that to live beyond the realm of suffering and death would be to live in a way that is no longer human – without the possibility of heroism, without the possibility of risking all for love. ‘Why is it, for instance, that so often in Greek mythology, perfect gods fall in love with imperfect human beings rather than their own kind? Because fragile humanity can exhibit exciting virtues, risky love-soaked heroism in the way that the gods just cannot.’

Of course, he agrees, none of us wants those we love to be taken from us. Yet also, death is what makes life valuable and precious. As the late Queen Elizabeth put it: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’.

What Odysseus discovers on Calypso’s Island – often identified by Greeks with the small island of Gavdos, off Preveli and the south coast of Crete – is that without death, life will be drained of its meaning.

Allowing those who are morally blind to lead us because it seems to be the safe thing to do, allowing our priorities in life to be dictated by appearances and being seen to do what is acceptable so that we live risk-free lives, our lives will be drained of meaning and of love too.

‘It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles’(Matthew 15: 11) … street art in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Tuesday 4 August 2026):

In my prayers this morning, I am praying for the people of Preveli, Aghia Galini, and other areas south of Rethymnon, who hve seen their natural surroundings destroyed in the recent wildfires that have swept acorss their parts of Crete over the past week or so. In difficult circumstances, may they find wisdom, resilience and hope. And I give thanks too for the two firefighters who died risking their lives so that other people might live.

In Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week (2-8 August 2026, pp 24-25), is ‘Faith Under Pressure in Nicaragua’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a Reflection by the Most Revd Juan David Alvarado, Bishop of El Salvador and Primate of the Province of the Anglican Church in Central America.

The USPG prayer diary today (Tuesday 4 August 2026) invites us to pray:

Gracious God, uphold Bishop Harold Dixon and all clergy serving in difficult circumstances. Give them wisdom, resilience, and hope in their ministry.

The Collect of the Day:

Almighty God,
who sent your Holy Spirit
to be the life and light of your Church:
open our hearts to the riches of your grace,
that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit
in love and joy and peace;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

Holy Father,
who gathered us here around the table of your Son
to share this meal with the whole household of God:
in that new world where you reveal the fullness of your peace,
gather people of every race and language
to share in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Additional Collect:

Gracious Father,
revive your Church in our day,
and make her holy, strong and faithful,
for your glory’s sake
in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s reflections

Continued tomorrow

Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ tells of the difficulty of the blind agreeing to be led by the once-blind (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

New Master of Sidney Sussex continues in a long tradition

Morning sunshine on the Master’s Garden and the Master’s Lodge in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

Each morning this week, I am strolling past the Master’s Garden and the Master’s Lodge in Sidney Sussex College on my way from my rooms in Blundell Court out to the Morning Eucharist on Saint Bene’t’s before breakfast, or between my rooms and the Mong Hall, where the IOCS Summer School lectures are taking place.

Earlier this month [July 2013], a new Master took off office in Sidney Sussex College and moved into the Master’s Lodge. Professor Richard Penty, who was elected as the 27th Master of Sidney Sussex earlier this year, succeeds Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.

Professor Penty is a distinguished electrical and electronic engineer, and before becoming Master he was a Fellow and Vice-Master of Sidney Sussex College. He read engineering and electrical sciences as an undergraduate and was a post-graduate student at Sidney. He was then was elected a Junior Research Fellow in Pembroke College, Cambridge.

He later became a Lecturer in Bath University and Bristol University, and then Professor of Photonics in Bristol, before returning to Cambridge where he has been Professor of Photonics since 2002.

His current research interests include optical data communications, MMF systems (digital and analogue), high-speed optical communications systems, optical amplifiers, and optical switching. He was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering last year.

After his election as Master, Professor Penty said: “It is a great honour to be elected as Sidney’s next Master, and I look forward to serving the Fellows, Students and Staff of the College to the best of my ability.”

Inside a house in Pompeii … Andrew Wallace-Hadrill says we are “wreaking a damage far greater than Vesuvius” (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The outgoing Master, Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, is a distinguished classical scholar with a particular interest in both Pompeii and Herculaneum – I visited both sites about ten days ago. He is standing down as Master of Sidney Sussex to give more attention to the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

So he can concentrate on this major opportunity, Professor Wallace-Hadrill is becoming Director of Research in the Faculty of Classics in the University of Cambridge from 1 October. But he is keeping his links with Sidney Sussex College, where he has become a Fellow.

Some years ago, in an interview on an Australian television programme 60 Minutes, he was caustic in expressing his views about the neglect of the archaeological site at Pompeii. He was described as an “angry archaeologist” when he argued that the conservation issues that need to be acted upon urgently at Pompeii are being neglected and that the site is suffering from a “second death.”

Commenting on the deterioration of Pompeii, he said: “Man is wreaking a damage far greater than Vesuvius. The moment of Pompeii’s destruction was also the moment of its preservation. The public needs to understand that unless constant efforts are taken to arrest the decay, the site will, within decades crumble to nothing.”

The Knox-Shaw Room in Cloister Court is named after another former Master of Sidney Sussex College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

I was also interested to learn that another master of Sidney Sussex College, Thomas Knox-Shaw (1895-1972), who was Master from 1945 to 1957, was associated with some of the mission agencies whose work is continued by Us – the new name for the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

Knox-Shaw was a trustee of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and an active member on the committee of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), which amalgamated with SPG to form USPG. He is credited with doing much to beautify the chapel in Sidney Sussex and to increase its importance in the life of the college.

The son of a Harley Street doctor and homeopath, Knox-Shaw went to school at Blundell’s School, whose founder is also remembered in the name of Blundell Court, where I am staying this year, and where I stayed in 2011.

Knox-Shaw’s name is commemorated in Cloister Court in the Knox-Shaw Room, which is one of the principal meeting rooms in the college. He also gave his name to Tomminox, one of the Sidney Sussex Boat Club’s racing shells. His gifts to the college include the picture of Oliver Cromwell which hangs in the Hall, under which I have dined for the last two evenings.

Herculaneum provides an insight into life before the eruption of Vesuvius

The frescoes in the richly decorated east wall of the House of Neptune and Amphitrite (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

On the programme for this week in the Sorrento area, Friday [5 July 2013] was listed as a “Day at Leisure,” or a free day to relax at the hotel pool, or to explore the bustling town of Sorrento, with its shops, cafés, restaurants and views, with a transfer to and from the town centre.

Instead, almost two dozen people signed up for a morning’s visit to Herculaneum, a town that is less well known than Pompeii, but which gives a more intimate opportunity to understand the devastation and human tragedy of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD.

Herculaneum is smaller than Pompeii, but the site is more intimate and more accessible (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The enclosed site at Herculaneum is close to the modern town of Ercolano, south-east of Naples. Compared to Pompeii, this was a small city, of about 20 hectares and 4,000. Only a tiny proportion of the site – about 4.5 hectares – is accessible to the public, but in many ways this a far more tangible, and so much less cluttered a site than neighbouring Pompeii, which is better known and has a constant flow of tourists and sightseers each day.

In Herculaneum, it is easy to imagine how the ordinary people lived and worked, shopped and worshipped, relaxed and were governed.

There are private houses with gardens and courtyards; shops and pubs; men’s and women’s baths; public fountains and latrines; boarding houses

The Hall of the Augustals is richly decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from the legends of Hercules (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The Hall of the Augustals has frescoes depicting scenes from the legends of Hercules, including a depiction of Hercules accompanied by Jupiter, Juno and Minerva; and an illustration of the battle between Hercules and the Etruscan god Acheelo.
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The House of Neptune and Amphitrite takes its name from the themes in the mosaics in the richly decorated east wall. The food shop next door almost looks like it is closed for a siesta and ready to reopen in a few hours’ times.

A house with overhanging eaves on a street in Herculaneum (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The Trellis House is a boarding house with an overhanging balcony. The House of the Wooden Partition displays the comfortable lifestyle of the prosperous ruling class.

Outside the Cucumas Shop, you can still see a listing with the different prices for the four varieties of wine once on sale here. At the large taberna or pub, it was possible to realise how like Europeans today these people were in so many aspects of life and lifestyle.

We were back at the Grand Hotel Moon Valley shortly after mid-day, and two of us took the Circumvesuviana from Seiano to Vico Equesne, where we strolled through the streets and along the sea front, looking down at the beaches and across the bay to Naples.

Piazza Umberto I is a quiet and shaded corner of Vico Equesne (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Sadly, the two churches we tried to visit were not open, not was the famous Da Gigino pizzeria, where the claim to fame is that there they invented the idea of “Pizza by the Metre.”

We made our way to a shady corner of Piazza Umberto I, with its fountain, foliage and trees, and had lunch in Wembley, a pizzeria on the corner of the square, before returning to the hotel to swim and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine.

Looking out on the Bay of Naples in Vico Equesne (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Walking beneath the clouds of Mount Vesuvius

Looking into the crater on the top of Mount Vesuvius (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

For most of Thursday [4 July 2013], Mount Vesuvius was wrapped in rain clouds, pouring rain down intermittently on Pompeii below. The clouds spread out over the Bay of Naples, and this afternoon blocked the view across the bay as we climbed Mount Vesuvius.

But we began the day with a morning walking through the streets, houses, theatres, temples, baths, the forum, the markets and the open areas of Pompeii, the city destroyed – and preserved – by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the afternoon 24 August 79 AD.

Walking through the paved streets of Pompeii (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Pompeii attracts about 5,000 visitors a day, or about 2.5 million visitors each year. There almost 50 people on this tour group, and for some it was an interesting reminder that Pompeii too was a holiday or weekend destination for many wealthy Romans almost 2,000 years ago until the city was buried under 4 to 6 metres of ash and pumice that fatal day.

Time has stood still in Pompeii ever since. It was good to be reminded too that apart from some modern inventions such as the internal combustion engine, the railway, electricity and the internet, many of the 20,000 residents of Pompeii lived very much like us, with two-storey houses, a clean water system – and a problem with producing too much domestic waste.

The walls of a house in Pompeii Pompeii (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The mosaics, frescoes, gardens, rooms and domestic shrines could only begin to tease our imaginations about life in Pompeii. Everyone says a morning there does not do it justice.

Throughout the morning, as we walked through the town, Vesuvius, wrapped in clouds, loomed above us in the distant background.

After lunch below the town in Lucullus, we continued on to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. From the car park it was a 20-minute climb to the rim of the crater at the top, and most of us managed the steep ascent in about 20 or 30 minutes, but the clouds still blocked a complete view of the Bay of Naples and the islands.

It was quicker coming back down the mountain path. There were no burns or injured limbs.

Back at the Grand Hotel Moon Valley, the pool also has a perfect view of Mount Vesuvius, the only active volcano in Europe. They say Vesuvius should erupt every 30 years – but it has not done so since 1944.

Mount Vesuvius looms in the background behind Pompeii (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)