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Today marks the centenary of the Armistice, the moment when 100 years ago the hostilities of the First World War came to an end and peace was made after four long devastating years of war.  More than ¾ million British men and women were killed and countless others were maimed, wounded or emotionally destroyed.

Two years ago in the Brexit referendum this country was divided between leavers and remainers. In truth few remainers believed the European Union was the fount of every blessing, while few leavers really thought Britain would finally realise its eternal destiny the moment it left the EU.

I wonder, when you lie on your bed, how long it takes you to get to sleep. There’s something extraordinarily vulnerable about lying down with your eyes closed not knowing what will happen next. It puts us on touch with our isolation.

A clergy friend of mine was a chaplain for a few years supporting lawyers in the City and was attached to St Paul’s Cathedral. Her role, the cathedral said, was the equivalent to that of a minor canon. The only point about this she said seemed to be that it meant she’d know her place in the clergy processions in and out of the cathedral for services.

I don’t really like the term practical theology. I don’t like it because for me all theology is practical. So to employ the term practical theology is to suggest two things that in my view are mistaken. The first is that theology is abstract and arcane, and that practical theology is the part that brings it down to earth.

There are two kinds of things: those that abide forever; and those that don’t. The things that abide forever we call essence; the things that last for a shorter period we call existence.

We human beings are in the first category. We exist: we think that because we exist we’re the heart of all things. But we forget that existence isn’t all there is. Existence is not the same as essence. Existence is subject to change and decay – and death. Essence isn’t. Yes, we do indeed exist. But we’re not essences: we’re not permanent. We’re not essential. Take us away and there still is. Our being depends on the existence of others.

Two weeks ago I sat in the deanery garden of St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg, with Godfrey Harwood, who was dean from 1986, during the transfer of power, and who had become a close friend of Geoffrey Brown, vicar of St Martin’s during the same period.

At Open House London last weekend I ended the church tour in the Dick Sheppard Chapel downstairs.  The last thing I showed our many visitors was the wonderful St John’s Bible, this volume of the Gospels that we read from here every week.

In the first of our Autumn Lecture Series last Monday Rowan Williams spoke about what it means to encounter the other. He spoke with a simplicity that made one feel that he was articulating a truth you had always known, but I am still unpacking some of the things he said for like all real wisdom what seems at first simple has a huge resonance and depth of truth for the whole of one’s life.