The American moral, legal and political philosopher John Rawls devised a concept called the 'Veil of Ignorance'.

Every year we seem to start sooner. Shops, cafés, pubs and public buildings are already decked out with Christmas decorations, the sound of Christmas tunes carries across their sound systems. And it is not even December.

There is a human tendency to only look for information that confirms what we already believe, and to reject, ignore, or even just not notice anything that is a challenge to our mindset. It’s called ‘confirmation bias’. We look for confirmation, that we are right.

In the story of the feeding of the five thousand we need to look beyond the confines of conventional interpretations, beyond the banal limitations of time and place, and seek instead what are timeless, eternal truths.

Is there a tendency, within the church, to revert to the Pharisee, to retreat into rules and constraints and the sanctuary of the few, the exclusive club, that cares more for law than the suffering of humanity?

‘Now we see through a glass darkly’ said the Apostle Paul, for both our ability to understand, and the lenses through which we look are compromised, each in their own way.

Donald Woods Winnicott who died in 1971 was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of developmental psychology. He is best known for his ideas on the true self and the false self.

Let’s be honest, no one takes the whole Bible literally, no one. Otherwise, they would already be in prison for murder or a fugitive from the law. We are all selective, and rightly so, in our reading of scripture.

Throughout the Gospel of John “the Jews” are presented as hostile to Jesus and to all who assert that he is the Christ. They are said to plot against him, to convince Pilate to execute him; even after his crucifixion they are said to oppose Pilate placing the sign ‘King of the Jews’; supposedly the disciples hid for fear of “the Jews”.

It can be pleasing when you find a meeting of minds, as it were, between science and religion, after all, there is no need for them to be at odds, and at best they can act as a corrective and a refiner, one to the other.