The Pope has said we must do something about our sermons. "Sunday homilies are to be prepared with much more care, through prayer and study. They ought to help the faithful to live their faith in their daily existence and to enter into dialogue with their fellow men." He reminds us of the many contemporary moral and spiritual questions crowding in on the minds of believers.

To all of which one can only say "hear, hear". The sermon is a kind of modern parable to set alongside the ancient parables of the Gospels. Those who give them need to know what is going on in the world, what sort of issues concern their faithful; they need to share something of the same experience and to reflect on the Scriptures prayerfully so as to have some awareness of what kind of answers the Holy Spirit is giving. No wonder the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth said he always prepared his sermons with the daily newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other.

Then there is the fact that the modern worshipper has a shorter attention span than his ancestors. And it is very much more difficult to produce things on a small scale. Of the French thinker Pascal it was said: "He wrote a big book because he did not have time to write a little one." He did not have time ... I was interested to read recently of the Baptist minister engaged by a new congregation who had it built into his or her 'contract' that the amount of guaranteed sermon preparation time per week was to be .....17 hours. 17 hours! A far cry from calling desperately on the Lord at 6.30pm on a Saturday night and saying "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening"!

The figure of 17 hours struck me because in the week in question that was exactly the number of hours I had had to spend in meetings - before doing a single piece of parish work! And yet if we take the Pope seriously we can see that to be engaged by the Spirit we also need time spent 'disengaged'. Is it a modern heresy that the whole Church day must be spent in reunions? Let us remember Christ saved the world by the Cross, not the Filofax. DS.