Mediterranean

It's that time of year when, in the company of uncomfortably large numbers of fellow-Britons we are off to the Mediterranean.

This picture, from last year in Rome, seems suitably symbolic.

For a start, it was taken in such ridiculous heat that I can remember telling my spouse-photographer to hurry or I would have to move!

Secondly it is of part of a very ancient statue that bespeaks the empire that once straddled the Mediterranean and affected the globe. A little toe the size of my head says it all really.

Thirdly, standing amid history is exactly why my daughter is not and would not want to be with us. This is a very adult vacation. Not adult in the way of the binge-drinking hoards of fellow-countrymen and women who populate various Mediterranean bar strips. Adult in the number of miles walked. For while we will have no hangovers, the repaired little toe on the statue looks, for all the world, like our little toes will look when we've finished hot-footing around another Mediterranean city this week.

Lastly, although I am no lover of the heat, I like the Mediterranean for at least this; that every time I see that sea it brings to mind any number of stories from the Bible whose dramas were played out around its shores and sometimes upon its waves. In fact the P Q R on the plinth stands for 'The People of Rome' and as I'm halfway through preaching Paul's letter to the People of Rome it all seems very appropriate indeed!

Rome

With encroaching winter - and yes, it has already snowed over an inch in High Wycombe - it is time to look longingly back at heady summer days. This year we were in Rome.

There was too much for a blog. But I like this picture of the first 'sight' we saw in the city. The Spanish Steps (138 of them!) were built to link the Spanish Embassy to the Papal City. But it's much more interesting than that because the Bourbon dynasty that ruled Spain also ruled France.

There at the top of the steps is a Church, Holy Trinity (in English), but a French Church in nationality. When I visited it there was an African priest speaking to a visitor in French.

Africa is also represented outside for the great obelisk on the steps was built (long before the steps of course) by a Roman governor from the wealth he had made from his North African province.

What I really loved about these steps however was the bizarre extra ingredient added to the French Church and its African priest, the Spanish dynasty and its grand staircase, the Roman obelisk with African connections and the blue Italian sky and fountain gushing fresh water.

For at the foot of the steps on the left is the English contribution. Babington's Tea Rooms. http://www.babingtons.net/en/history.php Not being blessed with the equivilant a lottery win we couldn't afford to go in and have afternoon tea! But what struck me was that although it touted itself as typically English such Tea Rooms are hardly to be found in the centre of most English towns and cities. Far easier - and certainly a great deal more economical - to go into a Costa Coffee or Starbucks.

As Church I pray that we might never be a Victorian quirk - a sugar and china cup escape from the reality of 21st century life rather than salt and light in it.

Altogether more down-to-earth is Trajan's Market. For in this ancient Roman ruin of a Shopping Mall, many of the first church members would have been bought and sold as slaves. This seems to me to be a gritty lesson in true churchmanship for all of us.