Notre Dame et Notre Seigneur

I am not well travelled, but even with my limitations it was not hard to dig into my pictures and find one of a recent (rainy!) visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, one of the most visited tourist sites in the world.

And yesterday France, to its horror, saw a great fire that reduced the great building to what appears little more than a stone shell.  The French President prioritised a site meeting and vowed that it shall be rebuilt.  At first hearing this appears an unlikely ambition for the ultra-secular French Republic - but an icon is an icon.  Hundreds of millions of Euros are already promised for its restoration.

'The World weeps', reads one newspaper headline, thereby conveniently forgetting hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim and the Eastern world who either don't know or certainly don't care that Notre Dame exists.  It is a little hard to imagine the refugee camps along the Turkish border feeling that this morning they have lost something important.

What a contrast there is, this Easter Week, between the way we regard a Christian cultural icon and the way we regard the One that Christianity is all about.

Not for him a nation hanging a tearful head in mourning;

Not for him a National Leader making pledges of restoration;

Not for him a world weeping or a tweet from Rome's Imperial Palace.

Not for him (despite the written appellation the King of the Jews) a declaration that we have all lost a part of us.

A mocking crowd;

A Governor who has washed his hands;

A world that didn't notice;

A man abandoned, betrayed, denied even by his friends - not a part of us, said Peter.

May the flames of the icon, inflame our love for the Saviour to whom, at its best, the icon seeks to point.

Sunday in Aberfan

This morning at Church we thought about what it must have meant to the Christians in Aberfan when, on this day (Sunday October 23rd) in 1966 they gathered for worship after a generation of the village's children had been buried in the catastrophe that was marked in its anniversary on Friday.

Who can imagine what that felt like?  We can't.

But we thought about a man who did - Kenneth Hayes, the Baptist pastor of its Chapel.  One of his two sons had died that awful morning and he led his remaining congrtegation on that shocking Sunday.

You can read about it here.

In this darkest of experiences the light was the great promise of God's word: 

 'What can separate us from the love of God? I am certain that nothing can separate us from the love of God, neither death nor life, neither angels or other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future..."

Disaster's Song

 November 22nd 1873.  A November night in the Atlantic gives us a great hymn from an awful family disaster couples with a deep faith.