Holiday Pics - No 5 Beware Pedestrians

So there in the middle of Falmouth is the narrow shopping street which, fortunately, is pedestrian only.  Except than when you walk down it you have to stay on the sidewalk because so many vehicles are flouting the rules.  Or so you'd believe.  There are buses and vans and cars and motorbikes - often in a line.  It is the least pedestrian-friendly pedestrian only street that I know.

At the end of the street is this sign.  When I read the sign I understood my several years of quiet fury at the hoards of drivers invading the pedestrian space.  They aren't.

Access to off-street parking at any time renders the whole point of a pedestrian street meaningless - after all a thousand cars an hour could head down the street to see if there is a space in a quayside car park.  And they do.  So do the motorbikes (with more hope of a space).  The buses are allowed too.  And taxis.  And for all but five hours vehicles to load.  

It struck me, looking at the sign, that this is exactly the way a person, a family, a nation, creeps into the chaos of rebellion against God:  an exception here, another here, some excuses over there and a permissiveness in a few things too.  Before you know it the semblance of God's ways have become obliterated even though there are signs - perhaps a church spire, or a personal self-identity that say there is faith here.

The exceptions we take to God's plan destroy our ability to enjoy God's plan - which was always the best.  

We look forward to the upcoming further deregulation of Sunday trading and the first smatterings of euthanasia.

Stop!

It's that time of year when things stop.  For those who work on Summer Camps, Conferences and Clubs this is farcically not true but in the general sense many things that happen over forty plus weeks of the year don't happen for five or six about now.

Lest this induce the activist Christian guilt (it doesn't take much) let us be heartened by this paragraph from the old Rule of the Society of St John regarding the monastic ministry of hospitality for which they were so famous:

If we let our life as a brotherhood be overwhelmed by the claims of the guests we could endanger the resources by which we serve them . . . there shall be interludes during the year when guests are not normally received.

Austria

Mountains are amazingly emotive.  This despite them being nowhere near as alive as Julie Andrews implied in The Sound of Music.  In the average lowland marsh there are countless more living things, so what is it that makes the traveller gooey eyed about mountains?  Why do we climb them, leaving ourselves exhausted?

 

Long before the Victorians were sea-dipping people were heading for the hills and I suppose it is about perspective.  The greatness of the view, the greatness of the mountain itself, somehow St Gilgan looks attractive in the photograph even though you cannot really see it.  It's beauty is made by the mountain perspective.

 

Isn't that what faith in God does too?

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.