Holiday Pics - No 6 Contentment

The weather was good apart from one day.  That's the kind of thing we all say about a British vacation (except the one may be up to seven!).  Cornwall, once a poor faraway mining and fishing area, is now quite a slick kind of place and it doesn't take an expert to work out that much of the money in Cornwall has been gained elsewhere and brought here as to nature's playground for some fun in old age or earlier.

I wonder whether this makes for more contented people though?  Or were the miners that crowded the Methodist chapels to sing their praise to God as happy in their limited expanses as the people popping down in the Porsche to the Michelin starred seafood restaurant?  I cannot say.

I know this cow was content though.  Just some grass will do.  I think I'll try and learn a lesson from the cow.

Holiday Pics - No 4 Open and Closed

Leaving Malta (previous 3 pics) behind, most of our holiday was in Cornwall, England.  We retraced our steps to the picture postcard fishing village of Polperro where we saw this sign.  I thought it was quite an optimistic use of the word daily in the circumstances described.

Like daily devotions for some of us all of the time and all of us (perhaps) some of the time.  "I pray  and read my Bible every day (except when I don't)"!

Holiday Pics - No 3 Thirstless

By inspiration of my wife I offered this chap some water on a hot day in the Grandmaster's Palace in Valetta.  You could hardly have a grander place!  You could hardly have anything more welcoming than some water on what was a very hot day.  But he didn't drink any: there was grandeur,  me, real refreshment but, in his case, no life.

Sometimes when, in the glories of worship we share the life of God in his Word we offer real refreshment in the grandest of spiritual palaces.  But there is not always drinking.

Holiday Pics - No 2 The Old Country

The weather isn't very British; the shrubs aren't very British; but what's that?  Nothing could be more British than a red telephone box!

I saw this one in Malta and there were plenty of others there - here's two . . .

Of course we still see them in Britain.  Occasionally.  They are strategically left for tourists to take pictures of them, or rather of themselves beside them.

Perhaps it is a strange thing that places that in other ways have gladly shed their connections to Britain have kept connections with things that Britain has itself abandoned.  If it isn't the telephone boxes it is a random London red double-decker of a kind almost untraceable in London today.

It illustrates how differently we choose to keep rooted or at least referenced.  In London we don't keep red telephone boxes or open back buses, in former connected countries they don't keep the Queen's head on stamps and currency.

In church worship you are more likely to sing an old evangelical hymn during a High Mass or prior to a liberal Bible-denying sermon in a church that kept the hymnbook but gave up trust in the Bible than you are to sing such a hymn in churches that have kept their simple trust in the Bible but given up the hymnbook.

Holiday Pics - No 1 Peace and War

Friends post lovely holiday pictures on Facebook.  Except that about this time in August it is hard to look at another 32 pictures from wherever having seen 932 already!  I virtuously posted only five.  So far.  On this blog I've decided to post some different ones that I can write about.

This picture comes from Malta.  I think it is fairly idyllic though on the wall to the right is a solemn reminder of one of the many great conflicts that the island has been involved in - in the case of the War Rooms here the Second World War.

With a bit of preacher's squeeze-a-meaning there is a lesson here about the transitory nature of this world's idylls.  But I didn't need that.  The point about this picture is that - like all photographs - it is silent.  As no people, animals or vehicles can be seen it even lacks the implied sound that many photos contain.  This was not, however, a silent scene at all.

It was a very hot afternoon. Mad dogs and Englishmen (let the reader decide which I am) went out in the midday sun, locals stayed indoors - as here.  Stayed indoors but did not stay quiet.  At the moment I took this photo two women were having the most ear-splitting row in the building at the top of the stairs.  I mean the sort of row that one half expected to end in a scream with someone being pushed over a balcony.

 

Sunshine doesn't reach the human heart, though it can greatly affect our skein.

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.

Trebah

As August comes to its end its most pleasantly memorable day for us was certainly the one spent at Trebah Gardens.  It was one of those perfect days at a perfect place that it is quite possible to get through years - or the whole - of life and never have (especially taking holidays in England!).

 

 

Bathed in glorious summer sunshine, visitors end their walk through the gardens at a private beach area, complete with ice cream of course.  It was almost too hot to sit there but we managed it  . . .

 

 

If only.

If only we could hold these moments as our constant way of life.

 

Poignantly, however, Trebah bears its own testimony to the simple reality that life is not a bed of hydrangeas.  There by the beach is a picture of another year - 70 years ago - at the same spot.

 

 

On our summer idyll came the reminder that as needs must on D-Day this spot had been found to be very suited to launching part of a military invasion.  The walk that we had just done had been the last peaceful walk that many of those soldiers did before losing their lives in Northern France.  It is the stark story of human life amidst creation's beauty.

Eisriesenwelt (Ice Caves)

On any vacation there are things you are never likely to forget.  When you pay out the money you anticipate (perhaps over optimistically) that the thing(s) you will never forget will be good.  The reality of vacations: long distance travel, unfamiliar food, different climates, different insect life etc. suggest that this optimism needs qualifying.

 

One thing I will never forget from this vacation was an announcement.

 

It is probably true that there have been several Church Services in which an announcement has stolen the show, notwithstanding the preparatory efforts of the musicians, the preacher and other participants.  That day the announcement somewhat stole the show.  The Eisreisenwelt are lauded as one of Austria's most spectacular places.  That is quite something in an alpine nation that is filled with amazing landscapes and an enormous historical significance over many centuries of culture, politics and the arts.

 

Certainly these ice caves are amazing - though possibly less so than the hype and world recognition suggest.  A cave is, after all, a cave.  And every cave I have ever visited has shapes and clever lighting shows them up.  Whatever.

 

The announcement that my daughter and I will not forget was memorable for its context as well as its content.

The caves are high, high up the mountain.  There was a bus to start with which (together with its amazingly grumpy driver - isn't it strange how you can tell that someone is grumpy and swearing at every passing car even when you can't speak his language?) took us to the car park.  The car park is itself a steep slope, then a facility building, and another uphill walk of some minutes to the cable car.

 

I mentally associate cable cars with going up mountains from bottom to top but this one turned out to go up from about 6/10ths of the way up to 7/10ths.  It left us with a further climb, the following photo being taken about a third of the way up that last climb.  You can see the entrance to the cave in the middle.

 



 

Even at the cave entrance the temperature, on the day we climbed, was in the mid 20s.  The English language has several words available for how we felt on getting to the entrance (how everyone arriving at the entrance seemed to feel).  I'll choose this one: knackered.

 

That was the context of the announcement. 

 

The content of the announcement?  At the entrance tired climbers were offered a Deutsch or Englisch queue each with fit-looking young guides in very warm-looking coats.  And ours, in decent English, made this announcement;

 

"I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that there are 700 steps up and 700 steps down.  The good news is that although it is freezing you will not feel cold with all those steps to climb!"  On the cheerful delivery of which he led us to light our lamps and on into the caves.

 

My inadequacy of language means I cannot accurately convey the experience of arriving with exhausted relief at a destination to find that the destination is a 1400 step climb.  The best I can do is that it felt like my body remained at several thousand feet up but my heart sank back to the shuttle bus stop at the valley bottom.

 

I wonder how many people climb their way through life without realising what they are climbing towards.  I wonder whether they would so climb if they knew.  I wonder if there is a whole different Way that ends with rest?

 



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!

Vacation

Holidays, vacation times, are great. And one of the joys is seeking out churches at which to worship. Though I must confess that has been a disappointment more often than a joy.

Never more so then when, on a visit in Catholic Europe we finally traced the location of an English-speaking and Protestant church. Or at least the place where it was to meet. After a long walk we met this notice in the window.

The Priest in Charge of this church has resigned without warning or due notification. The Bishop of the Diocese has suspended the Parish without warning or due notification. For those reasons Anglican Church Services are no longer held in this church.

We were not the only ones on vacation! It was very vacated indeed.

I figured the following;

• Now I know why I don't believe a Priest is essential to a church, still less a Bishop. After all, whatever their issues they had conspired to deny us a group of believers with whom to share worship in our language. If a congregation had turned up, I'd have happily led the service!
• If you are going to put a notice in the window it either needs to say more than this - something positive perhaps? - or less. I thought this was probably the most woeful church notice I had ever read. And THAT is saying something!

Meanwhile, the world continued to pass by the busy street while the ecclesiastical wheels remained stuck in the ecclesiastical mud.

May God grant us some vacationing fellowship to celebrate.