Advent 2010

This last Sunday was Advent Sunday, and we celebrated in our church by having an evening Advent service of music, carols, prayer and meditation.

During the Taize style meditation in the middle of the service I lit three candles in turn, symbolic of the light of Christ, extinguished them as we were reminded of the darkness of the world, and finally lit them all again to shine for the remainder of the service, as we sang "Longing for light, we wait in darkness.... " the wonderful hymn by Bernadette Farrell with the refrain:

Christ be our light!
Shine in our hearts
Shine through the darkness
Christ, be our light
Shine in your church
gathered today."

Much earlier in the day, in the morning Eucharist, we lit the first of our advent Candles. This first candle is traditionally the Candle of Hope. By lighting this we celebrate the hope we have in Jesus Christ. The light of the candle represents that hope, which is like light shining in a dark place.

At that same service, our nativity set models of Mary and Joseph began their journey around the parish. They set off in procession from the High Altar, to where they will return on Christmas Eve, ready for receiving the baby Jesus into their, and our, lives. This is our own version of the lovely Mexican and Latin American tradition of Posada (spanish for lodging or accommodation.) There the people dress up as Mary and Joseph, Mary often being led on a donkey, as they go from house to house asking for accommodation. We are asked to say a prayer as we take our precious cargo (heaven help any one who drops and breaks one - please may it not be me!!) to the next house: "As you welcome these crib figures into your home today, may you welcome the Lord Jesus into your hearts this Christmas."

I love Christmas. At least I love all the church services, the celebration of our Lord's Birth, the children's nativity services when we help them build up the crib through readings and songs as they process around the church with all the individual characters and place them in the crib itself. We then have the Midnight Mass when the church is always full to bursting with 100s of people. I am then up at the crack of dawn - indeed before dawn (!) for serving duties once again at the early morning and family Eucharists.

It is a great privilege and joy to me to be one or other of the servers/acolyte/crucifer/verger/thurifer ( I wear many hats!!) at all these services.

I love all of that. And I'm not a total killjoy. Of course it is fun to see the decorations in the high streets, and in and around the houses. But what I absolutely loath is the commercialism of the Festival. The spending-mad masses who shop to drop as if they will starve if the supermarket closes for one day!! I loathe the politically correct street decorations and postage stamps, the way the media dumbs down the Christian elements of the celebrations as if these do not exist when they certainly do! And there is a fear, they say, of offending non Christians - but no one seems to care very much about Christians being offended when the "ball is on the other foot."

Just before Christmas last year I retreated to Madeira for a week - an island where they profess their faith more openly, and where the taxi driver did not think it strange to take his fare to the Anglican church in Funchal on the Sunday - he would be going to his own church later that day.

The photo above was of a nativity display in a shop window - a shop seemingly devoted to Christian artefacts in Funchal. The street decorations are a little different from ours!

This year I don't think I'll be lucky enough to get away from the UK razzmatazz. But I shall certainly enjoy the festival itself for what it is, first and foremost, a Christian celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

More reasons to love Madeira - Funchal

Climate Change and Global Warming

I don't know what triggered my mind to do this, but yesterday I googled my scientific paper that I wrote with my supervisor on, wait for it, The Surface Phosphatase Activity of Roots of Beech Mycorrhiza. I was amazed that something I wrote in 1973 (in my maiden name) was now floating around in cyberspace, and just a little flattered that quite a few scientists still see fit to cite it in their own works! This was after all my subject for my PhD thesis, and for a long time afterwards I felt disillusioned as to the usefulness of this work in the grand scheme of things!

Perhaps I should not have been so doubtful!

The lesson from this small exercise in narcissism is that science is an art! There is a misunderstanding prevalent among many in the general non scientific public that scientific experiments categorically prove something to be true or false. This in many cases is simply not so. Scientists devise experiments around hypotheses and conclusions are made around probabilities and relative weight of evidence one way or another.

All this is very relevant to the current debates on climate change.

A Times poll in 2009 found that only two in five Britons believed that this current and visible problem was largely man made. But those that still harbor any doubts that we are in any way responsible for climate change should heed the report to world leaders by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following its meeting in Paris at the start of 2007. This report concludes that it is very likely (and that means a 90% chance!) that the activities of man are responsible for the increased greenhouse gases and the resultant problems of climate change now being seen and predicted for the foreseeable future. As a consequence average temperatures are likely to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. This is the consensus of opinion from the combined efforts of more than 800 contributing authors and more than 450 lead authors, with more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers involved in the two-stage scientific and technical review process. So what is there to doubt?

For the continuing cynics why not use an adaptation of Pascal’s Wager? Pascal reasoned that whether or not one believed in the existence of God, it was a safer bet and one had nothing to lose by supposing that He existed. So it is with the global warming debate. If we allow ourselves to become more spiritually aware, more sensitive to our finely balanced place in the world, more compassionate towards the plight of our brethren across the globe, more simple in our needs, more at peace with ourselves, more in tune with our own souls and the soul beneath our feet, then are we not alll enriched? We will certainly be happier, and we will be leaving a better world for those who come after us. What do we have to lose?

There are bound to be some controversies and debates surrounding the details of the IPCC report and the scale of its significance. Much of our best scientific research effort is being directed towards gaining a fuller understanding of all the issues involved, and what actions we can take.

We saw the distress that extreme weather can inflict in the 2005 devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Even those who cannot quite believe or accept the evidence for the part humankind may be playing in climate change cannot deny the extent of human suffering now seen on a global scale. This then becomes more than a debate on climate change. It becomes a matter of human compassion and justice. These injustices brew a potentially dangerous potion of civil unrest and worse. There is a social and moral imperative for us all to share everything, to watch out for each other, to work for global healing. I believe we can no longer ignore our global responsibilities.
These photos by the way are from the Nun's Valley in Madeira when there annual chestnut festival was washed out by the most extraordinary rain in November 2008. The capital Funchal of course suffered even more from freak weather in February 2010.

Christmas

Well here I am having "survived" Christmas. Don't misunderstand me. I love Christmas. At least I love all the church services, the celebration of our Lord's Birth. This starts with the children's nativity services when we help them build up the crib through readings and songs as they process around the churhc with all the individual characters and place them in the crib itself. We then have the Midnight Mass when the church is always full to bursting. I am then up early for serving duties again at the early morning and family Eucharists.
I love all of that. It is a great privilege and joy to me to be one or other of servers/acolyte/crucifer/verger/thurifer duty ( I wear many hats!!) at all these services.
No I love all of that. But what I absolutely loath is the commercialism of the Festival. The spending-mad masses who shop to drop as if they will starve if the supermarket closes for one day!! I loathe the politically correct street decorations, the way the media dumbs down the Christian elements of the celebrations as if these do not exist when they certainly do!
Just before Christmas I retreated to Madeira for a week - an island where they profess their faith more openly, and where the taxi driver did not think it strange to take his fare to the Anglican church in Funchal on the Sunday - he would be going to his own church later that day. The photo was of a nativity display in a shop window - a shop seemingly devoted to Christian artefacts in Funchal.
Hey Ho. Happy New Year and a Happy Epiphany.