Perspectives

While I was looking for a way of setting up a blog for something else, I found, to my amazement, this blog started in 2009 when I first began working as the URC's Ecumenical Officer.  It has posts on it that I put up when I took part in the World Council of Churches Assembly in South Korea in 2013 and various other activities.  It was not only an act of nostalgia to read them but also informative.  So I have kept them and any reader will realise that there is quite a gap between the dates of those posts and more recent ones, neveretheless, perhaps you will find them equally interesting.   I retired in 2017 and have made various attempts to start a blog which has usually involved complicated tinkering with Wordpress or such which has taken so much time that I haven't ended up doing what it was originally intended for.  There's a lesson there somewhere, I'm sure. So this post is put up in April 2021 towards the end of what we hope will be the last lockdown in...

On a rather quiet and sleepy day, spending all the time at home with no thought of doing anything very social I decided to advertise the fact that our pond was full of tadpoles on the village email network to see what would happen. The first result was a visit from a lady at the other end of the village who's tadpoles had all died in the frost a few weeks ago.  We'd never met before and had a very pleasant chat and disccovered that we both have the same make of campervan, a MURVI (Multiple Use Recreational Vehicle - Ivybridge).  So that was one good contact made. The second visit was from three young boys who had caught some tadpoles and newts somewhere else and wanted to give them a better home as they were simply living in a large dish. So they released them in the pond and we had a long conversation about tadpoles, frogs, newts and ponds in general.  It was so encouraging to see how excited and interested they were, even to admiring the swimming style of one of our fro...

I was struck by how conventional we get when we think of our Christmas greetings.  Even the flash mob video of the Hallelujah chorus being sung in an American shopping mall is just a variation on the usual.  So are all the variations we find within the Christian traditions which litter our planet and having had to read some books on the development of the concept of salvation and atonement the other day for a paper I was writing, reminded me of just how much nit-picking argument and disagreement there has been, and still is, over what so often seems to be either irrelevant or blinkered detail. Like all the best pieces of electrical equipment I sometimes think that what we need is a reset button.  So the picture above is my attempt at a reset button. The main picture is not of stars but of galaxies, in the centre is a picture of a star-forming region of our own galaxy; the eagle nebula is there because it looks nice and then there is our own earth.  If it was all...