This Covid thing, I mean, thing!

Last Sunday I set off for a long day off, two nights at Keilder. 


I grabbed my Ordnance Survey Map but when I arrived at Keilder I opened my map to the realisation that it had been published before the North Tyne had been dammed, so the Reservoir was not on my map.


I’m sure that there is a sermon in there somewhere?


As if the world is being challenged to find a way through this not just with an out of date map but without a map at all.

It all has an increasingly apocalyptic feel to it. 

What John Crace in the Guardian termed the 'pound shop' Churchillian rhetoric employed by the Prime Minister served simply to depress further spirits that had already sunk without trace.

Nothing has even come close in reach or association not even the splinter in my bottom when I was 8 to prepare me for this situation in which I now find myself alongside friends, neighbours, parishioners and folk I read about in the news.

Here we have an assault on our way of life that has divided neighbours and families and friends.

The rule of six, no joint household meetings and now Christmas is cancelled. 

The Prime Ministers broadcast last week was a reminder of just how serious this virus is. 


We are technically no longer in a pandemic as the virus has become endemic and the R number indicates that community transmission is now real and accelerating.


At the moment Churches remain open and we have taken advice with regard to ensuring that we are as Covid safe as possible.


It is probably far too early to be talking about Christmas. After all this weekend we will be celebrating Harvest and it is still English Summer Time after all the true countdown to Christmas begins with Advent Sunday celebrated this year on the 29thNovember.


I believe 87 shopping days to Christmas. So whilst on the one hand there is still time on the other it seems, following the Prime Ministers announcement of last week, Christmas is about to be cancelled.


Except!


Is it? 


Whilst much of what makes Christmas so special for people will not, cannot, now happen and there will be real sadness as families celebrate Christmas apart. As so many households remain separated unable to embrace, pull crackers, share gifts, there will be a real sense of loneliness and isolation Christmas greetings shared by long distance phone calls.


Yet if the tinsel has fallen of the commercial Christmas Tree, there is perhaps a fresh opportunity to celebrate a more authentic Christmas without all the trimmings.

There is much thought to be given about how that can be. I can only hope and pray that it will be possible to celebrate the birth of new hope that I will see a new dawn rise.


The great challenges facing our society globally and nationally, climate change, poverty remain and the church continues to work in poor and difficult areas, made more arduous by Covid, amongst outcast and rejected people who have lost confidence and hope for the future.


So we continue to pray for children born in refugee camps. 


Children slaughtered by their rulers. 


Families driven into migration, as the Holy family were. 


Christmas shorn of its commercial trappings can become a true celebration of humanity, of peace, goodwill and angelic greetings.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are you sitting comfortably then I will begin ........

  Do you remember  Listen with Mother  the programme always opened with the phrase "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin".   My memory of it brings back strong emotions as I recall as a young child how the ritual involved a sense of snuggling down on my mother’s knee to hear the story being read.   In our psalm today, psalm 34 we are invited to say with the psalmist at verse 8, Happy are those who take refuge in him.   The idea of taking refuge involves quite literally hiding yourself in God or in your parents love.   Which is why I found myself transported back in time to the memory of hiding myself in my Mother’s protection as I was asked ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’   This image of a small child wrapped in it’s Mother’s arms, protected, warm, loved, the sense of being happy, as the psalmist invites us to imagine the possibility of taking refuge in God.   Of being protected, warm and loved which brings with it a deep sense of cont...
Read more

To Theophilus friend of God ......

  People who like quizzes might prefer me to begin with a question such as: Who wrote a quarter of the New Testament? The answer is of course St Luke. Luke the Evangelist wrote both the Gospel that bears his name but also the Acts of the Apostles. As an evangelist Luke was writing from the perspective of a historian about events that he had not witnessed personally. However his writing in the Acts of the Apostles suggests that he was describing activities in which he was involved. Luke indicates that he was not an eyewitness to the events described in his Gospel he does 'repeatedly' use the word 'we' in describing the missionary journeys that he presumably undertook with Paul and which he describes in the Acts of the Apostles. In Colossians Paul writes: Our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas send greetings.  A near contemporary historian, Epiphanious, suggests that Luke could have been one of the seventy we read about in the Gospel set for the Feast of St Luke. As ...
Read more

Conviviality and a personal history .........

  There are many synonyms:  friendliness, geniality, affability, amiability, congeniality, good humour, cordiality, warmth, warm-heartedness, good nature, sociability, gregariousness, clubbability, companionability, cheerfulness, cheeriness, good cheer, joviality, jollity, gaiety, liveliness, festivity, bonhomie. And one rather sad antonym: unfriendliness.   In interdiac the definition of conviviality has three elements drawn from an understanding of the social and community aspects of life in the Iberian Peninsula where Moslems were able to live freely and openly with their Jewish and Christian neighbours.   The conviviality of life in 19 th  Century Paris with its free and unconstrained conversation.   The work and writings of Ivan Illich in which he described the transformation of relationships between people and their environment and technology.   In Manchester in the early 1970’s I worked in an inner-city environment which was scheduled ...
Read more