lurchersontheedge

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here's an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 35 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

My archdeacon said recently that ‘I was born to be the vicar of Holy Island’. I will take it as a compliment: all good remarks need to be embraced when someone is in ministry. On 22 August, I will have served 6 months as the Vicar and Team Leader of the Bro Cybi Ministry Area. You can find the official record of what has been happening here: http://bangor.churchinwales.org.uk/news/2014/05/bro-cybis-journey-1/

I think ‘born to be’ is a little too strong, but at present I am called to be the vicar of this glorious place, just as previously I would say that I was called to be the vicar of Bartley Green, a place of much gladness and one that I did not actually want to leave.

Six months in: what has happened?

I think there will be an official blog entry with a list of achievements coming soon. I think the most important thing we have done is to have begun to listen to each other. It is not a task that come easy to most of us. Listening and vocation go hand in hand. Vocation, I think, comes from the word “voce”, “voice”: we need to hear. In order to hear, we need to make space.

That is probably what the last six months have been about: making space.

Everyone with an ounce of human decency will recoil at the images that invade our television screens, laptops, notebooks, tablets etc chronicling the atrocities committed by the self-proclaimed Islamic State against religious minorities, including Christians.

I write as a Christian, but I acknowledge that it is not only my own brothers and sisters in Christ who are suffering at the hands of this fundamentalist movement. Indeed anyone who is other is seemingly to be obliterated. Christians are other to the Islamic State by virtue of their baptism, which should give Christians in the west preparing to baptise children of parents with no recognisable faith food for thought. I also acknowledge that the so-called Islamic State will to many Muslims be a perversion of their faith.

I also lament the fact that my own government, with others, helped create a situation where this fundamentalist group could flourish. The UK government is not responsible of course for the choices each individual has made, but our sometimes headlong rush into military intervention has looked to like a crusade. Indeed the then British Prime Minister and president of the United States seemed to talk like people on a mission, at times like fundamentalists of a different kind.

I am saddened by our Western Christian inability to understand the history of the Christian faith, and to seemingly know nothing of the historic centres of Christianity in the Middle Eastern region. Christians, Muslims, Jews have co-existed peacefully in many countries; always sustained just by the delicate environment created by successive governments. How many of us would have heard of Mosul before the turn of this year? How many of us would have sought to understand that when our governments ensured the end of their governments, the religious bio-structure would be profoundly shaken, leading to destruction of centuries of lived out faith. There were Christians in Iraq long before Augustine came to Canterbury.

All this can should shake us and descend into a lament. That would be good, if western Christians learned afresh from others.

Practically, you can pray – but pray in an informed way: use resources offered by Christian Aid and by organisations working alongside the suffering Church. Remember to pray for those who are not Christians too. No one should be hounded because they are other.

You can make sure others are informed.

You can protest: why not write to your MP. I have written to mine, see below. Make sure you adjust it. An individual letter can have more effect than a petition.

You can challenge: why cannot the UK offer asylum to anyone fleeing from this mess? We have after all helped create it.

We cannot simply walk by on the other side. It is time that praying hands also got a little dirty

Albert Owen
House of Commons
Westminster
London SW1A 0AA

Dear Albert

It was good to meet you at St Cybi’s, Holyhead on 2 August for the First World War commemoration service. I am, I suspect like you, desperately moved by the reports coming out of Iraq, particularly concerning the alleged atrocities towards Christians and other religious minorities by the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

I am delighted that Her Majesty’s Government has sought to provide humanitarian relief to those who have fled in fear of their lives, and would ask you to convey my thanks for this to the FCO, but urge them to increase such action alongside our international partners.

I am though very saddened by reports that the government is not prepared to offer asylum to those who lives are at risk. As you are aware, the United Nations defines a refugee as someone who lives with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. Those fleeing for their lives or in hiding clearly come into this category.

Whilst I am willing to be corrected, there seems to have been an articulate silence from the Leader of the Opposition on the matter of the persecution of minorities in Iraq. The nations of the United Kingdom have a long tradition of generosity to those who are fleeing violence. This stems from the inherited Judaeo-Christian tradition that has shaped some of our values, but is found in the social justice of the Labour movement and shared by many people of goodwill regardless of their religious beliefs.

I would be grateful if you could press the government to do more to help and embrace those who are being forced to flee, and also encourage your own front bench team to become more vocally articulate in supporting and challenging the actions taken by the government. I look forward to hearing from you

I spent the week of remembering the First World War in Eastriggs, which is a village of 3000 near Annan. It was interesting to be in Scotland during the week of the first debate between Salmond and Darling. Actually, I do have a vote in the forthcoming ballot and will be using it.

It was more significant to be in the place that styles itself the Commonwealth Village. It was during the First World War, that people from all over the British Isles and the Commonwealth came to this quiet unassuming village to make what Conan Doyle described as the ‘devil’s porridge’: munitions.

You can find out more about this at: http://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/the-devils-porridge-museum-p253371

Friendships were forged during this time of war

Eastriggs is proud of its hospitality, and from the visitor’s books, people from the Commonwealth are proud of Eastriggs.

The flags of the Saltire, Commonwealth and EU fly together.

I am reading Rowan Williams book entitled Being Christian. It is published by SPCK. Archbishop Rowan explores Baptism, Bible, Eucharist and Prayer.

I am only 6 pages into the section on baptism. However, these words strike me as deeply significant for my pastoral dilemma of keeping a consistently open policy

So it seems that, from the very beginning, baptism as a ritual for joining the Christian community was associated with the idea of going down into the darkness of Jesus’ suffering and death, being ‘swamped’ by the reality of what Jesus endured. St Paul speaks of being baptized ‘into’ the death of Christ (Romans 6:3). We are, so to speak, ‘dropped’ into that mysterious event which Christians commemorate on Good Friday, and, more regularly, in the break of bread at Holy Communion (1-2).

It is clear to me that this is probably not what the average parent who comes to my surgery to make a booking thinks they are doing. Nor, am I persuaded, that they believe it to be the case following my sometimes erudite baptismal preparation 🙂

The question then is: where does that leave us? If baptism means one thing and people something different: should we not sometimes have the courage to offer that which is different, rather than perhaps emptying baptism of what the church universal has mostly considered it to mean?

A Sermon given at St Cybi’s Holyhead on 2 August 2014

Dan ni yma heddiw i cofio:

I confess until this year to knowing very little about the First World War, the Great War, the War to end all wars. At school, we looked in detail at the Second World War and its aftermath. At University too, I grappled with theologians and thinkers who were responding to later conflicts.

My knowledge of the First World War was scanty based on a BBC TV comedy Blackadder, which in the midst of the laughter pointed to the courage, bravery and futility of some of what went on and upon the story of the Christmas Truce when British and German soldiers ventured into no man’s land together, pointing to us that within heat of battle, common and shared humanity was there.

I am part of a generation whose parents were too young – just – to serve in the Second World War. As son of the steel city, I do remember the sinking of our ship in the South Atlantic in 1982, and war for me for the first time entered into real life.
As I have discovered more about the Great War. I find myself being stilled. The stories of the Somme, the trenches, stench and mud have caused my imagination to be stirred and questions to be the created. Bill Mitton, the soldier-poet encapsulates this well.

I stood there before the crosses
glowing white in row on row
Everyone a young life cut short
as the names upon them show.

The dates they died below the names
tell of wars now passed and gone
Passchendaele, the Somme, and Mons
of battles fought, and lost or won.

History remembers, as it should
these men who fought and died
Whilst for their families left behind
a dull sorrow tinged with pride.

The faces of boys held now in Sepia
who died in days long gone
yet living on in memories
and hearts, still holding on.

Yet despite the hurt and grief here
what with horror makes me fill
Is that when I look behind me
there are more new crosses growing still.

For as we remember the First World War, we cannot but have the brutality of ancient and current conflicts at the forefront of our minds.

In the midst of conflicts, there has always been the God-person, the Padre. One writing home in 1914 penned these words:

I can go where I like; I go to see the wounded when being brought back from the front, and to see if I am needed when gunners have been shelled. If necessary, I am ready to go to the firing line, but I should only be in the way in the daytime. I see the sick who come in daily and are sent off by the ambulances to a hospital down country.

My first two Sundays I had no services. My third Sunday I had one in a farmyard lasting 20 minutes; and we had to march almost directly after. My fourth Sunday I crossed a river into the danger zone and held a service (without a surplice) for two companies, who were sleeping in bivouacs of straw in a wood in inches of water, surrounded by pools of mud up to 1ft. deep! I then went on to another wood to some more troops, and began a service, but a deluge stopped it, and I had to cancel a third owing to rain. We generally fight or march on Sundays!

War through all things up into the air: all were touched by its tentacles.

Those who served
– as soldiers, sailors and airmen
– as medics, nurses, padres, ambulance drivers
– in munitions factories
– on the farm

Those left behind
– wives, parents, friends, the aged, infirm

And, as importantly, those who objected, yet served.

Holyhead itself was decimated by the conflict and cared for many of those who were injured including at Stanley Sailor’s Hospital
We are here to remember.

We are here to commit ourselves to change

In this ancient holy place whose walls have seen more than enough bloodshed; we are here to offer to God our hopes and desires for a better world.

A Poet once said: History repeats itself. It has to. No one listens.

In this holy place whose walls have heard more than enough sermons urging a commitment to peace, we remember that the God who calls us to follow comforted the broken hearted, challenged the powerful and offered blessing to any who would work for peace.

I love Easter! I do! I love the fact that I believe with every fibre of my being that Jesus Christ smashed the powers of death and hell. I love the great resurrection shout, ‘Alleluia! Christ is risen!’ which can be met with the response, ‘He is risen indeed. Alleluia’ in lots of corners of our globe.

Easter gives a reason for living and is a motivating factor for much of Christian engagement in the world.

I do though want to hang on to the Friday. I hope it is not in a macabre way. It is not even because of the intense suffering that Jesus endured, which has been replicated in many and various ways by countless others down the centuries, save in one respect.

It is because whilst the Friday is usually seen through the lens of the Sunday, Sunday needs to be controlled by the Friday at times. I simply mean that the events of the Friday make the Sunday more palatable and real.

Pob bendith

Vestry agendaThe Easter Vestry takes place soon:

The Report

The papers and agenda can be found by clicking the above links