The Revd Writes… A good few years back, amidst the hustle and bustle of the Winchester Christmas Market, I found myself having a conversation with a woman who spontaneously declared, “I love Christmas! It is the most important Christian festival.” “Ah, no”, I interjected. “The most important Christian festival is Easter.” “No”, she said, “It’s Christmas.” “I’m a vicar,” I explained, “I know about these things.” “Well, I don’t care who you are or what you do, I am telling you Christmas is the most important Christian festival because it brings more people together.” She wasn’t wrong. I have reflected on that conversation long and hard subsequently. Shared experience brings people together, though our shared experience of the ‘most important Christian festival’ this year will be like no other. The pandemic begs the question for the whole human family, ‘Who will you spend this Christmas with?’ More importantly perhaps, who will it be safe to share this Christian festival with? Normally by mid-November, most families have a plan in place. But not in 2020. Shopping for presents, another common experience, has been dampened. Online shopping, no matter how dressed-up a website, is devoid of the face-to-face interaction we as human beings mostly enjoy and need for our own sense of wellbeing. Any seasonal activity this year will be hastily put together in an attempt to try to make Christmas ‘happen’, not least for children. Fundraising events for good causes, so crucial for so many charities, have been muted, with significant effects on next year’s budgets. This year Christmas is hard. Yet all is not doom and gloom. Facing adversity together has binding qualities as those who survived the Second World War knew all too well. Amidst pandemic, social cohesion across all communities has thrived. The battle to stave off isolation means that we now know our neighbours better than ever before. Generosity of heart has stretched across previously unknown thresholds. Kindness and thoughtfulness are now but a door or two away. Who are you spending Christmas with? More likely than not this year, for many people, it will be spent with those who live on the same street. And what will you give? And here a little plea. Like many charitable institutions, the Diocese of Winchester finds itself in a difficult place and is facing cuts of £2 million. The inability of our local churches to fundraise and hire out buildings has left a significant hole in church finances. Many people across the Dever Valley benefit from the pastoral ministry of our parish priests every day. If you can help and would like to help by donating a regular £5 a month to support this work, please go to the ‘Donate’ page on our website at https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/18357/page/56736/view/ More than ever, we are together this Christmas. Even if it feels we are far apart. God Bless Revd Mark Bailey
'View of the Cours during the plague of 1720', Marseille by Michel SerneThe Revd Writes…Now is the best time to be experiencing a global pandemic than at any other time in history. Our grasp of medical knowledge and the speed of our communication systems makes us better equipped than ever before. This thought occurred to me whilst holidaying in the Peak District in the summer and stumbling across the village of Eyam.In 1665 a bale of cloth arrived in the village of Eyam from London. As George Viccars, the tailor’s assistant opened the damp cloth and hung it up in front of the hearth to dry, so he unwittingly disturbed the fleas in the cloth. He was the first victim in the village to die of the plague. Between September and December that year 42 villagers died. In response to this calamity, the rest of the villagers began to prepare to leave. The Vicar, William Mompesson realised that if the disease was to be prevented from spreading, not least to the bigger populations of Sheffield and Bakewell, then the village needed to be quarantined. In other words, complete Lockdown. He called a meeting of the whole village community and eventually it was agreed that they would isolate themselves from the outside world – in the sure knowledge that many of them were signing their lives away – to prevent the spread of the plague. By August 1666 there were between 5 and 6 deaths a day. The hot summer meant that the fleas were particularly active. Elizabeth Hancock buried her six children and her husband within the space of eight days. She herself dragging each body away from the house and burying them herself in the field where they had spent each working day of their lives. Villagers from Middleton Stoney across the valley watched her, too scared to help. By November of 1666, a third of the village had died. Mompesson was one of the survivors, but he too had to bury his young wife. As you wander around the village, reading the names of those who died in each house, you become profoundly aware of the resilience of a community in standing firm in order to protect the lives of others in neighbouring villages and towns. Every step you take is one taken with humility and admiration for a people who knew what it was to live, day in and day out, with the prospect of facing deep loss and personal sadness. It makes very real the cost of Christian duty and discipleship.Today we are blessed with knowledge and skills with which to fight a pandemic of which the villagers of Eyam would have been deeply desirous. Their gift to us perhaps is the reminder of the importance of taking personal responsibility in ensuring we do all that we can to protect each other.God BlessMark
The Revd Writes…“Give me life, O Lord…” (Psalm 119 verse 107) sums up the dependency of the adult. The task of parenting focuses for much of time on encouraging the child to work through dependency towards a state of ever-greater independence. When a child grasps the chance to properly take responsibility for themselves, riding a bicycle without stabilizers is a good metaphor, the parent smiles with pride. Cross riding a bike off your list. One more skill learned, one less thing to worry about. “One day you will be a woman, my daughter”, to misquote Kipling. The road to independence is, more often than not, paved with tears, frustration and much parental anguish as the hard fact dawns that there is no textbook answer for helping my child negotiate its way into maturity. Parenting, despite what DIY manuals proclaim, is less of a science and more of an art. What works for one child does not necessarily work for another. The rich tapestry of family life is made all the more colourful and interesting by young personalities emerging into ‘this is me!’ and there is no duplicate of ‘me’ to be found in the whole wide world. Good parenting acknowledges from the start that mature independence always includes a place for a certain ‘grown-up dependency’. It is natural for children to imagine that to be independent is to be no longer dependent but ‘big and strong’, believing that they can take on the world with a, sometimes, reckless youthfulness. Yet wise parents will be all too aware of the need for boundaries to keep their children safe, often from themselves. A newfound independence and blind confidence can very quickly collapse into uncertainty and vulnerability. As every parent of a swaggering teenager knows all too well.A consequence for parents who promote independence at all costs is that they sometimes find themselves with adult children who have become isolated individuals, intolerant, with little empathy for others who are different from themselves. Such children are less likely to be there for their parents in later years, who themselves may well have become increasingly dependent. “You taught me to be independent. What you forgot to teach me is that we need each other.” Perhaps one of the correctives that the coronavirus pandemic has brought home is not so much how independent and resourceful we can be as individuals but how much more dependent we really are. “Give me life, O Lord…” through my neighbours and friends… and through my children… God Bless Mark
The meaning of statuesSt Paul writes in his letter to the Romans (5:1-2), “…we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through who we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand…” In other words, it is by the grace of God through the redeeming work of Christ that we are delivered from our failing selves and enabled to stand up straight and tall before God. To put that more succinctly, it is by God’s grace that we are made to feel okay. In doctrinal terms, we all fall short in various ways because we are only human – we are not perfect like God – and yet God still finds a way for us to become acceptable – this is the relationship between humanity and God. Humanity is dependent upon God to affirm anything that is good and redeemable.Our own experience of one another, however, is slightly different. Though we are able to affirm those character traits within each other that is positive, for example a good teacher will enable a student to become more confident at a particular skill or talent and give them the necessary boost to translate that skill into say, a future career, yet that same teacher might have to recognise that the student is never going to be good at foreign languages. This is negative and might be disappointing. And the teacher might have to accept this fact over time – that no matter how hard you try, no matter what resources are poured in, this particular student is never going to be able to learn to speak French or German to an acceptable standard. The student is always going to fall short. Or the example where a child comes from an emotionally starving childhood goes on to become a persistent shoplifter becoming a nuisance to the wider community to the extent that they end up in youth custody and no amount of support given replaces the neglect of earlier years, and results in later years turning to more serious crime, ends up in prison, banished from society for years. Whereas we believe that God transforms the disappointment and failure - wiping the slate clean - so that we become something good and acceptable, we human beings find ourselves often having to learn to live with the good and the bad that often live alongside each other in who we are. So, I might like the fact that you have a really good sense of humour but I don’t like the fact that you can be very controlling when it comes to what we watch on telly etc. Here on planet earth, we find we must live with these contradictions in each other, unlike the transformed state, instigated by God, in the heavenly place. By divine intervention, God transforms our failure and disappointed selves into that which is made good and acceptable in a way that we struggle to do with one another.The question of living with contradiction is an important part of the current debate, born out of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, and which asks us to consider which statues of famous people do we keep on public display as reference points for good role models in current society? Admittedly society today is not the same as it was one hundred or even fifty years ago. What might have been acceptable then in terms of how much good and bad was tolerated in someone whose life had been remarkable, and whose contribution to the common good pointed in the direction of them being publicly honoured by having a statue of them unveiled, might well not be the same today. So, it is right that we reflect on who is now, and who is not now, deemed to have manifested sufficient good over bad in their lives that they should be publicly honoured. Some statues may well need to be taken down and others brought into being. The question that we have yet to answer is, what criteria should we use in assessing the weight of good over bad – when we know that we are all good and bad – and fall short of the glory of God in our human existence? By faith, we know that we are all dependent upon the grace of God. But by what grace do we determine which statues of our historical forebears should stand… and which should fall? Revd Mark Bailey
