Long-Tailed Tits

As I mentioned in my post last Thursday, LTT's now visit very regularly - in fact they appear several times each day, starting quite early in the morning, and almost always exclusively using our feeder for "fat balls" rather than the seed or nut feeders.  During the winter they visit mob-handed;  the previous year's brood often stay with the parents through the winter.  To see - as on one occasion not long ago - twelve or so of these remarkably agile little birds flitting about together is a real delight.

Now, however, our visitors are a pair, arriving together and very much operating as a couple. Along with our pair of robins, a real sign of spring. Not that today is all that spring-like, with high winds and cloudy skies - but, thankfully, so far not the flood of rain the weatherman was predicting a day or two back. We could certainly do with the comparatively dry spell continuing for a while longer, though I doubt it'll happen.

I hope the daily presence of LTT's is a sign that they'll be nesting somewhere close by. It would be really nice to have their company through the spring and summer. The nest is one of the most finely fashioned of our bird's nests, and they will raise a family of between eight and twelve.

Bramblings

Today has been an amazingly busy day at our garden bird feeders, perhaps because the birds knew the garden would be a no-go area once our grandchildren had arrived!  Long-tailed tits are daily visitors now, preferring to feed on the fat balls, and there are large numbers of chaffinches, siskins and goldfinches. One or two greenfinches turn up, and the bullfinch is generally around as well. But today we have had a few bramblings again, and for the first time one has visited our front garden feeders, allowing a better chance for photography.

O.K., so . . .

. . . this remembering to post something every day so that this turns into a proper blog isn't really happening. I'll go on trying, though.  Mum's big 90th birthday bash was last weekend, so that took lots of time and drained lots of energy - sort of (we're a big family so it's not as if there was really all that much for me to do!).  Here are a couple or three pictures, anyway.

Siskin

Our garden has been full of siskins, goldfinches and long-tailed tits (again) today. The siskins are my favourite: I love their aerobatic and acrobatic skills.

Old Photographs

Well, the wet and windy weather continues, though it seems we may get a bit of a breathing-space from tomorrow.  To be honest, Welshpool has not come through too badly, compared to many other places in the country. We've had our share of flooding, which is only to be expected, lying as we do firmly in the valley of the Severn, but it certainly could have been worse, and has been in other years. Quite a few trees have come down, though - out and about yesterday and today there are many gaps in the hedgerows and along the skylines.

I've spent quite a lot of time today sorting through old photographs, and putting a bit of a collection together for Mum's special birthday party tomorrow. Memories come flooding back! Sometimes there is a very vivid recollection not just of the place but of the exact moment when I see my seven or eight year old self in grainy black and white. Not that that is always the case; some of the photographs stir very little in the way of memories. Mostly these are more recent photographs than the childhood holiday snaps. Sometimes what Ann recalls is very different from my memories (shades of Maurice Chevalier!). Sometimes neither of us can remember very much. One picture shows all my brothers, my sister, our wives and partners, and Mum; it's taken after dark in the garden of a fairly modern house. Whose, I don't know; what the occasion was, I don't know. I must have been there, but no memory at all is stirred, and Ann was quite surprised to find herself in the picture, too.

It is apparently not true that our brains work less well as we get older (apart, of course, from specific health problems that may occur). It's just that they contain so much information, so many pieces of memory, items of learning, that everything takes longer to process. This, I am informed, is a matter of scientific fact; it has been tested. All I can say is that so far, my own tests seem to suggest otherwise. Unless, of course, my mind has behaved like the digital computer on which I am writing this, and deleted data in order to speed up the essential processes and calculations. Anyway, someone else will no doubt remember what it was we were doing twenty or so years ago, when we meet up tomorrow. And as (I think) Albert Einstein said, the important thing is not that you should know a lot of things, but that you should know where you can look them up.

The Calm after the Storm

Since the idea of a blog is that it should be a sort of diary, I think I should make something of a commitment to post a bit more regularly than I have been doing!  So here goes.  Yesterday was a 'calm after the storm' sort of a day - blue sky and sunshine after the strong wind and heavy rain of the day before . . . though I still did get rained on while out and about, and there is snow on the hills. More bad weather to come, they promise, so the calm before the storm as well. What a wet winter it has been! How long will it be before the farmers can do anything at all in most of the sodden fields around us?

The newspaper Ann brought home majored, like all our news bulletins just now, on the weather and its impact on our lives, with the flooding in the Thames Valley (home, I imagine, to many a senior journalist) very much at the centre of things. It also had on its front page, however, a school photo of the woman recently convicted of three murders and two attempted murders, compared to the adult photo of her brandishing a knife, which half the world has now seen. The trial of the men who assisted her in her crimes has come to its conclusion. The contrast between the innocent face and quiet smile of the girl in the school photo and the reality of the events recounted in court couldn't be greater, but what actually leads a person to become what she became is hard to assess - what combination of nature and nurture, the genes we inherit and what the world does to us. Why is it that the same sort of  experience hardens one person, and breaks another, brings one person to faith and drains the faith away from another? What in particular breaks the restraining code of morality that for most of us, religious or not, governs our behaviour and guides the decisions we make?

I found an old school photograph of my class, on which I look quite angelic. I was surprised not to be able to put names to most of the other children. I remember many of the names, of course, but matching them to the faces is beyond me. As far as I know, none of them has become an axe-murderer, though I'm pretty sure at least one has spent time inside, at Her Majesty's pleasure, as they say. I certainly couldn't tell which by looking at the picture, though!

An axe murderer features in the Van Veeteren story (crime novels by Hakan Nesser) that I've just started. A quote from the first few pages of that book, which I thought worthy of reflection: ". . . did there come a point, (Van Veeteren) had started to wonder, beyond which we no longer look forward to something coming, but only to getting away from what has passed?" Discuss, as they say. I suppose I do hope that by the end of my life I may feel I am ready to leave it - but I do also hope that until that time I shall continue to look forward in hope and expectation. I may also look back, and at times that will be with regret, but I should not ever wish that to be the dominant theme of my existence. Or at least, not until the last possible moment.

Man versus Squirrel (4)

Snowy this morning, and a squirrel has for the first time sampled our front garden bird feeders.  The pole on which they hang is decidedly rickety, and I was half afraid the weight of a squirrel would bring it down.  It didn't, but the squirrel was a bit disconcerted by the amount of sway, and decided to descend to ground level!

In the back garden, my new squirrel-proof bird feeders have failed at the first hurdle.  Most birds seem quite put off by the mesh around the feeder, for a start.  Even the siskins won't go through, though the doughty little coal tits do.  Meanwhile, the squirrels have quickly perfected the art of just taking the lid off the top of the tube, and stretching down to eat what's inside.  Just to make sure we can't put the lid back, they've bitten through the catch, too.  Game, set and match to Sciurus carolinensis, I should say.

(Supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder)

Candlemas

It's been a while since my last post - I've been busy elsewhere - and I should have posted up this Sunday talk, given a week ago on 2nd February:

Around the time of the millennium, Christian leaders gathered in Rome at the invitation of Pope John Paul II to remember the martyrs of the Church worldwide, of the twentieth century.  There had been an awful lot of them.  Those who gathered in Rome heard the stories of women and men of many different cultures and nationalities who had refused to deny their faith, and whose blood called out from Auschwitz and from the gulags of the Soviet Union, from Burundi and from Uganda, from Central America and from China.  The commemoration took place close to the Colosseum where in the first years of the Church Christians had faced the lions, to be reminded that still today church leaders and church members still find themselves faced with the horrors of the cross and the reality of sacrifice.  To name a few: Janani Luwum, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Maria Skobtsova, Maximilian Kolbe:  there are many more.

I wanted to began what I say today by mentioning these martyrs of modern times because today is the day, forty days after Christmas, when traditionally Christians have recalled the story told by Luke in the reading I used a moment ago.  Jesus was brought to the temple by his parents, to do for him what any good set of parents would wish to do for their first-born son - to present him. Today is the day popularly known as Candlemas, but better titled the Presentation of Christ in the Temple;  and today has sacrifice as its central theme.  

When a firstborn child was presented in the temple he was offered to God as God's own possession.  At the same time a ritual sacrifice was also offered - for fairly poor folk like Mary and Joseph this would have been a pair of doves – and that sacrifice was to buy back the child to remain part of his own family. What lies behind this ceremony is an awareness of the way in which we all belong to God, something Mary and Joseph affirmed when they did for their firstborn son what the Law of the Lord required.

I recall visiting a Greek Orthodox monk some years ago, just at this time of the year - he was a painter of icons who was doing a bit of art restoration work for the church I was ministering in back then.  We found ourselves talking about the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and he told me that the great teachers of the Orthodox Church understood the story of the presentation of Christ to be an icon of the Holy Trinity. What do you mean, I asked - surely an icon is a painting?  Yes, it is, he replied, but it’s more than just that; the icon is how we in the Orthodox Church use and interpret everything in scripture and tradition and Christian experience. 

It’s about finding pictures and stories of sacred and holy things, he said.  In the story of the Presentation, firstly, when the Son is brought into the Temple and offered as a sacrifice there is an icon of the cross, which is the work of Jesus our Saviour. Secondly, the doves offered as a sacrifice become an icon of the baptism that begins and enables ministry, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit. Thirdly, old Simeon speaks to Mary and Joseph words God has inspired him within him, and in doing that becomes an icon of the Father.  That’s not the way I’d used scripture up till then, but I could see there was something in the way it takes a familiar story and looks at it in a new way, that maybe says something important about the way in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit belong together.

Actually, to think of God as trinity is itself an image of sacrifice. As we try to express something of the mystery of God, one way of putting the trinity onto paper is to draw a triangle. Each point of the triangle, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is completely God, and yet each is not the other.  This is a relational way of understanding how Father, Son and Holy Spirit belong together.  But on its own it’s not enough, it’s too static - so we might go on to represent the Trinity by drawing a circle.  

A circle makes for a much more dynamic way of expressing the idea of the trinity, because it has no fixed points at which Father, Son and Holy Spirit are located. Each person of the trinity could be at any point on the circle, and you could add arrows to your drawing to suggest the constant movement that is interplay between the persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This gives us a participative image of God as Trinity. Again, not enough on its own, so the triangle and the circle are often drawn together, as a triangle with a circle linking round through its sides, and this has become one of the classic symbols of the Trinity that you will sometimes see in churches and cathedrals and in Christian art.

And this presents us with a fundamentally sacrificial image of what it means to say that God is trinity, for what the circle and triangle linked together try to express in picture form is the self-giving love that is the very heart of God, in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit hold themselves together in mutual service.  Again, Orthodox Christians see the blood of the martyrs as an icon of the sacrificial nature of God.  Those who have given their lives for his life, their love for the divine love promised by the Father, revealed in the Son, and brought to life within us in the Holy Spirit have revealed something of the wonder of God who as Father and Son and Holy Spirit exists in mutual service, each member of the Trinity serving the others, for that is the nature of love, and God is love.

And we in our turn are challenged to reveal in our own lives the self giving love of God.  That is or should be the theme of our worship Sunday by Sunday and our prayer day by day;  we offer ourselves to serve and to love, and to give what we can. Most of us may never be faced with the stark choice of martyrdom;  but we’re all called every day to dare to offer our selves to God, and, as St Paul puts it, to present our selves, our souls and our bodies to be a living sacrifice.  It’s not easy, though.  I wonder how well we ever manage it - living our lives in a genuinely sacrificial way, setting aside our own concerns and priorities and pride and status in order to love the Lord our God and therefore also to love our neighbour as ourselves.  

The story of the presentation of Christ in the Temple presents the new covenant God makes with us within the circumstances of the old covenant of the temple worship and sacrifice.  The people of Israel belonged to God, but they were alienated from him by their sin, and that sin needed to be sorted out. The sacrifices offered in the temple were made to redress the balance, and to placate God’s anger and restore his favour toward his people. So the ritual sacrifice Mary and Joseph offer in the temple that day is just part of an ongoing continuing round of sacrifice which is never sufficient, never worthy, by which a people set apart from God by their own sin seek to make things all right again and restore his favour.  But within this old covenant Simeon sees in this child the beginning of something new, something for which he has waited so long, and something that will bring to an end the old round of temple sacrifice.  The old ritual is rendered obsolete by the new light who will be a light to all nations and the glory of his people Israel.

Until this time sacrifice was offered to placate God’s anger, offered in fear and trembling;  but now, in the light of Christ we no longer need to live in fear.  We can offer a sacrifice of ourselves as a thank-you rather than as a penance - and the reason we can do this is that the one true perfect and sufficient sacrifice has been offered; the sacrifice that restores us once and for all to the status of sons and daughters of the living God.  Through the child offered that day in the temple, all the little sacrifices of our own lives are offered an eternal worth and value.

Tertullian, one of the fathers of the early Church, writing at a time of great persecution and affliction, said that 'the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church'.  This is true now as it was then in a very literal way: the Church has often been at its strongest when it has been most severely attacked.  The brave sacrifices of those we honour as martyrs have inspired others and have drawn them to know and to follow Jesus, for by them men and women of faith have declared in a way no-one could deny that their faith in the Lord, their love for the Lord, the love they have found in the Lord, is for them a truth above all truth, and a life beyond all life.  So we should certainly thank God that when darkness and desperation have surrounded the Church there’ve always been men and women who did not stand down or run away or betray their faith but stood firm to the end.  And we should thank God that still today he is giving strength and light and courage and perseverance to his people who face persecution.

But the Church needs always to have a spirit of sacrifice, if it’s truly to be the Church of Jesus. The Book of Common Prayer includes these words: ‘Here we offer and present unto thee, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a holy and lively sacrifice’, and they seem to me to encapsulate what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world:  they are words not just to say, but to live.  The apostle Paul writes to the Colossian church that ‘he is helping to complete, in his own poor flesh, the full tale of Christ’s afflictions’.  But he’s doing this as a thank-offering to the God in whom he already has liberation and the promise of life.  

Because of the offering Jesus makes of himself, each small sacrifice we make, each little presentation of my self to God, can grows to be something better and stronger than our own efforts could ever make it.  However small the sacrifice, if it’s given wholeheartedly and lovingly, if it truly is presented to God, then God promises to make what we give into an icon of his glory.

Historically the Presentation of Christ in the Temple was within the Church an ending of the Christmas season and a time to start looking forward to Easter.  Traditionally called Candlemas, it became an opportunity for new commitment, for a new offering of ourselves. Old carols that used to be sung today tell of taking out the old Christmas greenery, holly and ivy and stuff, that would have decked our halls, to bring in new branches of rosemary and bay that look forward to the coming spring.  And the people would gather by the font in church to recall their baptism promises and to recommit themselves to live faithfully and courageously.  So may we just use this moment today to offer ourselves once again to our Lord who has offered so much to us, and whose Son was in the Temple acclaimed as a light for all the world;  a light for you and me, this tiny child who is the wonder of God himself held in the arms of old Simeon who had waited so long. And let us pray again that his light may shine in our lives, and that his glory may indeed be seen and known in all the world.

Man versus Squirrel (3)

Amusing today to watch a squirrel that is clearly not as agile as some, scrambling about on our feeders and looking most uncomfortable.  Mind you, they're nothing if not persistent, these squirrels: uncomfortable he may have been, and on one occasion he slipped off altogether quite spectacularly, but in the end he got his breakfast, and I hadn't the heart to rush out there shouting and throwing sticks.

For a while this morning the squirrel baffle actually did what it was supposed to.  Yesterday I moved a planter that the squirrels had used as a launch pad for their leaps onto the feeding station.  So this morning the squirrel made several attempts to climb the pole from the bottom, each time stymied by the baffle and having to return to ground level.  He then climbed a nearby bush, and tried to get to the end of an overhanging branch that pointed out in the general direction of the feeders.  Squirrels are quite light, and this one was smaller than some, but even so the branch was never going to be strong enough!

So the squirrel then tried a flying leap up from the lawn.  He cleared the baffle, grabbed the pole, couldn't keep his grip, and we were treated to the sight of the spectacular fall mentioned above.  He just tried again, and this time managed (just) to hold on.  He climbed to the top of the feeding pole, balanced there looking a bit vulnerable as it swayed in the wind, then out of the feeders hanging there selected the only one with a squirrel-proof guard around it.  He scrambled down that, and hung on to the base, allowing a few seeds to trickle out, which he was able to consume.  Then he fell off again.

Undaunted, back up he went, and this time selected the other feeders.  This was highly entertaining viewing, but - as mentioned before - the presence of a squirrel on the feeding station keeps the birds away, for the most part, and so I continue to feel I ought to discourage them.

Waste

Lights drift upon the black water,
as, viscous as oil, the stream flows;
passing silently under the bridges,
soft and secret and splashless it goes.
A man walks the cobbled embankment
passing under occasional lamps,
the shadows rise up to walk with him,
brought to life in the chills and the damps.
But don’t ask him what he remembers,
don’t ask him where he is bound;
it’s all water flowed under the bridges,
with no story, no crying, no sound.

Then the stillness is suddenly fractured,
wings are whipping and whirling, gulls cry:
with a thump and a rumble of diesel,
yellow hazards against the night sky,
men are busily clearing the rubbish,
briskly emptying barrows and bins -
silver packaging sparkles, glows briefly,
must be gone as the new day begins.
So metal jaws seize it and swallow,
sad remains of a time that is gone;
the man stops and he watches a moment,
then he turns up his collar, walks on.

We dance a short while and we sparkle,
and it seems our lives matter and glow,
but watch the lights fade in the water,
see them drift down and die in its flow.
So I’ll walk on, duck under the arches,
pretty soon I’ll be lost from your view;
leaving something perhaps of an echo
of the man whom you thought that you knew.
A new day is dawning without me,
where faith fights new battles with doubt,
where water flows smooth in the sunlight,
with the lights on the cobbles switched out.

Man versus Squirrel (2)

The neighbours probably think I'm mad, and will start to look away nervously, I fancy, when they meet me in the street.  Clapping hands and throwing sticks seem no longer to have any impact on our squirrels, so I have taken to creeping up on them (I can usually make it to within about two or three feet), and then shouting or growling very loudly.  It certainly alarms them and they beat a hasty retreat, but I expect it's alarming my neighbours too.

The squirrels have decided to broaden their diet.  They were happily eating sunflower seeds and leaving the other things I put out, but since I moved the nyger seed to hang from a post by the back hedge - a safer and easier spot for the squirrels - at least one squirrel has happily switched to that.  I only hung it there because this was the one feeder the squirrels always ignored!

I have moved all my feeders round, and it's been interesting to see the impact of this.  The nut feeder is now on the side of the feeding station closest to the house, rather than the side closest to the wood.  So far as I'm aware, the great spotted woodpecker has not visited since I moved it . . . I wonder whether it will start back once it's used to the changed positions?  We had enormous numbers of finches today, with the great oak to the back of next door full of them, all very noisy.  They are mostly chaffinches and goldfinches, plus a few siskins and the odd greenfinch.  We get bullfinches, too, but they go their own way and don't flock with the others.  Twice recently we've been blessed with redpolls, but only Ann has seen them, they're never there when I'm looking out!

Back to the squirrels.  Tomorrow I'll buy a squirrel feeder, and stock it with maize, and see how they go for that.  I'm not unhappy about feeding them, it's just that the birds keep away when the squirrels are about. Mind you, the other day a blue tit flew rapidly across to the feeding station, having - I think - completely failed to notice the squirrel that was hanging there grabbing the sunflower seed, and the squirrel was sufficiently surprised by this direct approach to make a dash for the trees.  So direct action by the birds could probably see the squirrels off, but the thought of that raises disturbing images worthy of Hitchcock.

Man versus Squirrel

I really don't mind feeding the local squirrels as well as the birds that visit our garden, but I do resent it when they monopolise the feeding station, as the presence of even one squirrel on the feeders will prevent any birds from visiting (though squirrels feeding on the bits dropped underneath the feeders do not deter the birds at all).  So I have put in a number of the supposedly squirrel-proof solutions to the problem.  The sight yesterday of a squirrel standing on the squirrel baffle (which supposedly prevents the animal from climbing up the pole from which the feeders hang) in order to reach inside the squirrel-proof cage around the feeder, made me a bit cross.  I chucked a piece of kindling wood at said squirrel, as there was a pile of it by our back door. To my surprise, it hit him, though not hard, as it was some distance away. He looked round at me, seemed to shrug his shoulders in a disdainful fashion, and carried on eating. Defeat duly admitted by disconsolate human.

Mind you, things are hotting up in the squirrel world just now, prompted no doubt by the comparatively mild winter we've had so far. Later in the day any number of squirrels - well, seven or eight, anyway - seemed to be engaged in something of a running battle through the treetops behind our house. Much shouting and screaming, and amazing agility as the creatures hurtled through the trees. It's my own fault, I suppose - they are now so well fed, and they have so much energy to work off. Certainly, it was amazing to watch them!

In fact, feats of agility of this sort are a feature of the mating season, which for grey squirrels is now in full swing. Squirrels produce two broods in a year, and the first of these is in the early spring, so mating - and no doubt fighting over possible mates - happens right now, whenever the weather is mild enough to encourage it. It's been mild nearly all winter so far, though the storms and rain over recent weeks won't have encouraged the squirrels. This week, though, things are much calmer meteorologically, and therefore, it would seem, considerably less calm in the treetops!

Advent Confession

Verses recently written, but in my thoughts set some twenty years ago, and (of course) at the beginning of Advent.

I have always wanted it all to be true,

and have always been afraid it might not be.

So here I am, on the last Saturday in November,

standing under a sad sky, halfway down the field,

looking up at the half tumbled dry stone wall,

the mess of posts and fence wire,

the busy lane and then the church beyond,

darkly brooding as ever, atop its little hill.

I am on my way home from a good brisk walk with the dog,

but now I shall have to get on with things.

Too far to see, but the church notice board bears my name,

and perhaps I ought to feel a little more sure 

about what it is I am selling.

Anyway, here I stand, quite newly arrived here,

and with the new liturgical year about to begin,

the Advent candle ring dressed and in place,

the altar and pulpit draped with purple cloth.

It has been a long journey to get to this place,

a long time spent wrestling with fears and uncertainties.

I seem to have so many questions that lack an easy answer,

that keep me awake on nights, interrupt my prayerful thoughts -

and yet I find also there is always the sense of God,

not present exactly, not in clear focus,

I cannot claim any blinding light or sounding voice, descending dove . . .

just the sense, and it is still there today -

of someone who does not let go of me, who is constantly catching my sleeve,

who despite it all goes on tugging me into saying yes.

January

Driving home, hard day, horizon ahead smudged and tearful,
all light and life leached out of it,
everywhere so dreary and it’s hardly four o’clock;
yet somewhere within the jumble in my head
a moment from a magical past drifts into focus,
a bright and shining star, that once I watched in wonder,
the kind my childhood self imagined
kings bearing gifts might follow.
And I can’t help but scan tonight’s grey and liquid sky
just in case I might glimpse it again.
For maybe then I’d find
those old stories I heard are true after all,
and know, even on a dismal night like this
that I really am heading for home.

Some words at the Epiphany

. . . prepared for a service I shall attend tomorrow:

Epiphany is a word that means discovery, revelation, the penny dropping, the eureka moment:  to have an epiphany is to realise the truth of something in a way you haven't before, to discover something new about yourself or about the world.  Today, January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrates Jesus shown to the world, as he is shown to the wise men from the east who came looking for him;  and the Epiphany season that begins today goes on to tell of many more revealing moments - at his baptism, his first miracle, and more besides.

The man Jesus was born a Jew, and raised in the Jewish faith.  He called fellow Jews to be his disciples, and he taught in Jewish synagogues and the Jewish temple.  He had some critical words for some of his fellow Jews, like the Pharisees, but he was never critical of the Jewish faith itself.  The prophecy which suggested that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem told of the man God would send to 'rule over my people Israel'.  And the wise men from the east, with their star charts and their observations of the night sky had come to find the one born to be King of the Jews.

So that is where Jesus belongs, culturally, historically, geographically, linguistically.  In Palestine, and in the Jewish nation, and in the Jewish faith. So we might ask - how come he didn't stay there?  As we begin to consider that question, one fact to note from the outset is that these men from the east weren't Jews but Gentiles;  and the story of their visit is told to symbolise this vital piece of good news: that here in Bethlehem God has done something new to change the destiny not just of the Jewish nation but of the world.  And the gifts offered by the travellers are symbols of this new act of God:  gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Sacred gifts of mystic meaning, as one Epiphany hymn puts it. Gold is obvious enough - the child is a king, and gold is a king's coinage.  The child the wise men came to see will take authority and exercise power; he will rule over his people - though his route to kingship and the throne he claims are very different from the story of King Herod. But still, Herod would have seen the point of gold, and frankincense too he’d have understood, for there's always something priestly about becoming a king. Monarchs are anointed as they are crowned, as a sign their kingship is held in sacred trust from God.  The role of a priest is to stand between the people and God, God and the people, and one word that describes this is pontifex, meaning bridge builder.  Jesus is pontifex maximus, our great high priest, and he will rebuild the bridge we've broken.

But for me a chill falls across the proceedings when the third gift of myrrh is offered. Myrrh makes for a costly and special gift, but there’s no escaping the fact that it's also the stuff of death. For me the words quoted by Paul in Philippians chapter 2 stand at the heart of my understanding of discipleship and service: 'He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.' This was what it would mean for Jesus to be king and priest: not the acquisition of status and power, but the letting go of these things. In the Letter to the Hebrews we read that Jesus is both the perfect priest, and also the perfect sacrifice. He offers himself for the sins of the people, to die so that they - that we - might live.

So gold, frankincense and myrrh are gifts with power and symbolic resonance, but it's the myrrh that most deeply expresses the crossing of human boundaries and the breaking of human barriers. For myrrh stands for the self-giving love that can break into our hearts, and for the God who in his gift to us places no limits on his love, loving as a Father loves even the most wayward of his children.  The wise men bow before God’s only Son, who will reveal himself as the living expression of that boundless love.

So how come he didn't stay in his Jewish setting?  However precious the birth we've just celebrated, it was his death that led those who saw him and heard him and followed him, and were changed by him, to conclude that what this man had done was for the whole world, and to acclaim him the King of Love, whose kingdom has no human boundaries. The Church founded in his name has the holy task of enabling that love to take root and grow and flower in all cultures and climes.  This child the wise men hailed with gold, frankincense and myrrh can never be the a possession of any one race or culture.  He's a Jew but he's not contained within what is Jewish;  he sometimes feels very western and European, but he's not ours either to keep for ourselves. When the Gospel is made an instrument of imperialism or colonialism that gospel has lost its truth. Jesus is ours as a gift, and his Gospel must shared as a gift, humbly and lovingly - a gift to set all people free.

And wherever the Church may be, it should always bear the symbols of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  Gold because we too are kings - Jesus shares with us his royal state and authority, and the secret of his throne, when he tells us: 'Let the one who would be greatest among you become the servant of all.' And wherever the Church is a servant Church it claims its share in the kingship of Christ.

Frankincense because we're all priests:  for all who serve and follow Christ share a holy call to speak of God to the world, and to speak for the world to God.  We are to pray without ceasing, and to witness with constant zeal.  To listen to God, and pass on what we hear;  to listen to the world, and to make our neighbour's need our constant prayer.  And wherever the Church is doing this, in any language or culture, it's sharing and communicating the priesthood of Christ.

But myrrh too must be our sign, for we're called to die daily to sin, and to take up our cross as we follow our Lord.  Our baptism joins us to the death of Christ and joins us also to his risen life and to the new wine of his Holy Spirit.  Discipleship requires of us a dying, a laying down of the old things, so there can then be the rebirth that is Christ alive within us, as we promise and pray 'Lord, you only will I serve;  you are Lord of all my life.'  We may never manage to achieve what we intend or resolve, but we must always aim to offer all we can.  As Christina Rossetti wrote, 'What I can I give him - give my heart'.  Wherever the Church is really striving to be Christ-filled and Christ-centred, setting aside any desire for worldly status or security, then the death of Christ is being proclaimed, until he comes again.

And sisters and brothers, the amazing and wonderful thing is that our Church that is so often so broken, so unsatisfactory and even so sinful nonetheless is doing all these things in so many places: African places and Asian places and South American places, and even European places too.  The wise men were right - the birth of this child was something very special, that could not go unmarked;  they trekked across the desert to lay their royal gifts before the one whose love can transform every human heart, for in Bethlehem they found God's free and loving gift to the world he can never cease to love. May your heart and mine receive that love tonight, and may our lives proclaim it in the world.

Unhappy Bird

We have had more birds than ever on our feeders today, with blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits, great spotted woodpecker, chaffinch, siskin, greenfinch, bullfinch and goldfinch, nuthatch, wood pigeon, robin, dunnock, blackbird, house sparrow all visiting.  The activity around the feeding station was most entertaining, but bringing so many birds together at one place can present its own problems, one of which (as I've mentioned before) is the ease with which disease and parasites can be passed on.  It's important that we do our best to keep the feeding station reasonably clean and healthy.

One female chaffinch in particular has been rather unhappy.  Its feet are very deformed, and its ability to perch must be greatly diminished.  It seems to be able to hop around all right, but its deformity must make it more vulnerable to predation, I should think. It seems likely that this particular chaffinch is suffering from chaffinch viral papilloma, which is not uncommon, sadly. While it is not in itself life threatening, anything that encumbers a bird's ability to move about the place, and of course to perch somewhere hidden and out of reach, has got to put it at risk.

This disease is specific to chaffinches (and bramblings, I believe), so the other birds that visit our feeders are not at risk of contracting it. However, the existence of a very visible disease of this sort only points up the probability that other diseased birds without such obvious symptoms may be visiting feeders.

Siskin

After the mystery of the female siskin found dead outside our back door a week or two back, today for the first time a siskin was seen visiting our feeding station (along with about twenty goldfinches). This was a male, with the black crown to his head delightfully prominent.  He was part of a real flurry of busy birds, with, besides the goldfinches, well into double figures of both chaffinches and blue tits, plus great, coal and long-tailed tits. Today has been a moderately calm interlude between stormy bursts of weather, and I wonder how aware the birds are of this, and their need to grab what they can while the weather holds!

A Sunday Talk

. . . for the Sunday after Christmas :-

Tragedies of one sort or another strike at every season of the year, somewhere in the world;  but tragedy at Christmas is especially poignant. A concert at which I sang just before Christmas supported the work of Save the Children in Syria and among the refugees from that sad conflict, and a representative from the charity told us about some of the work they were doing; it’s so sad that so many children are suffering there, who have no part in that war, nor do their families, just the desire to live in peace and safety. And among the TV adverts for beds and sofas, you’ll have seen many images of suffering children, as aid charities seek our help to challenge poverty, homelessness and disease.

A few weeks ago I watched the final programme in a TV series about pilgrimage, as the presenter arrived at the sacred sites of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The programme didn’t hide away from the fact that there’s something between Jerusalem and Bethlehem now that wasn’t there when I made my visit to those places fifteen years ago. Then we passed through checkpoints, but now there’s also the wall, slabs of sheer grey concrete (with added graffiti) to separate Israel from the Palestinian areas of the West Bank.  Many see this wall as unjust, particularly where it separates families from the land that’s their only source of income; but at the same time the state of Israel insists that the wall is vital to preserve their people from the constant threat of terrorist attack. I remember a scene of children looking through gaps in the wall. When communities are divided, and people live in fear of each other, often it’s the innocents, the children, who suffer most.

The first thing that happens after Christmas in our Bibles is also a tragic event;  and like so many tragic events, it’s the children who suffer.

[Matthew, chapter 2, vv 16-end]

The historian in me has to admit at this point that we have no independent confirmation of the story Matthew tells us.  But it matches what we know of the character of King Herod.  This was a man who would stop at nothing to eliminate any challenge to his royal power. He killed several of his own children, so why would he baulk at killing the children of others.  And life is cheap.  That’s true in the world of today, and it was certainly true then.

The slaughter of the innocents inevitably raises the same one-word question as today’s tragic events - why?  I have a  friend for whom the story Matthew tells of the slaughter of the innocents is the biggest stumbling block to her faith.  It was because of the psychopathic cruelty of King Herod that these children died;  but why was it necessary for God's messiah to be born in a land whose king would murder all the other children in the town?  Surely, my friend would ask, that’s too big a price to pay?  Didn't God know what was going to happen? Didn’t God care?

That last question is one I find rather hard to answer. If God didn’t know, then that diminishes him, and if God did know but didn’t care, that diminishes him too: and what makes God either less than all-knowing or less than all-loving surely also makes him less than God.  Could I have faith in a God who really doesn't know what's going to happen next?  Or who really doesn't care?

And in that thought there is a major faith challenge. It’s basic to our faith that God is love. And we believe that God is omnipotent - in other words, all-powerful - and omniscient - in other words, all-knowing.  And yet the little children died in Bethlehem - as the carol says of Herod ‘All the little boys he killed at Bethlem in his fury’; and today innocent people suffer still, and young lives are still lost that have scarcely begun.

It sort of helps a bit when we have someone to blame. The children died in Bethlehem because of Herod's megalomania and paranoia.  But that still leaves the challenge of the images of poverty on our TV screens, in the aftermath of storm or earthquake or other natural disaster. Who’s to blame then? Even when people don’t behave with deliberate cruelly, innocent people still suffer, innocent lives are lost.  So is God in charge, or is he not?  Or is God a tyrant with the same irrational and cruel streak as Herod or, say, Caligula or Stalin?

My faith is certainly challenged by these events and by my reflections upon them. And yet I go on believing. And what I believe is this - that God cannot be remote and terrible and irrational and cruel, for God is like Jesus. I believe in a God who matches the picture Jesus shows me; I believe in a God whose whole nature is love, and whose way is the way of justice and righteousness. I believe in a God is biased toward the marginalised and the vulnerable and the poor. Indeed, I believe in a God who has chosen to share that life, beginning in the stable at Bethlehem and the flight from Bethlehem to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod: a God who doesn’t stand apart from human tragedy.

But I still have to reconcile that belief with the fact of the persistence of injustice and unrighteousness in the world . . . so how am I going to do that?

C.S. Lewis wrote about 'the problem of pain', something that theologians have wrestled with throughout the whole of Christian history; and at the end of all their writing and thinking the problem remains. Why do I have to suffer, and why does anyone - in particular what about the innocents who just get caught in the crossfire? There comes a point at which rational argument fails, and as a believer I have to take a leap of faith'.  I don't have all the answers, and however lovely the Christmas stories, they still leave me short of complete proof. I have to make that leap, and sometimes I can do it with a fair amount of confidence and hope, and other times I find it’s harder. Faith and doubt form two sides of the same coin, I discover.  Like St Paul, I see dark reflections in the glass, but hope one day to know fully and completely - to know as I am known.

But the very fact that I’m so appalled by the story of the killings Herod ordered in Bethlehem, the very fact that I’m so moved by the images of suffering on TV, etched on the faces of children I’ll never know, who are halfway round the world from me - that in itself is part of the answer to my faith question. We know about right and wrong, good and bad, darkness and light;  we have an intrinsic capacity to care about these things, to know what sort of world we want to see, and Christmas each year rekindles those hopes and dreams within us.  And somehow freedom, love and pain are inextricably linked together.  God made us free to quest for him, to love him, to serve him - or to ignore him.

Christina Rossetti wrote ‘love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine.’ Love was born into a world where then as now hatred and suffering can seem to have the upper hand, where the streets too often run with blood. In this dark world God proves his love in the birth of this child. But a world in which we’re free to love him back maybe has to be a world of chance and danger, and the new king who enters that world isn’t a king like Herod. He doesn’t descend with chariots of fire, he’s born in a stable.

And even as I welcome the Prince of Peace, the Christmas story as a whole forces me also to admit the reality and potency of evil.  It’s dangerous to downplay the role of evil in the world.  Everything can’t be explained away in terms of societal pressures, or failures in nurture, or the impact of poverty, or our genetic inheritance . . . nor is evil the preserve of those people the tabloid press likes to label as 'monsters' - and therefore quite different from us.  Evil can happen anywhere; evil is what happens when good is absent, and when good people look away.

The murder of the children in Bethlehem is a reminder of what happens when evil is rampant and unchecked. All that’s needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.  The battle between good and evil is fundamental to our human experience, and it’s an inevitable component of the story of love.  And though I don't have a complete answer to the problem of pain and evil, I think I do have the beginning of an answer that I can work with.  The story of the Word made flesh who dwells among us tells me that God doesn’t leave himself out but includes himself in: love incarnate is calling us to love, and lighting our way.

And this is love not just as an idea or a tinselly picture, but as a programme for action, and for courageous and generous living. So let’s not just think about love, but do it. Evil reigns not so much because bad people do bad things, but because good people let them. Let me close with some words for Christmas from the black author, educationalist and civil rights leader Howard Thurman.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and the princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
then the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.

A Small Mystery

. . . A small tragedy, as well.  The other day I found a siskin, a female bird, lying dead just outside our back door. I am not sure what was the cause of death, but a small amount of blood was visible on the tail feathers, leading me to speculate that maybe it was killed by one of the local cats, and left there perhaps as a sort of gift, or maybe just because the bird's killer was disturbed.

So there's one mystery; but the other mysterious thing is that a siskin should be there at all, since we have never seen a live siskin in our garden in all the time we've been here. There will be siskins not too far away, to be sure - when we lived just up the way in Brookfield Road, we had siskins all winter, as very regular visitors to our feeding station. They are delightful small finches, very acrobatic and with an attractive plumage. As they quite often flock with goldfinches - and we have no shortage of goldfinches, with fifteen our highest total at one time so far this winter - we had hoped to see them here, but it's sad that the only one seen so far is dead.

Not Really Believing

Not really believing, and yet
I have come to sing again the old words,
and to rejoice that the candles still are lit;
my heart will still respond, will still be moved
as the remembered stories are read once more
from behind the great brass eagle.

I am here because I want to be, perhaps even
because I need to be.
I should like tonight the chance to be a child again,
with no need to worry about whether shepherds saw a star,
and wise men heard an angel;
Matthew and Luke have written their distinct stories of a birth,
but tonight their stories are melded as one,
one tale, to be re-told by candlelight
and sung to the old dancing tunes that power the faith songs of the people.
I am glad still to be part of this.

And then there comes the story that for me will always stand unshaken,
whatever my doubts about stables and stars:
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.”  Here
is the truth I shall depend on, the quay
at which I moor my ship of faith,
such a flimsy craft for much of the year,
and so easily cast astray.

The child I was rejoiced at mystery,
was happy not to understand,
loved being so small, where the old arches soared upwards
into a dusty and holy height
hardly touched by the flickering flames below.
We stand for the Ninth Lesson,
bow our heads at the holy words -
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
And yes, we have seen his glory,
or we have almost seen it, caught this season’s tantalising glimpse
somewhere within the echoes of our carolling,
half-hidden in that holy dusk, beyond the candle flames we have lit:
a light that is not of our kindling, but is his own,
and a Word that is its own music, impossibly ancient
and yet completely, utterly new, as it seeks an entry to my heart.

Homeward bound with “O Come, All Ye Faithful” still in my ears, I see how
every star is newly bright across the virgin sky
as the haloed moon sails high, and the sparkled frost begins to form.