CHAPLAIN'S MESSAGE FOR OCTOBER, NOVEMBER and DECEMBER 2009.

OCTOBER 2009

I’ve acquired a new enemy in the past 3 weeks.  Ever since I planted out my autumn vegetables – mainly lettuce, swiss chard and broccoli, I have been in competition for their produce with someone else!  Actually not someone but something, as this competitor is not human.  It is a lovely blackbird!  You know, that bird which has such a lovely song and of which one of our favorite hymns speaks:
“Morning has broken, like the first morning,
blackbird has spoken like the first bird…. 
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day!”
            I hadn’t realized that blackbirds were partial to salad – I had thought they just sat their singing, eating the odd worm and grub and praising God every morning.  But no, unfortunately they like my little gem lettuces as much as I do.  So suddenly I have an enemy!
            Everybody who has tilled the ground from Adam onwards knows the battles and pleasures, joys and frustrations of growing food in a fallen, less than perfect world.  Genesis explains it is part of the curse on Adam.  It is never easy!  You wait patiently for rain for 4 months, irrigating where you can over the summer, knowing that when the gentle rain from heaven comes it will naturally refresh the plants.  And then when it does come, we have 75 litres in two days and the garden is awash and flooded, the soil pounded, and I know that when I have to go away for 10 days the sun will come out and bake the surface soil hard and dry because I didn’t have time before the deluge to get the mulch on the surface to protect the surface soil!
            How we take for granted the food on our tables!  Every grape we eat, every nut we crack, every cup of milk or wine we drink, every plate of vegetables or salad we enjoy – all these have been produced by the sweat of someone’s brow, sometimes wonderfully working with nature, at other times competing with nature.
            Yes, the Lord our Creator, sends the rain and the sunshine, but not always exactly when and where and how much we want.  We pray for rain and we get a deluge!  Some others pray for rain and it doesn’t come – there are many parched areas of the world today, sadly many of them created by human activity and ignorance.  There are floods, often for the same reasons.  While farmers pray for rain, vicars and cricketers pray for sunshine for their Christmas Fayre or their cricket match.  My prayers yesterday were rather mixed – my garden and many others’ gardens and land desperately needed rain, but I had the first cricket match coming up for 4 months as well.  The Lord was good – we got the rain - a bit more than we had bargained for – for the gardens, but we also managed to play an innovative cricket match without our normal mat for a pitch.  It rained a bit but the visitors to the island were not disappointed.
            We share the world we live in.  We are not the only species to live here, and my personal activities and interests are not the only ones in God’s mind each day.  But we are the species which the Lord has put in charge of everything, but not just for our own advantage. 
Praise God for his harvest each year which, this year, we will celebrate with the Spanish and German churches on October 4th.  But we will also celebrate with my blackbird friend – no longer an enemy, but a fellow creature in God’s world.  I hope now that there will be enough other green shoots for him to eat apart from my lettuce!  But let’s not in our abundance also forget the millions who are less fortunate than us with whom we share our world and its resources who won’t go to bed with a full and satisfied stomach.
God bless you all,
Bob

NOVEMBER 2009

Looking back, last month I had a battle with a Blackbird with whom I built up a friendship!  I am glad to say that since the very heavy rains of September, which brought out lots of new shoots and other watering and feeding places, the Blackbird has flown and is no longer sharing my lettuces!
            I have learnt a couple of things from this.  Firstly that we share this world with our many neighbors which is, I think, a very central part of the message of Psalm 104 which we looked at during our Harvest Festival service.  Secondly, a bit of pruning doesn’t do us any harm.  The lettuces have grown very well, possibly even better than normal, and we and others are enjoying them.  That goes for God’s pruning in our lives as well, which Jesus spoke of in John 15.  Having our lives pruned by God’s Word and Spirit is for our benefit, even though at the time it may seem painful!
            In September, we arrived at my Cambridge College, and the first person I bumped into having checked in at the Porter’s Lodge was Gerald Davies, the person who would be giving the speech at the dinner.  I recognized him and he said he recognized my face.  The same could be said for two of my cricketing friends, one from England and one from Sri Lanka.  Quite remarkable after 40 years!
            In these reunions, it is fascinating to hear what has happened over the years.  My Sri Lankan friend had become an architect and had met Roy Dixon when he was out in Sri Lanka helping the Tsunami victims.  We also met his lovely Indian wife.  It is also interesting to recognize again the characteristics of others and ourselves.  Some things haven’t changed, which perhaps we wished had over the years, but other things we can look back on and be thankful that 40 years have not been wasted!  Getting old isn’t all that bad!  Certainly I thank God for all that He has given me in that time, and relating these things to old friends is a very good thing to do as it makes us focus on all those incidents in our lives through which the Lord has brought us and guided us.
            Which leads me to think of Remembrance Sunday coming up in two weeks time on Sunday November 8th.  This is such an important day which we are in danger of forgetting over time, especially here living overseas.  In the UK it is still quite a focus of TV, of many churches and communities and newspaper articles.  Here, it is not so obvious and we have to work at remembering.
Remembering firstly all those people who have given up, and continue to do so today, the most precious thing that they had, their lives, in ensuring that their children would live in a free world which we enjoy today.  Secondly, those many innocent people caught up in the conflict as civilians.  Thirdly, those other individuals who were co-opted into doing things that they knew were wrong but the situation forced them into taking actions they would otherwise never have done.  This is one of the terrible things about war and we must always think “there but for the grace of God go I!”
Please make a point of trying to encourage your friends to come to this service. Perhaps it makes us uncomfortable to think about these things, but we should not retreat from one of the realities of our daily life.  And it is very cathartic in many ways to remember what happened last century and continues today and at the same time to thank God for the privilege we have of living in peace where we are here in Ibiza.
God bless,
Bob

DECEMBER 2009

I was profoundly concerned by a debate I listened to last Sunday night put on by the program Intelligence Squared and aired all over the world on BBC World News.  It was chaired by Zeinab Badawi, one of the BBC newscasters.
            The motion was “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”.  I came in on the tail-end of the debate when Stephen Fry, the actor, was giving his speech.  Ann Widdecombe and a Nigerian Archbishop had already spoken for the motion and Christopher Hitchens, the well-known Atheist against.  Stephen Fry was launching into an angry invective against the Catholic Church for its stance on homosexuality, women priests and the use of condoms for controlling HIV/Aids.
            As the audience went into the debate, they were polled on what they felt about the motion, with about 50% against the motion, 33% for the motion and the rest “Don’t knows”.  There were more than 2,000 people present.
            As Fry was speaking, there was clearly huge support for him with a great deal of applause.  He was working the audience very well as an actor might.   Apparently from reports, Christopher Hitchin was even better!  He had assassinated the character of Mother Teresa, the great icon for good of the Roman Catholic Church.
            The concerning thing was how easily the audience were swayed by the angry, questing, destructive arguments put forward by the opposition, and the swing of 33% for the motion and 17% who didn’t know to nearly 90% against the motion was the biggest swing ever seen in a debate in the experience of one seasoned debater.
            At no stage of the debate, however, did anybody point out that the whole debate was probably invalid anyway because the wording of the motion was about “The Catholic Church”, yet all the debate and voting was on the “Roman Catholic” Church.  The Catholic Church is the worldwide Church of every denomination of believers in Christ, not just the Roman Church.
            All this leads me to the conclusion that there is a huge ignorance on the whole today about the Christian faith.  And not only an ignorance, but also a great deal of prejudice and stereotyping on the basis of one or two issues such as homosexuality and condoms/birth-control.  And I was very disappointed that the chairwoman did not reprimand Mr. Hitchin for an extremely offensive piece of stereotyping and prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church in his summing up.  Had this particular thing been said of Moslems there would have been absolute pandemonium!
            All this leads me to the conclusion that it is not easy to be a Committed Christian in Western Europe today.  I acknowledge that the institution of the Church is not perfect, nor its history nor its present practices.   
In spite of this, however, it was very encouraging to have 5 adults confirmed yesterday by our Diocesan Suffragen Bishop David, who came over especially for the occasion and led us in a very moving and powerful Confirmation Service.  These are all people who have found that the real Catholic Church has indeed been a force for good in their lives.  To quote one of them ‘So far I have found only good people in the Church, not like when you walk into a pub.’  The cynic might say this person has not seen much yet, but it is clear that those Christians whom this person has met are faithfully reflecting the life of Jesus, our Leader and Saviour, to the world.
The media today sadly tends to focus on the bad, because it apparently is more interesting than good.  Our job as a Church, as Jesus reminded his disciples on the Sermon on the Mount, is to be “the light for the world”, so that people “will see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven.”  Let’s keep up the good work to draw more and more people to Jesus.
God bless you all this Christmas time as we have opportunity to reflect on the amazing rescue plan for the human race that God put into action those 2,000 years ago.
Bob