St Neots Parish Church

Among the many changes in our understanding of the world is our attitude towards children. My father never had a belt; had he had one he would never have taken it off to leather any of us. It was my mother who terrified me. Family rules were not to be argued with. I would, looking back, have been happier had their been more discussion about what I could and could not do, but I am amazed when I am told that children ‘won’t go to bed’ when told, that they ‘won’t eat’ particular foods or are ‘out of control’.

Big news is almost always bad. The death of the Pope has confused the media by being both bad and good. The difficulty is that the man himself did not regard his death as bad but as his final submission to God. What was more he was a great political figure as well as a religious one: his contribution to the demise of communism was huge; he worked tirelessly to reconcile Christians, Jews and Muslims. So, to the delight of some and the disgust of others, religion is news this week and not all bad.

What do you do about the Grand Canyon? I confess that I have never seen it, though I know someone who has – twice in fact, so far as I remember. It is one of the wonders of the natural world – wide, deep and breathtaking to see, so I am told. Having seen it only on film I can believe that it is a visual memory that lives in the brain very vividly. But what do you do about it? If you are a government administrator you might promote it as a tourist attraction; if you are an engineer, you might consider how the water of the Colorado river which flows through it can be syphoned off to provide for the golf courses of the arid western states. But, not being either, what do we do about it, apart from remember an amazing sight?

Today is about angels. About St. Michael and St. Gabriel. Our calender of saints consists of people, Christians who have followed the teachings of Christ in life and often by their death. St. Michael is different; he is an angel mentioned in the book of Daniel as St. Gabriel features as the messenger who brought the news to Mary of the birth of Jesus. Both of them are blokes, that is they have men’s names. I read recently that it was about 1800 that the representations of angels changed from being men to being women. The angels in our windows are certainly fresh-faced long haired soft creatures, more conventionally female you might think than male. The book from which I derived this information suggested that at about that time, 1800, the perception of Christianity changed to being essentially a female profession. As the Germans once chauvinistly said, the role of women is: kinder, kirche, küche – children, church and kitchen. Women are described as being the upholders of morality, the home and hearth as being the basis of civilised society. Educated men, who were no longer so concerned with religious or moral questions, were dragged along only to the more important religious occasions. Clergy, with long frocks were characterized as being not men, but some undefined third sex. More analytically, confirmation has been for a long time something that girls rather than boys did.

‘…you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’

I remember some time ago seeing a cartoon of a group of men, in space suits, floating some hundreds of miles above the earth, surrounded by pieces of an orbital space station which they are about to assemble. Other astronauts are busy unloading other pieces of equipment from a space vehicle. ‘I think we’ll build it about here’ says the chief engineer.

Those who are closest to us are the ones we find it hardest to deal with. We are bound to them by ties of loyalty, but there is also an expectation of similarity of outlook which is often not met.

Take, for instance, the Americans. They are, according to the proverb a people from whom we are divided by a common language. They talk more or less as we do; many of them originate from England; but they are different. Going to the states a couple of years ago and travelling across the Appalachians by train I arrived at length in West Virginia. The US is different: it is big. West Virginia is nothing much but forests and mountains and valleys through which roaring rivers flow, and Beckley. You have not heard of Beckley; it is a frontier town. It began with mining but now, like most American cities it goes on forever. The road is lined with parking lots behind which are vast stores, hypermarkets of one sort of another, or restaurants with large signs. Its huge extent would not be possible in this country. There they think that the land goes on forever and that its resources are inexhaustible. To under stand why the Americans are so sniffy about the Kyoto agreement on climate change you just have to go to Beckley. My confusion and frustration in talking about damage to the environment was to think that Americans think like us.They don’t.