St Neots Parish Church

So the Catholic Church has lost its argument over gay adoptions. I can’t help feeling that there is a connection between that decision and the desire of government not to allow Muslims exemptions from conformity to British standards and attitudes. From encouraging diversity, they now want to encourage equality and inclusion.

If only we could all agree! This week is kept as the week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We had a service all together with the Methodists. The view was expressed that we should be so much stronger if we all worked together. I am sure we should…if we all worked together. The trouble is deciding on whose terms we should agree. This applies to attitudes towards war, divorce, homosexual practice, the services we use, the robes we wear and the hymns we sing. As for which building we close in order to be together and how we alter it, words fail me!

After a big event we sometimes feel a sense of anticlimax. Twelfth night has past and the Christmas decorations are down. Those sentimental souls who began the new year with resolutions may have already found them either impossible of fulfillment or that the energy required to keep them is lacking.

Last Wednesday morning there was a sound like a pistol shot and a huge bough of our cedar tree crashed to the earth. Being an evergreen its pine needles had been caught by the wild winds just once too often. I hope we shall not lose it.

The town Christmas lights are gone; only those on the bridge remain to be taken down. The rain continues to fall. Our pockets are mostly empty. My credit card bill came on Tuesday. After the celebrations comes the anti-climax. And if we made any New Year resolutions they may be proving hard to keep.

As we contemplate the execution of a dictator, all too gruesomely shown to us, and the violence which continues in Iraq, it may make sense for us think about the contribution that religion makes to peace and happiness. Any pub conversation will bring forward someone who says that religion is the cause of all wars. It’s no good my saying that Hitler was no Christian – he valued art more than people! Or that the other monsters, Stalin, and Pol Pot (the man from Cambodia) were devout atheists; that Winston Churchill, who authorised the bombing raid on Dresden, was no Christian either. It’s no good my saying that there is nothing in the New Testament that allows for, much less authorises, war.

Our church is a very solid and imposing structure. Because it has been here for hundreds of years it may seem to be utterly permanent. It may even seem threatening to some people as it towers over us – a symbol of a powerful and impersonal God. I wonder whether that was the reason why, on Christmas night, someone threw several pieces of broken gravestone at our windows. One bounced off the guard wire but two more smashed the leaded windows. Ironically, it coincided with the feast of Stephen, who was stoned to death!

From time to time, we are encouraged to believe that the end of all things is nigh. The threats are various: some are medical, like BSE and bird flu; some are political like nuclear war; some are more all-consuming, like global warming.

This season is full of stories, some of them more believable than others; there is Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, whose feast day was yesterday, who came from Myra in Turkey (Oh yes he did!) who gave money to three needy children; there is his twin brother, Father Christmas, who apparently lives at the north pole (Ho!Ho!) . There is St. Lucy, whose name means ‘light’, a virgin martyr from Syracuse whose feast day next week is celebrated in Scandinavia.

It has been an amazingly warm autumn; but as the clocks go back we find ourselves suddenly in the gloom as we go home from work. Even if it is not yet cold, it isdark. Our spirits are dampened at this season; getting up in the morning is more difficult; work is even less attractive.