St Neots Parish Church

When I pick up the phone, I try to be polite. This is not just good manners; it’s also that I present the public face of the Church. People will judge what kind of organisation it is by the sound of the voice they hear. Commercial enterprises used to do the same. Unfortunately, very often the voice you hear these days is recorded and the information that ‘all our advisors are busy’ proves to be only too true, at least with the amount of time that it takes to speak to a real person.

People sometimes think of the different religions as ways up a mountain. Every path is different but all lead to the top. Any climbers among you may feel like responding that not all paths are equally easy, some are prettier and some lead to sheer unclimbable precipices, at least without hammering footholds into the rock. Thinking about Snowdon, the Llanberis path is the easiest, the Horseshoe the most difficult and I am sure that there are some which are plain dangerous. You may prefer a different image. How about putting all the religions into a pot and distilling the pure spirit of religion so as to leave behind the sludge of local differences and customs. Now I know a small amount about drinking whisky and less about distilling but I do know that various kinds of spirit evaporate off during the process, some of which are poisonous.

I don’t often get freebees but last weekend I was in Helsinki – we are twinned with the cathedral there. It seems a bit strange but it was their idea. It was cold and snowy and the sea was frozen. The temperature was minus nine. Fortunately the cathedral was warm.

The rudest person I ever met died about a year ago. It isn’t possible in print to repeat the things he used to say about God to me. I took his funeral. Rudeness between friends is one thing. Rudeness between strangers is another. On the whole I think that if you are going to be rude about someone’s faith you should do it face to face and, if you don’t know them, to be courteous.

Waking in the middle of the night, I turned the radio on. It was the World Service. The man was saying that in some cultures patients won’t take their medicine if they are warned of the horrors that will befall them if they don’t take it. That sounds silly, but what they need, apparently, is to be told how good they will feel if they take the medicine. Encouragement is better than warning,

I saw a girl in town last week whose jacket had on the back ‘I’m beautiful, I’m perfect…..I’m God’. (The words left out suggested that she was very fed up!) No one was falling at her feet in prayer. Cocking a snook at God is easily done these days, but the idea that we can be free from any challenge to our behaviour is very old. God, after all, is a nuisance: He places our behaviour under scrutiny and we most of us dislike authority. We long ago decided that the Church did not speak for God. The State long ago gave up attempting to speak for Him, though the level of attempted control by government increases daily.

‘Nothing comes from nothing’, as the song says. Everything has a history. Changes happens, that’s all. And when it does it may, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, seem like a new beginning. The baptism of Jesus is one such.

A Happy New Year to you all! I don’t know whether you are one of those who managed to find somewhere to drink continuously for 36 hours over the New Year. If you are, you may not yet be ready to focus on a printed page!

A merry Christmas to you all! What did we do before we had Christmas? Well, of course, we’ve always had Christmas, pretty much. To find a time when no one had Christmas in this country you have to go back to the days when most people huddled in front of fires in the cold and dark wearing nothing but animal skins. And from what I can gather, before Christmas, there was some kind of party: many peoples had some kind of celebration to mark the turn of the year when the days began to get longer for which they had a variety of names.

Christmas started, as usual, on the Sunday before Christmas with our Christingle service. We sang Away In A Manger with the church lit solely by the candles held by the children.