Christian Unity Week 2025 in Nenagh

The Nenagh Church of Ireland and Catholic parishes invite you to join them, with Christians of all traditions, in an ecumenical prayer service for Christian Unity Week, in St. Mary’s Church of Ireland, Church Road, Nenagh, on January 24th at 7pm. All are welcome!

The service will be based on materials prepared by the community of Bose, an ecumenical monastery of women and men in northern Italy. They have been distributed by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. We will listen to Martha confess her faith in Jesus, ‘Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world’. In this 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, we will affirm the faith we share by saying together the Nicene creed in its original form, shared by both the Western and Eastern churches before the ‘filioque’ schism. And the moment will be marked by sharing the light of Christ, symbolised by lighted candles, as the flame is passed on from the Paschal candle to candles held by the congregation, filling the church with light.

Deborah O’Driscoll, Minister for Catechetics in the Ódhrán Pastoral Area, comments:

“God calls us to unity, not uniformity. Each of our Christian traditions has its own gifts to share, and when we come together, we enrich one another through the love of Christ. Let us celebrate the diversity God has made and recognize that, though we may worship differently, we are one family in faith. Unity doesn’t mean thinking the same way—it means walking together in love, listening, and learning from one another as we strive to build God’s kingdom together. We are better together.”

Echoing her words, Joc Sanders from the Church of Ireland Nenagh Union says: 

“God surely loves the diversity of our Christian traditions, just as he loves the wonderful diversity of life he has made. We do not all need to worship in the same way, nor even hold exactly the same beliefs. But when we gather to pray together as Christians of different traditions, I believe the Spirit urges us to the unity Christ prays for, which is unity in diversity. We have much to learn from each other. We need each other to be salt and yeast to build God’s kingdom in the world. We truly are better together than apart.”

A version of this article was printed in the Nenagh Guardian edition for Saturday January 18 2025

Faith in uncertain times

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 14th January 2025

I don’t know about you, but I am fearful. We are living in a time of great uncertainty. More uncertain even than at the height of the Cold War, perhaps, when people of my age thought seriously about how we should respond to the threat of nuclear annihilation, which seemed all but inevitable at the time.

Today, we see narcissistic demagogues rise to power across the world. We see wars on our screens that bring obscene destruction to cities, and those who live in them. We see the benign climate we have enjoyed, the climate in which we humans and nature have flourished together for millennia, collapse into a nightmare before our eyes.

WB Yeats experienced something similar in his own time, when he wrote this in his poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

St Paul speaks to fears like this in today’s reading (1 Corinthians 1:18-31). He calls us to consider our own call to follow Christ Jesus. ‘Not many of us are wise by human standards; not many are powerful, not many are of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. God is the source of our life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.’

Paul calls us, I suggest, to personal holiness, to the holiness modelled for us by Jesus Christ. The Beatitudes he gave us show us how we should respond, humbly but without fear, to sin and evil in the world. It is no accident, I think, that they were chosen as the Gospel reading at the state funeral last Thursday of that good and faithful Christian, President Jimmy Carter.

We spoke the Beatitudes earlier. They are easy to say, aren’t they? And so very difficult to live up to. But let us do our best to model them in our lives.

And let us, in John Wesley’s words, ‘do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as ever we can.’

Ministry with Children

The boy Jesus in the Temple, Heinrich Hofmann, 1881

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 29th December 2024, the 1st Sunday of Christmas

Today’s readings are both about the presence of children in holy places.

In the OT reading (1 Samuel2:18-20,26) we heard about the child Samuel ministering before the Lord in the sanctuary at the pilgrimage shrine of Shiloh, where his parents had left him in the care of the priest Eli.

In the NT reading Luke (2:41-52) told us about the 12 year-old Jesus staying behind in the Temple at Jerusalem when his parents returned home to Nazareth. 

How did Samuel come to be with Eli in the shrine of Shiloh?

Shiloh was in what we now call the West Bank, about 30 km north of Jerusalem. After the Israelites conquered Canaan, it was one of the main centres of Israelite worship, until the Temple was built in Jerusalem. The Tabernacle which they had brought with them on their wanderings was kept there. At that time they were led by Judges, rather than Kings, and Eli was both a priest at Shiloh and a Judge.

Samuel’s parents Elkanah and Hannah made an annual trip to worship at the shrine at Shiloh. Hannah desperately wanted a child and prayed for one at the shrine, promising that if she had a boy, she would dedicate him to God. Her prayers were answered, she gave birth to Samuel, and when he was old enough, she brought him to Eli at Shiloh and left him there in his care. It is a very touching detail that when she came back on her annual trips to the shrine, she always brought him a little robe she had made.

It may seem strange to us that Hannah could give her child over to be fostered by Eli. But fostering of children was common among our ancient Irish ancestors, as it still is today among Nigerians, often causing real difficulties with immigration authorities. And posh folk still send their children off to boarding schools.

The fact is that by giving Samuel over to Eli, Hannah ensured he had a good education. He inherited Eli’s role as a Judge of Israel, the last one. And he would become a great prophet.

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us the single thing we know about Jesus’s childhood from the canonical Gospels - we know nothing else from his birth until his baptism by John.

The boy Jesus goes AWOL - absent without leave, when his parents return home from his family’s annual Passover visit to the Temple in Jerusalem. ‘When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.’

When they found him, Mary chided him, saying ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ And Jesus replies, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

Jesus was brought up as a Jew, in a devout Jewish family, attending the synagogue in Nazareth, where he would, no doubt, have become familiar with the Jewish scriptures, our OT. We believe Jesus to be the fully divine Son of God, the 2^nd person of the Trinity. But we also believe him to be fully human. 

Here we glimpse, I suggest, his humanity, as a 12 year old boy on the cusp of adolescence. He listens to and questions the teachers of his Jewish faith. He is slowly but surely feeling his way toward a mature understanding of the loving God he calls his Father. He is preparing himself for his adult ministry, in which he proclaims ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 4:17).

As he matures, ‘Jesus increases in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour’, we are told. Mary treasures all these memories in her heart. Later she must have shared them with a disciple, so that Luke could pass her story on to us.

All this gets me thinking about the place of children in our Church today.

It is our corporate responsibility to raise them in a loving community of faith, so that they can, like Jesus, ‘increase in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour’, to use Luke’s words. Our duty is to model for them what it means for the kingdom of heaven to come near.

We must never forget that our children, like ourselves, are spiritual beings. When they listen and question, as Jesus did among the teachers in the Temple, we must be attentive and answer them with complete honesty appropriate to their age. They are feeling their own way to understanding the God of love we believe in.

When the time is right, the church, with our support, offers them preparation for confirmation by wise priests and teachers. In this we can see a reflection of the 12 year-old Jesus among the teachers in the Temple.

We hope and pray that they will then feel able to affirm their faith publicly, before the bishop, in front of the congregation. But that must be their decision – no one has the right to force them to do so.

This is the ideal, but sadly we know that some children experience something quite different.

With great sorrow, we must recognise that within churches of all traditions, as in wider society, there are those who prey on and abuse children, causing them immense harm.

We all know about the child-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, which damaged so many children, and turned so many away from that Church. But none of our Christian traditions is immune. Our sister Anglican church, the Church of England, is now in turmoil about past child-abuse scandals. Senior churchmen have covered them up for years to protect themselves, their friends, or the reputation of the Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently been forced to resign for not taking timely action, and there are now calls for the Archbishop of York and others to resign too.

We can only hope and pray that in our parishes, and in the wider Church of Ireland, our Safeguarding Trust processes are sufficiently robust to ensure that children and vulnerable adults are protected, and that appropriate, timely action is taken when incidents and risks are identified. Safeguarding is immensely important, and we must take it seriously. We owe a debt to those on our parish safeguarding panel, and to those working with children who undergo regular Safeguarding training. We should keep them in our prayers.

I shall finish in prayer with today’s Collect of the Word:

God of community,

whose call is more insistent

than ties of family or blood;

may we so respect and love

those whose lives are linked with ours

that we fail not in loyalty to you,

but make choices according to your will;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen

Millstones and the Good Shepherd

 

Wall-size painting of Christ as Good Shepherd surrounded by multitudes of people, painted by Ruth Owen Pook and hanging in The Chapel of the Good Shepherd at The (Episcopal) Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Reflection for morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th December 2024

The Gospel reading set for tomorrow, Tuesday, is the much loved Parable of the Lost Sheep (Matthew 18:12-14), but to place it in context I have chosen to start the reading at the beginning of the chapter.

The disciples come to Jesus and ask ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?’ They really want heavenly greatness for themselves. But Jesus knows that wanting to be great is not the way to greatness in the kingdom of heaven. So he calls a child to him and says, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’  Humble, weak, ordinary human beings, as trusting as this child, will be greater in the kingdom than those who push themselves forward.

Jesus is concerned that disciples who seek greatness will mislead ordinary folk, and be like a stumbling block to them, causing them to fall below God’s standards, in other words to sin. So he warns them, ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.’

If we look around Christ’s church today, we see all too many cases where leaders who want to be great have become stumbling blocks to ordinary Christians like you and me. A few have done evil things, and must dread the millstone. Others, from different Christian traditions, have sought to protect their positions, their friends and their churches by covering up the evil behaviour, of others. This has seriously damaged victims, and caused many good people to turn away from the church.

As we all know, the Roman Catholic Church has been seriously damaged by clerical abuse scandals and cover-ups, here and around the world. And our own Anglican Communion is not immune. Recently we have been shocked to learn of the appalling abuse of young men by John Smyth, a Reader in the Church of England. Senior clergy and leaders covered it up for many years, enabling him to move to Zimbabwe, and then South Africa, to continue his abuse. The Church of England is in turmoil. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been forced to resign for not taking timely action, and there are calls for other resignations.

We can only hope and pray that in the Church of Ireland our Safeguarding Trust processes are robust enough to prevent anything similar here.

Christian leaders of all traditions must beware of the dangers Jesus himself warned of, and choose the path of humility, the child-like humility of someone who knows the overwhelming power of God’s fatherly love for all his creatures. They must be open to give an account of themselves.

But what of the little, ordinary Christians? Jesus goes on to reassure us with his Parable of the Lost Sheep. He is our true and faithful shepherd. He does not rest until he has found any of us who is lost. And if he finds us, he rejoices, more than he rejoices over those that never went astray. When we see church leaders misbehaving, we should take comfort in this: ‘It is not the will of (our) Father in heaven that (even) one of these little ones should be lost.’

 

Make straight the Way

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 8th December 2024, the 2nd of Advent Year C

As I dodge the potholes on North Tipperary boreens, I often pray that the County Council would take to heart the words of Isaiah we’ve just heard Luke quote in his Gospel:

"Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;”

Joking aside, today I want to focus on John the son of Zechariah, the subject of today’s gospel reading (Luke 3:1-6). He is the person we familiarly call John the Baptist. But Orthodox Christians call him John the Forerunner, which is quite as it should be, because the gospel writers and the early church saw him as the forerunner of the Messiah, foretold by Old Testament prophets including Isaiah.

There are 3 questions I shall try to answer:

1.                        Who was this John?

2.                        What was his teaching? and

3.                        How is it relevant for us today?

So, firstly, what do we know about John the son of Zechariah?

Quite a bit, in fact - and not just from the Gospels. Josephus the 1^st Cent Jewish historian is an independent source, who says more about John than he does about Jesus. John was a real person, not just an invented character in the gospel story. Notice how firmly Luke places John in his historical context.

Within the gospels, Luke tells us the most. He weaves the story of John’s birth in with that of Jesus. At the very beginning of his gospel, he tells us about John’s parents, a priest called Zechariah and Elizabeth his wife: both good, pious people, but getting on in years and childless. The angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah to tell him that Elizabeth will bear a son to be named John, who will be a great spiritual leader. Zechariah doesn’t believe Gabriel and is struck dumb, but Elizabeth does indeed conceive.

Now, Elizabeth is a relative of Mary the mother of Jesus. Six months later, after Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she will give birth to Jesus, Mary rushes off to visit Elizabeth. When Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice, the baby John leaps for joy in her womb, and Mary responds in the words of the canticle we know as the Magnificat.

In due course, Elizabeth bears her son, whom Elizabeth and Zechariah duly name John. Zechariah’s speech returns, and he gives thanks in the beautiful canticle we know as the Benedictus, which we used as our psalm today. It echoes the OT prophesies:

And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest,

for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation unto his people,

for the remission of their sins.

All 4 of the gospel writers tell us how John, now grown up, goes out into the barren desert country by the Jordan. There he called on the crowds who followed him to repent, to change their ways, and baptised them as a sign of their repentance. The background to all this was a great popular religious revival: many people were convinced that the Messiah of prophesy was about to appear, and they were urgently looking for signs that this was so. As we all know, Jesus himself went to John to be baptised, and John recognised him - not surprisingly since they were cousins.

John was just as blunt and bold a preacher as any of the Old Testament prophets before him, always ready to speak truth to power. He was bound to run into trouble with the authorities. And he did: he upset Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch or King of Galilee, who ordered him to be arrested, and later beheaded. Josephus says Herod had John killed ‘to prevent any mischief he might cause’.

Let’s now turn to examine John the Baptist’s teaching.

In today’s gospel passage, Luke (3:1-6) says that John ‘proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. He goes on to outline John’s teaching. Three points stand out in it for me:

1^st, all the gospel writers are clear that John never claims to be the Messiah, but believes himself to be the forerunner. Luke puts these words in his mouth: ‘I baptise you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming: I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’.

2^nd, John is what we call a hellfire preacher. Luke quotes him saying: ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. () Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire’. John seeks to shock the crowds into repentance by terrifying them with the consequences if they don’t. Then John seals their repentance by immersing them in water to symbolise that they are washed clean of sin. His preaching must have been very effective, judging by the crowds he gathered.

3^rd, John’s message is about much more than just hell fire. He calls for social justice. Quoting Luke again, he says: ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise’. And he calls everybody, even tax collectors and soldiers, to do whatever work they do fairly, and not to extort more than their due. No price gouging!

So what relevance does John the Baptist and his teaching have for us today?

Luke saw John the Baptist as the hinge on which salvation history turns, the forerunner promised by the prophets, making straight the way for Jesus the Messiah. 

It is difficult for us to see the world as Luke and his contemporaries did, through the prism of scriptural prophecy. And I for one deeply distrust fundamentalists who see it that way today. But that world view empowered the early church to respond to Jesus’s message, no matter what the cost. Without it, the church would probably not have survived, and we would not be Christians today. The mysterious working of the Holy Spirit through prophecy is something we should celebrate, I suggest.

Few Christian preachers nowadays stir up hellfire in their sermons, as they once did - and not so very long ago. We have become uncomfortable with the idea of the wrath of God. Instead it is ecologists and scientists who have been leading denunciations of our foolish and wicked trashing of this beautiful, God-given planet from secular pulpits.

Now more and more people are hearing the call to protect our planet, and starting to act upon it. Christians are to the forefront. Our Anglican Communion has adopted as the 5^th mark of mission, ‘to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth’. Pope Francis has given us a clarion call in his encyclical Laudato ‘Si. Among the Eastern Orthodox, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has been leading from the front to promote ecology and environmental protection. Here in Ireland, Eco Congregation Ireland is spearheading the movement.

I am not a prophet – certainly not in my own country and parish! But I prophesy this: we will hear more and more John-like hellfire preaching from our Christian pulpits, as the twin ecological catastrophes of climate change and bio-diversity loss intensify. Why? Because we should be terrified of the wrath to come predicted by the scientists. That should bring us to repentance. And we should seal that repentance by mending our ways!

And as we mend our ways, we must also try to live out John’s social gospel, to share the good things we have received with our neighbours of every faith and race, at home and abroad. Mé féin is a road to perdition in our shrinking, globalised world. We must do so because this is not only the gospel of John, but the Gospel of Jesus, who empowers us by baptism not with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire!

I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word for today

Almighty God,
who sent your servant John the Baptist
to prepare your people to welcome the Messiah,
inspire us, the ministers and stewards of your truth,
to turn our disobedient hearts to you,
that when the Christ shall come again to be our judge,
we may stand with confidence before his glory;
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen

What are we looking forward to?

Joc Writes, in Grapevine December/January 2024/5

Christmas, John Betjeman, 1954

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true?  And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ?  For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

December is a month for looking forward, in expectation. But what are we looking forward to?

As I write, there are 4 weeks before the winter solstice, and 32 days before Christmas. You will likely read this around the 1st December, the 1st Sunday of Advent this year. That is also the start of a new Church year, liturgical Year C, when most of our Gospel readings will be from Luke. 

After the winter solstice, the days will become longer, but it will take a while before we begin to see the stretch in the evenings we so look forward to.

And then there is Christmas. We need to distinguish between the secular and the Christian festivals of Christmas. The secular Christmas is all about exchanging gifts and feasting with friends and families. It is not in any real sense Christian at all. It is a continuation of the ancient pagan festivals of Yule in the Germanic world, Meán Geimhridh in the Celtic, a very human celebration of life, warmth and relationships at the darkest time of the year in mid-winter. No wonder, in an increasingly post-Christian world, some now call it Winterval. But Christians should surely not behave like the Grinch, saying ‘Bah, humbug’ about this secular Christmas, as the 17th century puritans did when they tried to ban it. For most of us it is a time of joy as we renew relationships, and recall Christmases past together, though for some it will be a time of sadness, because of difficult memories or straitened circumstances. 

When I was a child, the secular Christmas traditions were Victorian, probably no more than 100 years old, greatly influenced by Charles Dickens’ book ‘A Christmas Carol. We began to look forward to Christmas at the start of Advent. My brother and I took turns opening the windows in the Advent calendar to reveal little pictures. We were asked what presents we hoped Father Christmas would bring. We sent off cards, and parcels with presents, to faraway family and friends. A few weeks later, singers started to go round the houses singing carols, and perhaps were offered a drink or a mince-pie. We made Christmas decorations at home from strips of coloured paper. We waited expectantly for the Christmas turkey to arrive by post, sent by my grandmother. Decorating the house would wait until the week before Christmas, when holly and ivy and the Christmas tree would be brought in, to last until 12th Night, Epiphany. Our Christmas feast was on Stephen’s Day, since Christmas Day was a working day for my father, a priest.

Things are different now. Christmas is much more commercial. As soon as Halloween is past, we are deluged with Christmas adverts, and the shops are decorated for Christmas. The Advent calendar contains sweets or toys. The decorations go up weeks before Christmas and are gone long before Twelfth Night. Father Christmas has turned into Santa. And turkeys no longer arrive by post. But I’m sure we will all plan to celebrate a secular Christmas with family and friends again this year, mixing old family traditions with the new, as is surely right. 

But as Christians, during Advent, we also look forward to a Christian Christmas. We prepare to celebrate the birth of our incarnate God, taking flesh as a helpless child 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem. And at the same time we look forward to his second coming, the fulfilment of his kingdom, and the heavenly banquet. 

John Betjeman, a devout Anglican, got it right in his lovely poem.

Remembering

The white poppy of the Peace Pledge Union (www.ppu.org.uk)

A reflection on Remembance for morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on 12th November 2024

Here in the Northern hemisphere, November is an in between month. The joys of gathering in the harvest and celebrating its bounty are only a memory now. The leaves have mostly fallen, tender plants have collapsed, and the days are getting short. At twilight, as darkness falls, we light fires to warm us. We hope that there will be enough to keep us warm and fed through the cold and dark of winter. But it is too soon to look forward to lengthening days and the return of growth. Now is a time of reflection and remembering.

It is not an accident, I think, that the Church focuses on remembering in November. 

At the start of the month we celebrated the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. We remembered and gave thanks for those who have been as saints to us, pointing us along the Way of Christ, and those we love but see no longer.

Last Sunday, we marked as Remembrance Sunday. We remembered those on all sides, men, women and children, service personnel and civilians, who have suffered and died in the wars and conflicts of the last century, in our own times, right up to today. 

It is surely right that we should remember and mourn them, and in particular our own dead. It is powerfully symbolic to do so at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the exact time of the armistice which ended WW1, which so many vowed to be the ‘war to end war’. But we must never glorify our dead as offering a blood sacrifice for our nation. There is no such thing as a holy war. Jesus commands us to love our neighbours as ourselves. Our human species has been stained through the ages by a disposition to hate others not like us, to make enemies of them, to kill and destroy them in war, rather than treat them as neighbours we must love. Surely this disposition is a kind of original sin, something we need to guard against and repent.

I am conflicted by red poppies as a symbol of remembrance. Earl Haig began the poppy day appeal to raise money to support service men and women whose lives had been shattered in WW1, and the money it raises is still used for that good purpose. I remember as a child how my father wore a red poppy as he led remembrance commemorations alongside other veterans, as they silently mourned their fallen comrades, and remembered the dreadful things they had seen and been a part of. But I am dismayed at how the red poppy has come to be used as a symbol of British military glory, so that public figures who do not wear it are attacked for being unpatriotic, traitors even. I choose to wear the white poppy of the Peace Pledge Union instead, as a symbol of repentance, while I also contribute to the poppy day appeal.

For the rest of November, I suggest we should continue remembering. 

We should allow our spirits to be lifted by happy memories of the blessings we have received, and the good times we have had this year. The burgeoning growth of spring. The beauty of summer flowers. The bounty of autumn’s harvest. The holidays we returned refreshed from. The meals shared with friends and family. 

We should also remember the changes we have seen over the years. Fewer people live in poverty than when I was a child. People here in Ireland live longer, healthier lives. But we can also see the damage being done to the world around us, fewer insects, wild plants and birds, and increasingly frequent and intense droughts, floods and wildfires around the world. We must give thanks for the good, and mourn the bad. 

Then, when Advent arrives in December, when we look forward to Christ incarnate at Christmas, and the lengthening days after the winter solstice, we can start to consider our New Year resolutions, what we ought to do to make the world next year more like the kingdom of heaven.