John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Prepare in the wilderness a road for God

A voice cries out,

'Prepare in the wilderness

a road for God'

Isaiah 40.3

Working through advent with Ruth Burgess' Wild Goose book Hear My Cry. The Isaiah reading makes me think again about roads, which were for quite some time the one-and-only theme for me (see my other blog Walking the M62). The theme of preparation: recalling all those struggling men who hacked out large corridors of Britain in the push for motorways in the 1960s and 70s, their story captured poignantly in Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballad, Song of a Road, with its descriptive track titles including We Needed a Way Cut Through the Land, Sixty Tons of Steel, What Made You Come into This Game?, Come All You Gallant Drivers and I'm a Roving Rambler. Preparation is a rough, rugged, difficult task, and it relates well to my Advent prayer life at present. But the other trigger-point is thinking about the visionaries of the 1920s and 30s corporations who created the great out-of-town estates, neat houses with gardens front and back, tree-lined avenues, space for air and play - new homes for those previously crammed into inner-city slums (see eg my paper Towards an Urban Theology of Land). Preparation follows vision; results in something better. An advent theme with promise....

 

In search of leadership in a time of darkness

As we make our act of remembrance today we do so in a society and a world which needs good leaders. People who will not shrink from difficult decisions in government and economics, and conflict, who will embrace the realities, grapple with the complexities, act on conviction - people of all generations who can help and influence others along the way. Leaders like you and me.

Especially we need leaders (parents, grandparents, friends, neighbours) who can teach deep values to others, especially the young, who may be in the dark about such things: in a recently-published book on just war, the former defence advisor and leading public Christian David Fisher argues (along with General Lord Dannatt) that many modern soldiers have had little prior education in religion or morality: he says that "It was striking how Lynndie England, one of the participants in the Abu Ghraib abuses, claimed in her defence that she had assumed the abusive practices were acceptable because no one had told her otherwise."

In search of leadership in a time of darkness - my offering for Remembrance Sunday's services, with the Parable of the Talents as a conversation-starter on the subject of leadership. The quote comes from a book review in the Church Times this week, of David Fisher, Morality and War: Can war be just in the twenty-first century?.

In search of love in the face of Apocalypse

This is a time of red skies and uncontrolled fires; this is a time when the dead are recalled, whose souls are alive to us again in the potent atmosphere of remembrance. This is a time of All Saint's, All Souls', of Halloween, of Bonfire Night, of Remembrance Day, when we set fires to protest at the growing darkness of winter, when the red poppies we wear throb with the pain of history, when we are full of the sense that the end of the year is nigh.

And this is an apocalyptic time; this is a time when people at large, the whole world over, see, in the stormy skies and violent tides of contemporary disasters, signs of the end of time; where it is not uncommon to hear talk of apocalypse in the doomsday scenarios of politicians, filmmakers, terrorists and ecologists.

So the question is, how are we to live in an age of apocalypse? Inspired by the Fortean Times cover article on the Tate Britain John Martin exhibition, my talk today: In search of love in the face of Apocalypse.