November 2009 – For the fainthearted . . .

Selling chocolate

The complaint at the dinner table was that the school milk cartons were changing; no more would Irish pupils encounter puns about cows being so cool that they were Friesian or about them being ‘moosicians’. However cringeworthy the jokes printed on the packaging, they had obviously entered the consciousness of a generation of schoolchildren. However, there is a difference between gaining a place in someone’s consciousness and actually making them want to buy a product.

Advertisements from the 1960s and 70s remain clear in the memory, most of which created …

Sermon for Second Sunday in Advent, 6th December 2009 (Old Testament reading)

“But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?“ Malachi 3:2

Malachi describes an encounter with the divine; an encounter with something awe-inspiring and terrifying; an encounter where one’s sense of self is secondary to an overwhelming sense of the other. Malachi’s experience is altogether different from the experiences of our own times, where self comes before everything else.

If we are searching for a religious story to describe our own times, it is not to be found in the experiences of an Old …

Unravelling mysteries

Just when you think a question has been answered, another more nagging one comes along.

We moved to the village of High Ham in Somerset in February 1967. Our house was the last in a line of council houses built in 1926. Beyond our house, the road passed between open fields before reaching High Ham windmill, the only thatched windmill in England. It had stood semi-derelict for years, before being restored by the National Trust in the early 1970s.

Only this week, approaching 43 years later, did I discover from …

Sermon for Advent Sunday (Evening service on Sunday, 29th November 2009)

“May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones “ 1 Thessalonians 3:13

It’s the time of year when I once again take from the bookshelf C.S. Lewis’ novel The Great Divorce. The title comes not from the breakdown of any human marriage, but as a counterweight to William Blake’s 19th Century book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis, a lecturer in English at Oxford, …

Choosing the anthem

Being an Englishman who has attended Ireland’s three autumn rugby internationals in the past fourteen days; there were observable traits in the singing of the National Anthems. Some people sang Amhran na bhFiann but not Ireland’s Call; some people sang the latter and not the former; some people sang both; and some people sang neither.

Was there political motivation? Or was it simply a practical issue? An Ulsterman beside me said he had no objection to singing Amhran na bhFiann , but that he had never been taught it and …

Planted by the waterside

There is a planting of trees on the Milltown Road between Bright crossroads and Ballyhossett in Co Down. They are tucked into the fold of a hill and provide shelter for sheep from the neighbouring field in the wintertime. They are young trees, when I first met them the diameter of the trunks would have been no more than a few inches.

I stood and looked at them as I walked my dogs one evening in 1989; they seemed almost frail, too weak and immature to face the hardships of …