Of course, today, in our advanced western society the majority of children are born into the clinically sterilised, brightly lit atmosphere of a hospital filled with expert medics, the full might of technology and an extensive armoury of effective drugs. The image of the defenceless babe is now viewed through a twist of tubes and the bubble of an incubator. The essence of its vulnerability, its exposure to the elemental and the aggressive, is diminished.

However, there are those in our homes, villages and country who do still seem to be terribly vulnerable and treated with extreme caution by much of society. They are the children and adults who have been designated as ‘disabled’, differently-abled, having additional needs, and they are too often, even now, segregated from the rest of us, squirrelled away in special institutions. A significant proportion of our society still treats these people as having a half-life, as not being fully part of our world.

Henri Nouwen, the Christian priest and spiritual writer, spent a significant proportion of his life in a community of severely developed adults. They were his everyday companions in his house. In sharing the daily round and common task with them he came to appreciate not just the difficulty of their lives – not being able to vocalise, hear or carry out simple personal tasks, prone to seizures, with weakened immune systems or partially functioning organs – but also their supreme value. The rhythm of the house allowed for no rush, time was not allowed to dominate, the busyness of business had no place inside its walls. And in his companions he found a stillness, an acceptance, an unconditional outpouring of love that, combined with their personal suffering and shunning by society, took him right back to Christ – the mewling babe, the travelling teacher, the crucified Messiah. In his housemates Nouwen discerned the saints of the age, the ones most able to put aside the hurly burly and concentrate on the essentials; the ones, he suspected, who were both most like Jesus and most in touch with God.

As the effects of recession chill our Christmas we would do well to remember these vulnerable members of our community, not only learning from their lives of waiting and watching but also guarding against the tendency of austerity to marginalise them further. For it may well be that with those whom we label ‘disabled’ we will find the Holy One, Emmanuel, God-with-us dwelling in our midst.

Editorial Barrow Gurney and Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, December 2011

Richard Greatrex

I recently received an electricity bill together with an annual review of consumption and a revision to the direct debit amount. On checking this I was surprised to note that despite the fact that there was a credit balance on the account, it was being recommended that the direct debit should be increased. This didn’t seem to make sense, so I endeavoured to check their calculations. So many units at one rate, so many at another, standing charge (again two different rates), discount for paying by direct debit, VAT refund (?), climate change levy and finally VAT at 5%. Eventually I surrendered, as it all seemed so complicated or is this just an age thing? Do you understand the new ‘simplified’ telephone bills for example or mobile phone tariffs?

The world of finance has become so complex that even many financiers seem to struggle to understand some of the more ‘sophisticated’ products and as for Income Tax, need I say more. Even the world of sport has not escaped complication, the awarding of points and bonus points at the rugby world cup is a case in point and who really understands the ‘Duckworth/Lewis’ method of assessing targets in a rain affected one day cricket match.

I realise that this is probably beginning to sound like the rant of ‘a grumpy old man’, but my point is that life in general is becoming ever more complex and we are in danger of losing sight of the basics. Over complication leads to mistrust and unless we can simplify things so that they can be more easily understood this will only get worse.

Let’s see if we can get back to a simpler life, loving and caring for one another as Jesus taught us. This has to be the way forward.

Richard Burningham

Editorial, Barrow Gurney and Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, November 2011

We have had opportunity to realise the joys and blessings of democracy, of freedom, of marriage, of friends and neighbours. We have also just witnessed a possible major upturn in the global fight against terrorism. Against this back drop however much of the world must nevertheless be experiencing the same sentiments as that chronicler; parts of the world still reeling from recent horrendous events caused by man – terrorism, war – and equally horrendous acts of nature – volcanoes, tsunamis, drought, flooding. And on top of all that, projecting forward, environmental issues that are so frightening that it seems best not to think about them.

But God and hope are synonymous and every day, if we look, cannot we all see something to give us hope? Yes we can. Each day I can find something that tells me that there is a greater plan than any of us can understand. It is spring and I see the new green grass coming through the mud in the chewed up fields – so there will be hay (although as I write this, some rain would help!); I see the green shoots and buds on trees and fruit bushes – so there will be food; I see the birds collect, for their nests, little bits of fur from where the kittens have had a play fight – so there will be new life. In the park, I see a young mum drag her toddler with his juice carton past the rubbish bin over to the recycling bin; on the station concourse I see a young disabled man walk painfully across, out of his way, to a lady collecting for victims of the latest disaster. So people do care about each other and the environment and the future.

Christ is not sleeping; He has given us hope, manifest in everyday actions and occurrences as well as in His life and His resurrection. At this time of the year we also particularly reflect on His ascension into heaven and celebrate at Whitsun/Pentecost the foundation of the Christian Church and the hope, comfort and joy that that brings to so many.

Susan Bews

Editorial, Barrow Gurney & Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, June 2011

You only have to look at our newspapers to see this desire in full flood. The press is constantly asking ‘why?’, ‘how?’, ‘who?’ and ‘when?’, craving a practical application for every piece of research and someone to blame for everything that doesn’t go according to plan. In this worldview Christians tend to be portrayed as holding an outmoded set of answers to the ‘big’ questions; churches, unable to satisfy the modern hunger for certainty, are in danger of becoming empty chambers with no immediate connection to the pragmatism of daily living.

Yet could it be that the Church is called not to provide answers so much as to open up yet more questions? Far from being a neat packaging of comforting answers perhaps faith is about meeting the transcendent in the complexity and vastness of the universe, in the preciousness of creation and the vulnerability of Love.

The season of Lent is a journey into a mystery that defies resolution. The death of God in Christ on the Cross is an outpouring of love that is visceral in its physicality and almost unbearable in its tenderness. We will never be able to isolate completely why or how Christ died for our sins, just as we can never fully explain how the bread and wine of Communion becomes Christ dwelling among us and in us. If we did then all meaning of such actions and symbols would be lost like lifeless butterflies pinned to a board.

Lent is also traditionally a time of giving things up. Many of us find it hard to put aside the temptations of chocolate, biscuits and alcohol. The result often seems to be that we feel deprived with no discernible benefit to ourselves or anyone else. Part of this giving up is about making space to enable our spirits to grow. Perhaps this year we should try a different tack. Instead of denying ourselves physical comforts we might aim to relinquish our restless quest for answers and immerse ourselves in the mystery of God made man who died for the love of us. Then we might find fresh questions arising, ones which reach deeper into the still centrepoint of our existence and give new shape and colour to our lives.

Richard Greatrex

Editorial Barrow Gurney and Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, March 2011

This should be the month when we are still at some risk of snow and ice and all those annual hold-ups; but we had those in December.  Conversely, this should also be the month when the first snow-drops push their pale green way up through the chilly earth and begin to announce the coming of spring.  But I don’t know; typing this at the beginning of January, I’m reluctant to expect anything expected!

Back in December, the papers, and much of our conversation, were full of complaint about “unprepared Britain”; but if we look around the world, Scandinavia, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, none of us were as prepared as we would have needed to be if we were going to guarantee a completely undisturbed life.

In the end we muddled through.  Some people had disrupted holidays, some people had longer away than they had expected.  But it is the nature of humanity to adapt; and we adapted.

We’re asking a lot of the world, the physical world, to be as flexible.  It seems – and no disrespect to those of you who find the concept of Global Warming at the best unproven – but it seems that something is afoot.  Whether it’s a periodic shift, or a novel change, in terms of the weather this has been a dramatic December and January, almost all over the world.

In Genesis 8, verse 22, we can read, “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”  And we perhaps re-assure ourselves too much by that reading, forgetting that it represents a promise by God to Noah, and follows the story of the destruction of the earth by the flood!  It seems that it’s happened before, at the end of the last ice-age, and it might well have been due to happen again “all by itself”.  But we can’t be sure; “nobody expects the Spanish inquisition”, and it might in fact be all our fault.

At the very least, I don’t think we’re helping.  I know the re-cycling’s tedious at times, and it’s wasteful if you draw clean hot water to wash out your yoghurt pots before you put them in the bin (and yeuchy if you don’t rinse them!), but it really does help. And, if you haven’t done so already, let your late resolution be “this February, I shall start a compost heap”!  You can buy a very convenient outdoor Compost bin by phone from North Somerset “Streets and open spaces” on 01934 888 802.  £15 delivered; a snip!  I’m sure a neighbour with a well established one will give you some “culture” to start you off.

Here’s hoping that, either way, this finds you “in the green”.

Peter Crawford

Editorial, Barrow Gurney and Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, February 2011

Sadly the majority of humankind do not appear to understand the seriousness of the situation. Neither do they wish to know the ecology that governs all life on this planet. We humans seem to think we are a special and superior animal to which the laws of nature do not apply. Unless this stops and every effort is made to reverse our detachment from the real world, mass extinction will occur. So let us start today. Try making your garden environmentally friendly. The more and larger plants you grow the more oxygen we all will have. Encourage creepy crawlies to help increase biodiversity. Put up bat boxes as well as those for birds. Help towards rebalancing native ecology by discouraging aliens like Grey squirrels, a seriously destructive introduction to this country. If there are just two of you in the house and you have a bus pass you only really need one car. None of these actions are hard and each will do a little bit to help improve the vital natural environment.

In the word of the meerkat insurance advert — simples!

Brian Mayled

Editorial Barrow Gurney & Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, January 2011

Which might be why reading ‘and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ at the Midnight Service never fails to send a shiver through my bones. For the simplicity of those few words encapsulates the whole story of the seismic conjunction between the ineffable and the mortal. It tells of an unfathomable, unshakeable love of the Creator for his creation, the Father for his children. Despite all the grief, mess and disorder which beset the earth, these words – and their reality in the form of an infant in a stable − declare an almost incomprehensible truth: God so loves the world that he wants to be one with it.

Christmas, then, is a huge celebration, not just of the passion and constancy of God’s love but of the wonder and beauty of creation. Go out this Christmas and take a closer look at the miracle of this world – care for it, weep for it, explore it, get lost in it but, above all, enjoy it.

Richard Greatrex

Editorial, Barrow Gurney & Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, December 2010

As we now head into late autumn and winter most of us will, hopefully, have memories of our holiday in 2010, whether it was a seaside holiday with the children, lazing on a beach, visiting another country and absorbing a different culture while endeavouring to cram as much as possible into a limited time, enjoying fresh air and outdoor pursuits, activity holidays or simply ‘chilling out’ with family and friends.

These memories will for the most part be happy ones but if the weather was particularly bad and has dampened these memories, then spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourself who for one reason or another were unable to take a holiday. Limited financial resources, illness or caring full time for another may have prevented them from being able to take a break away from their cares, where a rest really would have been a change!

Richard Burningham

Editorial, Barrow Gurney and Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, November 2010

For many the beginning of a new term was full of exciting possibilities; for others it was replete with dark fears. Everyone, though, was offered a chance to start again, to be a new person in a new class or school and to erase some of the mistakes of the past year.

The Christian calendar is full of new beginnings: the season of Advent, the start of the church year serves as a time of preparation for the new relationship which God establishes with creation at Christmas through the birth of his Son, Jesus; Lent and Easter invite us to repent or ‘turn again’ to Jesus who erases our offences and atones for the mistakes we have all made. Each Sunday our worship restores our relationships with God and each other. Near the opening of the Sunday Communion service we confess everything we have done, or not done, that may have messed up our own or others’ lives, making us feel cut off from God; the Absolution which follows is a sign that God not only longs to forgive us and welcomes us back to him, but commissions us to do the same in the world – to wipe the slate clean and offer one another a chance to grow into a ‘new creation’.

Starting again, fresh, with a clean slate, is a wonderful opportunity for all of us. But it isn’t easy to deal with all the emotional, cultural and spiritual ‘baggage’ we carry around inside us, weighing us down and sapping our energy. Forgiving ourselves is as important as being able to forgive others; to forgive ourselves might mean to stop demanding that our past should have been different from how it actually turned out to be. If we can do that, then perhaps we can start our new term, our new day, our new week with excitement rather than fear and with a tiny inkling of the boundless love of God who is continually offering us the opportunity to begin again.

Richard Greatrex

Editorial, Barrow Gurney and Flax Bourton Parish Magazine

September 2010

In her book ‘The Hiding Place’, Dutch Holocaust survivor, Corrie Ten Boom, recounts her time in Ravensbruck, one of the worst concentration camps in Germany.  Conditions in the camp were appalling – insufficient food, cramped sleeping accommodation and virtually no medical facilities.  They also had to endure a thick infestation of fleas in the straw they were to sleep on.

Corrie turned to her sister, Betsie and questioned how they could possibly live in such a place.  Betsie began to pray and soon the answer came to her.  They had read it in the Bible that morning that they should “Give thanks in all circumstances”.  Betsie therefore proposed that they should thank God for the fleas!  Corrie’s response was to question her sister’s thinking; how could they possibly thank God for fleas?

Corrie and Betsie had smuggled a Bible into the camp which was shared with many others.  Normally these barracks would be subject to surprise inspections where their precious Bible that brought so much light and strength would normally have been seized.  Miraculously, they never had such inspections.  Much later they found out it was because their barracks were flea infested that the guards did not enter.  The fleas had provided protection.  Upon learning this, Corrie very humbly knelt and truly thanked God for the fleas!

Giving thanks is more than just being grateful for the good things in life and for when things go according to plan.  It is an attitude of mind that makes the best of all circumstances.  Even if we find it hard or impossible to thank God for some specific thing in our lives we can still give thanks, not “for” every circumstance but “in” every circumstance.  We may not see clearly why it is we are going through a particular ordeal but, as with Corrie Ten Boom, we may learn that the very “fleas” that we saw as only a plague to our lives are the very things that allow God to bless us with the things we need most.

Jos Moule

Editorial, Barrow Gurney & Flax Bourton Parish Magazine, August 2010