Predictions for 2014

Archbishop Cranmer, the famous blogger has predicted 2014  like this:

• The UK will remain a full and compliant member of the EU 
• UKIP will do very, very well in the Euro Elections  
• There will be wars and rumours of war (especially in the Middle East).
• Some Christians will leave the Middle East. 
• The eurozone will experience further turbulence (but the moon won’t turn red). 
• The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby will receive some bad press from The Times.
• The Telegraph will prophesy division within the Church of England.
• Pope Francis will satisfy some and disappoint others.
• Scotland will vote 'No' in their referendum for independence.
• Alex Salmond will declare "victory" for having secured further powers from Westminster.  
• Ed Miliband will announce some new policies.
• Some brave British troops will sadly die in Afghanistan.  
• There will be a Royal engagement (for a wedding, that is; not to attend a function). 
• Taxes will rise and people will die.
• Some politicians will receive knighthoods.
• So will some political donors.  
• Jesus will not return, and the Government will remain upon David Cameron's shoulder.

To this I would add this:

• Carers will go on caring and workers will go on working
• Everyone will be very glad they were not alive in 1914, about which scores of TV programmes will be transmitted.
• More people will get so entirely worn out or disillusioned with broken families, illness, low incomes, the coldness of humanism, "hard" and "celebrity" personalities that they will start thinking about finding God first hand through unconditional surrender to Christ and throwing their lot in with (friendly) committed believers.
• The Trussell Trust will set up more food banks even in rich towns, to feed the poor
• Fuel bills will continue to rise and more people will switch their heating on only in the evenings.
• People with ME will continue to cling on, largely disbelieved, but incredibly valiant and "real". Some of them will draw their strength from a trustworthy God who can lead them to things that help them get better.  I will try to compile my "ME recipe book" for publication.
• Believers and martyrs, internationally, will go to Heaven and meet God, receiving their reward
• The Gospel and Scriptures will continue to spread with the aim of reaching the whole world, which is prophetically the event to trigger the Second Coming of Jesus, who many are already realising is the "only solution" and already desperately needed.
• The Greats (Classics) will be rediscovered for their rationality by the few, combined by still fewer searchers finding Christian truth (Classics and Christianity being the traditional English "mix")
• More people will pray for a great preacher of the true Gospel to appear.
• Belusconi will avoid prison and the political right will reshape itself, while more and more Italians think about emigrating
• Prince Charles will gain more popularity, for championing Christians in the Middle East
• Sentieri Antici Valdesi will grow
• There will be an archeological discovery which does not contradict the Bible 

Why must I write thank you letters?

Expressing gratitude is one of the fundamental marks of a civilised person, even in the modern world. If you fail to thank even a parent or spouse for a Christmas gift, you are transgressing not just social rules, but the deepest bonds of civilised life. This is a serious matter because people gain impressions of others by their manners and letters, even in families.

Note well: if you do not thank someone, the sender will not know you received it and will think it was lost in the post. Some will ask you whether you received it and then you will prove that you did not thank them for it, or value it.

To use or cash a gift before you have thanked someone for it is a kind of insult. Would you like to send a gift that is used or cashed without anyone thanking you for it? Basically this behaviour says “I have got this stuff, but I do not care where it came from, or who made sacrifices to give it to me”. This behaviour marks a person out as both selfish and self-centred. 

Sadly, today, some people do not express the gratitude and gifts that they receive at all, or for the support and love they receive from those around them even using social media or email.  Using social media to thank someone for a gift is not really acceptable. But if you cannot write, need to save money because you are out of work, you are travelling or working night shifts, it is fine. At least, an email shows you received the gift and you were grateful.

In relation to Christmas gifts, you run the risk of not receiving any more, if you do not thank the giver. From a purely selfish point of view, you are also weakening the natural bonds of your family and society that one day you may need more than you do now. Someone who has no regard for their family members lacks moral feeling and the ancients would regard such a person as "outside the pale"or "a barbarian". Scripture is heavy in its demands on our duties towards those who support us, such as parents. Hence the more eloquently, rapidly and elegantly thanks is expressed, the more others think of one’s manners, maturity and character. You can “set yourself apart” in the way you write. You should even thank those you do not want much to do with!

If you fail to sit down to write a letter in return for a gift that someone has spent time thinking about, money buying and precious minutes wrapping up and posting off, there is something lacking in your character. As well as lack of gratitude, it denotes, lack of reliability, lack of self discipline and many of the other qualities people need to hold down a job in the modern competitive world. Most of all it can denote a person who has no regard for the “oil” that moves the wheels of life.

If someone has made the gift themselves, it is even more precious. If the person has little or no money and has still given you a gift, then thank them more profusely to show your sensitivity to their situation even if you will not use it, or will give it away.

Some rules of thumb on when to write a thank you letter

• if someone has been in the room when you opened the gift and you expressed your thanks to them face to face in a sincere way, you can consider whether a thank you letter is appropriate. This particularly pertains to the gift of a bottle of wine or perishable food. One rule of thumb is whether you think they will write to you. If you think they will you should write to them.
• if you do not live with the person, say they are in an elderly people’s home, it would be polite to write anyway on nice note paper to brighten their day.
• if you rarely see a relative or friend who gives you a gift at Christmas, make the thank you letter a mark of your ongoing connectedness with them. Otherwise, you will prove yourself to want nothing more to do with them and also prove that you are a thoroughly ungrateful, even rude, person!
• sit down as soon as possible after Christmas and just do it. Allowances will be made for people such as mothers or women who are busy at this time of year until about 6 January at the latest. After that is too late to write. Instead, you should call and express apologies. But even then, a phone call will not substitute for a handwritten letter.

How to write a Thank you letter

• use your best notelets or best quality notepaper 
• use a black or blue fountain pen, if you have one 
• aim to write at least two sides in medium sized handwriting. Your letters need be an essay or dissertation, but a letter handwritten is infinitely better than email or printed off letters. It shows courtesy.
• hand write the envelope
• start by thanking someone for the specific gift to prove that you know they gave it to you and what it is. Try to sound really grateful, even if you did not want the gift! It cost someone money and time. Their thinking about you is what counts most.
• if you received a cheque, say how you will spend money on something that the sender would consider useful to you, not just blowing it "on a night out".
• say a few key things about how you spent Christmas 
• insert something about their plans for the New Year, or situation, if you know them so the whole letter is not about you
• in the last paragraph express good wishes for the New Year 
• put an appropriate “sign off” such as "Thanking you once again, With love from”, “Kind regards” or in some more distant cases “Yours sincerely”.

New Year Resolution : poem

Today, the indwelling Holy Spirit has the power to renew the heart, preserve standards and virtues, create essentially "new people" who are salt and light to maintain Truth in a world fast going "off". One reason why people today cannot identify how sin is considered by God (as in story by Daphne du Marier about a vicar which I reviewed below) is that they do not hear the Bible preached, or fully understand it. Hence "Read the Bible" and "Listen to Sermons" would be the wisest New Year Resolution. I've made that one already and try to adhere, hence this poem.

New Year Resolution

 

Always keep your heart a garden,

Free of weeds and rank decay.

Perfumed blossom, neatly tended,

Always sunblest, always May.

"May" from Book of Hours (wikipedia)

Always keep your mind a garden

Free of envy, lust and greed.

Work it with the Spirit’s tending

Extirpate carnality.

French potager (Wikipedia)

If you keep your soul a garden

Justice, honour, truth supreme.

What bur can ever stick upon you?

What slur for that which has not been?

Alison Bailey Castellina 2013

Murder cannot frustrate the purposes of God

The text set today in the Church Lectionary focuses on the flight to Egypt. Rev Paolo Castellina considers the issue and sets out that all history is intended as a prophetic message.

• Murder cannot frustrate God's purposes - sermon by Paolo Castellina

                 Giotto's "Flight into Egypt" in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (Wikipedia)

The story of the destruction of St Kilda

Review: East Wind, a short story by Daphne du Maurier

I’m reading The Doll, a collection of early short stories by Daphne du Maurier, during this week that stretches out to New Year, perfect for letting loose one's imagination.

East Wind is a short story about the destruction of a community, through decadent values impacting on simple remote people and the long, strong traditions which bind them together. Due to a strong east wind bringing a sheltering ship to their bay, a remote island is landed by foreign strangers, bringing brandy, dancing, the outside world, sin and free love. The effect quickly fragments the local fishing community, leading to dancing and lust, ending in murder. It is symbolic of the eventual demise of the whole community. Du Maurier calls her island 'St Hilda', an isolated rock, supposedly far off the Scilly Islands, but it must surely be St Kilda, a real island forty miles west of Uist, the far west point of Scotland. In fact, St Kilda was abandoned in 1930 by 36 remaining people, an event contemporary with the date of her short story. Today, just this abandoned street tells of the once cohesive and strong seafaring community that lived here.

                                                The ruined "Street", St Kilda (Wikipedia)

Visitors started to reach St Kilda by boat during mid Victorian summers to watch birds on the seven mile barren island. They encountered the natives of St Kilda, St Kildans, bringing with them each time a 'flu epidemic, which the islanders genes could not resist. Nevertheless, contact with the outside world was alluring. St Kilda's young men left for the mainland. By 1930, a shrunken community clung on without enough people to work the land, harvest the sheep for cheese, eat the sea birds, or make tweed. St Kilda could not be reached, except by trawlers from late August to late spring, due to wild Atlantic seas. That winter, the islanders were near to starving. Even a doctor could not reach them.

The remaining islanders unable to face another winter cut off by storms, petitioned the Government to be evacuated. They specifically said that they did not wish to be rehoused together as a community of families, possibly because they all had different ideas about what they wanted to do, but possibly because they were no more a living community.

So, today, St Kilda is as dead as Pompeii:  an empty shell, storm lashed for seven months a year. In summer, it is visited by keen bird watchers, but you need permission from the National Trust for Scotland to set anchor in Village Bay (below).

                                                      Village Bay, St Kilda (Wikipedia)

Possibly, as Du Maurier perceives, it was the temptations of the world and the flesh which finally destroyed St Kilda’s community. Du Maurier certainly loved isolated, marine and wild places. Debauchery and murder on a rocky shore is a theme in her novels and is always destructive.

While watching the famous film "It's a Wonderful Life" on Christmas Eve, George Bailey is a given a vision of what would have happened to his community if he had never lived. Instead of a decent community, the main street is a line of gaming houses, brothels, crime, flashing lights, pawn shops and money-lenders. Oddly, this alternative town struck me as rather like some of our towns today.

We talk about the “destruction of community” so perhaps we can learn lessons:

• That honesty, self discipline and moral values matter, in the longer term, for communities and their ongoing survival. 
• That people and churches must make an effort to act as "salt and light" in their local communities to hold them together and strengthen them. 
• That temptations of materialism can destroy whole communities. 

Our towns could all be left as empty streets, as people elect to go somewhere else. We already see some English high streets becoming dead retail centres, full of charity shops and empty premises as out of town shopping centres take over. The mass exodus of the young is already destroying many remote and mountain communities across Europe. 

Maybe we urgently need more people who are willing to reverse the process of decay, to value again the concept of "community" itself, to swim against this strong tide of abandonment, to resist the strong lure of modernity, and materialism.

• Guardian article (2012) about someone born on St Kilda