Tuscany

A few years ago I was invited by my daughter and her husband to spend a week in Tuscany during the school autumn break.  The very word Tuscany seems  to sum images up romantic views of sun drenched olive groves and vineyards,  

and of towns that have changed little since the middle ages.  The towns we visited did not disappoint.  The wide piazzas and the fascinating narrow streets  and splendid architecture are probably unequalled anywhere in the world. The amount of artistic and cultural history in this part of Italy stuns the mind and the imagination. It is no wonder that English aristocrats in preceding centuries always  included Tuscany in their Grand Tours. The only problem we faced was our expectation of a sun drenched landscape.  Our visit coincided with a severe cold snap caused by a wind sweeping down from the Alps. I shivered throughout!

Below is a typical piazza in Tuscany.

I took this shot of an annual street market.  You simply pay an fee on entering and then you can saunter about and taste all the local produce that appeals to you.  Here are some vendors slicing some very tasty salamis for passers by to sample.

Of course, wherever you go you meet the most amazingly elegant Baroque churches, even in the smallest towns.

I was wandering around this interesting town when I saw this view of a typical Tuscan scene - an attractive jumble of roofs all covered with ochre- coloured tiles

This shot is of the world-famous Ponto Vecchio in Florence.  It is lined by shops - mainly jewellers today - but  it was lined by butchers shops in the middle ages. The retreating German army in 1944, when told to dynamite it, refused to destroy this world famous landmark;  instead they blew up the roads approaching the bridge.

In the middle of the main square in Florence is a memorial plaque that few seem to notice.  It marks the spot where in 1498 the Florentine authorities burned alive, with exquisite cruelty, one of their most illustrious sons, Girolamo Savonarola.  

Savonarola was a Dominican monk with a passion to reform the Roman Church of his day.  He was scandalised by the worldliness of the Papacy, where Pope Alexander Sixth lived a life of debauched luxury. He had mistresses and at least five illegitimate sons. He was more akin to a degenerate Roman emperor than to a prince of the church.  Savonarola also attacked  in fiery sermons the lives of the local priests and merchants, who seemed to be more interested in Aristotle and Plato than in the Bible and whose lives were consumed by vanities.

All this was a bit too much for the pleasure-loving Florentines.  He was tried, found guilty and summararily executed and his ashes thrown into the river Arno. 

 It would take another monk, in another country, and  nearly twenty years later,  before a serious Reformation became possible.  Luther  was in Germany, living under princes who sympathised with his message, when he published his theses at Wittenberg. in 1517.  In Italy he could have met with a like fate to Savonarola's

Judging others

A few months ago I heard a talk given by a South African lady that has remained in my memory.It went something like this:
You have some spare moments and you decide to spend some time at a well-known shopping mall. The weather is fine and you feel pleasantly relaxed.  You meander  around, casually window shopping for the most part, but occasionally buying a few items that  you have on your list.  You gaze for a while in front of a high class jewellers and peer at those fabulously expensive brightly-lit Rolex watches  behind that thick glass.  You sigh with a certain envy and  move on.  Then you wander round Waterstones and buy a popular book that you have seen reviewed in the press: but the experience is tinged with a slight depression as you gaze at those classics that were mentioned at college that you have never got around to reading.  After an hour or so you legs begin to ache and your feet begin to burn.  It's that Starbucks moment.  A nice coffee and a pastry would be very welcome.  Sipping coffee in one of these malls has an added pleasure,  You rest your weary legs, enjoy your well-earned coffee and at the same time watch the world go by. As you relax you often experience a sort of interior critical monologue.   
That smart young man striding purposefully along - he;'s obviously into corporate business and probably takes home an enviable salary.  Then a slightly shabbily attired young woman passes.  She shuffles along and is obviously obese.  Why doesn't she get a grip of herself before she ends up grossly  overweight!  A rather harassed women with two children walks by.  Her children are noisy and obstructive.  You feel that she hasn't a clue how to discipline those two potential brats. That woman, she's obviously in her sixties; she's got all the latest teenage gear.  Talk about mutton dressed up as lamb! And so it goes on.
Probably all of us have experienced this sort of thing in some measure.
But the south African lady went on to say something that is very obvious - such critical and judgemental behaviour is profoundly unchristian. Personally I had to admit that I do it a lot.  As Christians we are  put on this earth not to criticise and to judge, but to love and to pray for those whom God puts across our path.


A little later I bought a book on Amazon on the Desert Fathers, those strange Christians who retired into the wildernesses of Egypt during the third and fourth centuries.  The book contained an anthology of their sayings.  One of them struck me.


 "A certain brother came to Abbot Poemen and said: What am I to do father?  I am in great sadness.  The elder said to him: Never despise anybody, never condemn anybody, never speak evil of anyone , and the Lord will give you peace."


I am still trying digest these words and, even more difficult, to put them into practice.

Europe

Living in England has its definite benefits.  It has spared us from the tyranny of continental dictators such as Napoleon and Hitler yet it is near enough for us to visit France or Belgium or Holland with ease.  This has become especially so since the channel tunnel was opened in 1994.  This was an incredible feat of modern engineering.

Europe has everything - beautiful cities soaked in history and culture, mountainous regions such as the Alps or the Pyrennees, where the young and energetic can enjoy hiking and skiing, and the sandy beaches that stretch along the coast of the Mediterranean.  Also it has been the source and inspiration for all that is technically wonderful in the modern world  Think of anything, from the latest mobile phone to the latest high-speed train, and you will find that the basic knowledge behind these wonders were discovered in Europe.  Other countries have produced many wonderful things, but they have invariably built of the scientific knowledge amassed in Europe during the past four hundred years.

In the past few years my wife and I have visited a lot of these attractive cities.  These short breaks as they are called are very popular in the UK and are relatively cheap.

The pictures below are from the Belgian city of Bruges.  It has many attractive canals and is known as the Venice of the north.   It grew very rich by exploiting the wool-producing areas of Scotland and England.  This wool was made into garments that were eagerly sought throughout Europe

The first picture shows one of the fine bridges that can be seen and the second  shows one of the many street cafes where one relax and enjoy a coffee.  The third shows the novel and attractive means that are used to see the sights of the town

I have several more cities to put on my blog - such as Paris, Florence, Krakov and Budapest- which I shall do when I have a few spare moments.

The Pope's visit to Britain

The Pope, Benedict XVI , made an official visit to the UK last week.  It was a visit surrounded by controversy and tight security.  The secularists and the agnostic/ atheist left were strong in their condemnation of the whole event.  True to their fears he spoke out strongly against secularism and the almost universal marginalisation of the Christian faith in Europe. 

Secularism can be summed in a couplet from the poet Swinburne, a poet who wrote in the latter half of the Nineteenth century.


Glory to Man in the highest!  
For Man is the master of things


The Pope spoke eloquently about the need for Christians to bear witness to the glorious truths of the Christian faith.  Even hardened protestants were impressed by his words.

"How much contemporary society needs this witness! How much we need, in the church and in society, witnesses of the beauty of holiness, witnesses of the splendour of truth, witnesses of the joy and freedom born of a living relationship with Christ!

One of the greatest challenges facing us today is how to speak convincingly of the wisdom and liberating power of God's word to a world which all too often sees the gospel as a constriction of human freedom, instead of the truth which liberates our minds and enlightens our efforts to live wisely and well, both as individuals and as members of society.

Let us begin with the sacrifice of the cross. The outpouring of Christ's blood is the source of the church's life. St John, as we know, sees in the water and blood which flowed from our Lord's body the wellspring of that divine life which is bestowed by the Holy Spirit and communicated to us in the sacraments (Jn 19:34; cf Jn 1:7; 5:6-7)."

We rarely hear such sentiments from a senior ecclesiastic in Britain these days.

The visit coincided with seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain,  when the nation fought for its very existence in the face of the onslaught from Nazi Germany,  We stood alone in Europe.  Our natural ally, the United States, had not entered the war.  The Nazis had conquered Poland in less than a fortnight and had scythed through northern France in less than ten days.   Their armies were strongly encamped on the coast of France, just over twenty miles from the English coast.  All that stood between us and ignominious defeat was this stretch of water, the timeless eloquence of Churchill and the immense bravery of the pilots of the Royal Airforce.  For weeks a protracted battle raged in the skies above Kent and London.  Sometimes the September sky was filled with more than 400 enemy bombers surrounded by hundreds of spitfires and hurricanes.  In the end the Luftwaffe realised they had bitten off more than they could chew, having lost over one and a half thousand aircraft, and Hitler postponed indefinitely the invasion of these shores. The cost was great: hundreds of young pilots were killed and over 40,000 civilians had perished in and around London,   

I think God spared us.  Not many people realise that King George VI and Churchill had called the nation to prayer and humiliation in May, just before the battle began.

As I finish I would like to pay tribute to the American journalist and broadcaster, Ed. Murrow.  As the bombs were falling, and with great personal courage, Murrow would stand in a doorway or under an arch during the Blitz, and begin with his famous opening phrase This Is London,  and then go on to describe the devastation and death all around him.  His words were eagerly listened to by millions in America.  President Roosevelt honoured him later in these words,

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead ... were mankind's dead without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be. You have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3000 miles of water is not really done at all.

I think he did much to influence American public opinion in Britain's favour.

Israel and Christian Zionism

My eldest daughter  is doing a bold thing.  She is flying out to Israel and meeting some Arab Christians, staying at a hostel run by some nuns in Haifa,  before driving over to the sea of Galilee to meet some friends. She is doing this solo.
Strangely enough very few visitors to Israel ever meet a Palestinian Christian
The words Israel and Zion evoke very strong emotions at the  moment.  There is a very strong movement in the Church called Christian Zionism, which has been deeply impressed by the creation of the state of Israel and which feels that this event will be the trigger that precipitates the end of this age and the coming of Jesus as the promised Messiah.  They feel that the restoration of Israel to its ancient land in 1947 is a remarkable fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.  They interpret the ancient prophecies of the books of Daniel and Revelation as  providing us with exciting insights into the End Times.
Others think very differently.  They feel that the church has replaced Israel in the purposes of God (replacement theology), and they feel that the current support for Israel by the evangelical Church, especially in America, is a recipe for future disaster.
Others feel that the preterist position regarding Daniel and Revelation is the only true one to take.  They say that the force of evil in Revelation is undoubtedly Rome as represented by the monstrous emperor Nero, and that the book has nothing to do with the End Times.  They quote Rev 1:1. which   states that all these events will take place "soon" or "shortly" (translations vary).  These adverbs can hardly be used to refer to events two thousand years later.  They mention that Neron Caesar, when the letters are used as numbers in both Greek and Hebrew,  can be represented by 666.
For those with sufficient leisure and curiosity, all the various details of this often acrimoniousness debate can be accessed  by reading the relevant books by the chief protagonists: David Pawson and Stephen Sizer.

Havering atte Bower Fayre

Last Saturday the nearby village of Havering had its village fair.  The village goes back centuries: it is even mentioned in the Domesday Book.  Kings and Queens of England once lived in the palace which was situated behind the present Church, but all traces of this palace have long since disappeared.  There is a story that Edward the Confessor used to wander through the woods saying his prayers, but one day the nightingales disturbed his devotions and he cursed them!

A local butcher roasted a whole hog to feed the many visitors

The chief musician of the Morris Dancers tunes up

The Morris Dancers

This is a view from the church tower, looking west.  You can see the skyline of the city of London on the horizon.  To the left you can see the roof of the famous Dome.

Essex

Last week my wife and I decided to do some touring of the villages in the north of Essex on our bikes.   Unfortunately, Essex has poor image in the popular press and media.  It is looked upon as a rather boring county inhabited by less than intelligent people.  An Essex girl is often portrayed as a mindless bimbo, especially if she comes from Romford or Dagenham.  These are unjust slurs.  The countryside in Essex contains many fine villages and areas of great attractiveness.  Our young people are on the whole as smart and educated as more affluent counties.

We decided to put our bikes on the back of our car and to drive out to the very historic and culturally renowned town of Thaxted.   Probable the finest building to be seen is the ancient parish church,  built over six hundred years ago.  It is an enormous church for such a small town.  The shot below shows the tower as it is seen from the splendid medieval Guild Hall.

We cycled for a few miles NE to the villages of Great Samford and Little Samford, then on to the picturesque village of Finchingfield.  It is justly famous for its attractive green, a pond that attracts an assortment of bustling bird-life, and one or two fine inns, all of which are dominated by the  medieval parish church.  We had cycled a few miles and our legs were ready for a rest and our bodies were  ready for some sustenance.  Just nearby was an inn, The Fox, which had a good selection of meals cooked on the premises

He is the Fox inn, with the diners sitting out in the sunshine, enjoying their food and surrounded by the splendid local scenery.

This is the interior of The Fox.  It is typical of many English country inns.  When I was here several years ago we brought an American who was working in France.  He said, "I'd like to see the inside of an English pub while I'm here."   So this is where I took him.

On the way back to Thaxted we passed through the tiny village of Little Bardfield and saw a thatcher putting a new straw-thatched roof on a cottage.  I got chatting to him and was told that the thatch lasts about twenty-five years before it needs renewing.  There are many thatched-roofed cottages in this part of Essex these days.  This is an excellent thing because this ancient craft was beginning to die out.

These are some very attractive alms-houses near the big church in Thaxted. They go back about three hundred and fifty years.  In the background there is an old windmill.

I hope my friend David will enjoy these photos of his native Essex as he settles into his new life in Redding, California