I saw a Red  Admiral drifting over some crocuses in my garden on February 16.

Pure existence.
Pure presence, out on the hunt for nectar, a familiar pastime that we have all engaged in.
And I thought there it was free, much freer than I in so many ways.

Do butterflies worry about repaying their mortgage, do they worry at all?
Do butterflies have to drive to the supermarket?
Do butterflies have to contend with the glories of teenage children?
Do butterflies have to write sermons, wash up, buy new socks?
Butterflies never fall out with Bishops, or have to take a bus when there are engineering works on the line.

Butterflies don’t have to fill in tax returns or endure sea sickness.

I know, as Darwin knew, that butterflies have other trials and tribulations, but they are no greater or lesser than ours they are just different.

By Peter Owen Jones.  See the full Text and be inspired at Christian Ecology Link

Reading Alastair’s book Soil and Soul is illuminating because for once he usurps the general convention of, is there, isn’t there, celtic arguments and says this:

“The issue, I think, is not whether Celtic spirituality ever existed, but the fact that a living spirituality connecting soil, soul and society manifestly can and does exist. This is community in that word’s most holistic sense. … Celticity therefore takes on a meaning that can be bigger than ethnographic and linguistic definitions alone: it becomes code for reconnection with human community, with the natural world and with God. It expresses what I call a ‘metaculture’: a connection at a level of the soul that goes deeper than superficial cultural differences; a connection simply by virtue of our underlying humanity. Such a bedrock of commonality is desperately needed in today’s fragmented world. It arises not from globalisation as a business concept, but from the fact of being ‘one world’ “

If you are quick, you might the last one from Fair Grounds though you may have to email as it is not on their online shop!!

Apparently there are shepherds and sheep coming next year.

Nativity Figures

So, What is the weight of the world?  Not its mass, that, according to google is:

mass of Earth = 5.9742 × 10²⁴ kilograms

What I was thinking about was the weight, and wondered if it was proportional to the amount of pressure we put on the earth:  Perhaps the harder we stand, the greater the weight on the world, no prizes for guessing I’ve been listening to Alastair McIntosh on MP3, somehow I managed to miss all three of his appearances this year at Greenbelt!

So what is the weight of the world?  Well if we all calculate our footprint, how heavy we are on earth’s resources, how many tons of fuel a year we use for starters add to that the food we consume and the weight of the rubbish we throw away, add all the figures together and give it a value in weight…

Ok, it’s an impossible question, however it is possible to do in terms of carbon, I tried this calculator, it’s quite worrying that I don’t think that we as a family use a great deal of resources, however we would still have to cut our footprint by two thirds to achieve the global target…

Inspiration at the last possible moment came whilst drifting away from the reading back to the morning’s breakfast. The children wanted to watch a video whilst eating and chose Narnia! I was now re-creating the scene for my congregation in which Lucy (the youngest of the four Narnian adventurers was not believed about the land behind the wardrobe, even though she was more truthful out of herself and Edmond!
It occured to me as dd1 asked if there was a real place called Narnia me that perhaps we have lost our ability to imagine and to see the truth in stories needing to see tangible evidence.
The desperate need to know whether Narnia was real was not helped by my assertion that stories are as real as we want or need them to be. Those who don’t need or want the creation story to be real have seemingly lost the childhood ability to imagine a world beyond our own, strangly, something i attribute to the assertion of David Attenborough when he said recently on BBC1 about Darwin, that humanity believed it was the dominant race because the bible says so.
Such a lack of imagination not to engage with the story, but simply to say this is how it is.
If we start to realise we are not the most important creature on this planet, then that can be a starting point for cooperation rather than domination.  Of course that is the scary part for those with fixed ideas about the unseen world as we have to start to let go of our power over our own future…

All from the comments of a 9 year old sceptic!

Isn’t it wonderful to connect with people and pick up where you left off?, even after a few years away – of course the good old internet helps – reflecting on an evening meeting with some old, some new, friends in Liverpool!

I’m not sure we have room for the 15 tv’s that they found in one house.

Having said that… the culture of me me me is nothing which those in churches are shy of aspiring to!

http://en.arocha.org/home/