The Beatles’ enigmatic ‘While my guitar gently weeps’ was followed by ‘Woodstock’ from Matthews Southern Comfort.  It was a felicitous juxtaposition, as a clerical colleague would put it; it was good to have the  two songs together.

Being only eight years old when Woodstock took place and having few memories of the Beatles (other than the strains ‘Eleanor Rigby’ coming from the radiogram in our living room), liking for such music is hardly a matter of nostalgia, but there was a sense of being at a turning point in the songs; a feeling that these were times that would be remembered.  Joni Mitchell’s lyrics for ‘Woodstock’ include:

Well, maybe it’s the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man

Maybe it was ‘the time of man’.  Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon; the civil rights movement was asserting human equality; a social revolution was manifest in the emergence of the ‘permissive society’. The times were memorable, historical even.

The changes in those years were first order changes, they were about the ways in which human beings treated each other, about the ways in which they ordered their affairs.  Perhaps lasting change brought lasting music.

In the forty years since, there has been nothing of comparable substance.  Singers may have stood and called for changes, but they have neither been part nor agents of revolutionary change.

There is a touch of melancholy listening to ‘Woodstock’ now; the new world ushered in by the social revolution of the 1960s did not bring an age of happiness; individual freedom allowed space for individual greed.  Maybe the roots of the casino capitalism that brought the economic collapse of the past three years lay in the casting off of all restraints and responsibilities forty years ago.  It is difficult to imagine the staid, conservative societies of the 1950s allowing the excesses that were to emerge fifty years later.

The world is a better place than it was; it’s just that it could have been a whole lot better than it turned out.

It’s over two years now since the Irish Times carried a report from The Journal of Glaciology on the causes of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica in 2002.

The demise of the ice shelf has been cited as a significant indicator of climate change, and so it appears to be; but the story is not as simple as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere simply increasing the temperature and melting the ice. The Irish Times piece was also covered at the time by BBC Wales who reported a new study from scientists from the University of Aberystwyth and Colorado University:

Prof Glasser said the dramatic event was "not as simple as we first thought".

He acknowledged that global warming had a major part to play in the collapse, but emphasised that it was only one of a number of contributory factors.

"Because large amounts of meltwater appeared on the ice shelf just before it collapsed, we had always assumed that air temperature increases were to blame," he added.

"But our new study shows that ice-shelf break up is not controlled simply by climate.

"A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are involved.

"For example, the location and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is."

Dr Scambos, of the University of Colorado’s national snow and ice data centre, said the ice shelf had probably been in distress for decades before its demise.

"It’s likely that melting from higher ocean temperatures, or even a gradual decline in the ice mass of the peninsula over the centuries, was pushing the Larsen to the brink," he added.

There has been a nagging feeling for some time that there is no Plan B in our response to climate change. If there is a centuries long shift that has been exacerbated by the huge increase in carbon emissions, what measures are proposed if carbon emissions are reduced, but the reduction does not halt the increase? Who is planning for the shift of the population of Bangladesh or the resettlement of the peoples of drought-stricken sub-Saharan Africa?

Today’s Washington Post reports on the collapse of sunspot activity and notes,

These changes are raising questions not just about the sun itself but also about the extent to which the sun’s activity affects our climate. There are those who believe that the solar variability is the major cause of climate change, an idea that would let humans and their greenhouse gases off the hook. Others are equally convinced that the sun plays only a minuscule role in climate change.

What if the first group are right?  What if the sunspots, or lack of them,  are affecting things to a critical degree?  Is there anyone offering a way out of the doomsday scenario where having a clean and green world still fails to save hundreds of millions of lives?

“We sing them”.

“Which ones?”

“The Venite and the Urbs Fortitudinis”.  (The canticles are sung in English, but their names are from the Latin versions of their opening words).

The church filled with sound as the Venite was sung, the congregation of twenty people singing words they had known since childhood days. In another generation, they will be forgotten.  The capacity for forgetting is great, we are even forgetting how to read; look at a tabloid newspaper from forty years ago and compare it with an edition of the same newspaper today. Sorting through papers in the basement, there were old newspapers from times when people took a pride in knowledge.

Digging out Des Ekin’s book The Stolen Village which tells of the raid on Baltimore, Co Cork in 1631 in which 107 people were taken away as slaves by the corsairs, it was amazing to read again how much can be forgotten.

Here’s Ekin’s description of a world very different from Western Europe in the 17th Century:

“Compared to European capitals, Algiers was a healthy city. Its cobbled streets were kept clean by an army of workers. In an era when Londoners emptied their bedpans into the street, Algiers had piped sewage and fresh running water – James Cathcart described this as ‘clear as crystal’.

Europeans ridiculed the citizens’ personal hygiene, with one Frenchman deriding the ‘foolish conceit’ of washing before meals.

Islamic medical science was far ahead of Europe, and had been for centuries. In Baghdad, a thousand years earlier, medical students had been taught the basics of modern anatomy, pharmacology and toxicology. From Cairo to Cordoba, doctors had diagnosed diseases as complex as meningitis.

Sophisticated anaesthetics had turned surgery into an art. Abulcasis, who died in 1013, described more than two hundred fine surgical instruments that could remove kidney stones, strip varicose veins, and excise cancer tumours. Islamic surgeons could even extract eye cataracts by suction through a hollow metallic needle.

While Europeans were tackling the Black Death through self-flagellation, physicians like Ibn Khatima had discovered that minuscule organisms could invade the body and cause disease.

And long before Jenner ‘discovered’ vaccination, Turkish women, were routinely using small doses of cowpox to protect their faces against smallpox.

A diet rich in vegetables also helped to promote health. The climate was kind and the fields produced prolific yields. According to the Spanish monk Haedo, Algiers had an ‘infinite number of gardens and vineyards filled with lemon, orange and lime trees [and] flowers of every kind.’

Even the weather was pleasant by North African standards. ‘The climate in this country is remarkably delightful,’ John Foss wrote. ‘The air is pure and serene’.

All these factors had a measurable effect on quality of life and longevity. Even then, Algerines were described as healthier and longer-lived than Europeans . . .

The Algerine slave trade left another type of legacy: the opening of Northern Europe to Islamic influences. Returning captives . . . must have brought back tales of an equal-opportunity society in which wealth and status was determined by ability rather than by accident of birth. These were dangerous ideas. For instance, Islamist ideals of equality may have indirectly influenced the creators of the American Declaration of Independence.

Eastern learning shook western science to its foundations. European scholars pored through Islamic writings, gaining insights into chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Again, this was dangerous knowledge. The English academic Dr Henry Stubbe (1632-1676), who openly admitted his debt to Islamic teachings, had his work suppressed and was jailed for heresy.”

It’s not just the singing of canticles that is being forgotten as our civilisation drifts backwards.

Archie died in 200. Had he been alive, I do not think he would have been in Normandy today. Archie avoided such occasions, he took the view that they didn’t capture the horror of the events. When books were published to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day, six years ago, there seemed to be many veterans who shared Archie’s opinion. Martin Bowman collected a series of reminiscences in his book ‘Remembering D-Day: Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes’. Bowman quoted from Donald Burgett, a member of the 101st Airborne Division who was nineteen years old when he landed in Normandy. Burgett says, ‘It was dirty and dehumanising and disgusting . . . I just hope that when they make their fine speeches on the beachheads they remember what happened. I do. Every night of the year. The images of the dead always wake me up’.

We went to Saint Aubin sur Mer in 1997, it’s close to the ferry port of Caen. It was a wet afternoon in late August, the seafront was deserted. At one end of the promenade there was a plain stone on which were inscribed the names of those who did not make it off the beach on that June day.

Leaning on the railings and looking out at a grey sea, it was hard to imagine this anonymous French town had once been at the centre of a major event in world history. Imagination is important.

Losing the capacity for imagination meant that wars became about sets of statistics. D-Day in history became not the experiences of those involved, but lists of casualties, descriptions of the forces and the weapons involved, timetables of events. Without a capacity for imagination, there is no understanding of D-Day as it really was for those who were there. Without imagination there is no encounter with the reality of that far off June day.

Being someone always fascinated by local histories, it was interesting to read the history page of the Ford Meter Box Company which is based in Wabash, Indiana:

No definite date for the birth of the company can be found; however, a patent application for the original Ford Meter Box was filed on December 20, 1898. It can be assumed that this is the birth year. The company had few material assets; in fact, it consisted mainly of the ideas and dreams of the founder, Edwin Ford.

After losing an investment in a glass company in Gas City, Indiana, Edwin Ford returned to the home he owned at 213 East Kickapoo Street in Hartford City. He took a job with the new water works in Hartford City and was soon appointed its first superintendent in 1895. Edwin was concerned about the heavy demand for water, caused by customers wasting the cool water by running constant streams to preserve milk and butter. There seemed to be no solution except to meter all customers. The problem was where to locate the meters.

Most houses in Hartford City had been built without basements, making indoor meter placement very difficult. Meters could be installed only in some kind of an outside pit and Edwin set about the task of designing such an arrangement. He dug a hole in his yard and covered it with a wooden lid.  He hung a thermometer from it, which he adjusted to different depths. In cold winter weather he would dash out to read the temperature and from his observations was able to work out the design of a meter pit or “meter box” which solved the problem of meter freeze-ups.

The very first meter boxes were made of three foot lengths of vitrified clay tile about ten inches in diameter. A cement bottom was cast at one end of the pit and vertical lead pipes topped with meter couplings extended a few inches from this enclosed bottom. An inner frost lid of wool and felt was placed about half way down to protect the meter from freezing along with an iron ring and lid cemented to the top. The entire town was metered with these boxes, making Hartford City Water the first utility in a cold climate to have all meters installed outside at the curb.

Edwin had no intention of producing meter boxes for other than local requirements, but word of the unique program at Hartford City was spread to neighboring towns by meter salesmen. Edwin was approached to make boxes for other utilities. He agreed, and these first meter boxes were made in Edwin’s basement in his spare time and pulled out of the basement window on a cart with baby buggy wheels, running on an improvised track. Thus a new business was born and the logical name of The Ford Meter Box Company was adopted.

Edwin Ford may have not planned to produce meter boxes for other than local requirements, but his products reached unlikely places.  Walking down Kilkenny High Street this morning, an unexpected address appeared on a water meter cover, set into the stone pavement.

What were the economics of selling Indianan water meters in 20th Century Ireland?

What was it like to be trapped in the life of the man who was trying to make a few pesos selling peanuts to passing motorists?

What was it like to be one of the family who were living under one of the highway flyovers?

What was it like to be living in a house made from bamboo and woven leaves in one of the many villages we had visited?

When these people watch a European pass by, what thoughts do they have?

Their whole life, to us, is an unknowable experience.

“Muzungu, muzungu”, shouted the children last week in Rwanda, “whites, whites”.

Kids in second hand European clothes, running barefoot at the roadside, watched as people from another world passed by in a four wheel drive pick up.

What were their lives like in their mud brick houses? How far did they walk to fetch water each morning? When they went to school, what lessons did they learn?

It is impossible to stand in their place; impossible to unknow what we know. We know we have comfortable homes to return to. We know we have our treasured possessions. We know we have our friends or family to turn to in times that are dark.

There are few people in our community who would contemplate turning away from all we have and willingly facing the nothingness. There are few people who would put themselves into a situation where there was no way out.

It’s impossible to let go of all the things that are important, to stand alone and vulnerable in a foreign, place; to imagine ourselves with nothing.

If we cannot go into that other place, perhaps we could, at least, more often try to think about their lives from where we are.

Saturday, 1st May

It is Labour Day, a public holiday. Manchester City are leading Aston Villa by two goals to one in the match being screened in the corner of the bar at La Galette, the European supermarket and bakery. The Europeans seem intent on shopping while a cluster of African men sit intently following the progress of the football. The English commentator gets excited a Manchester City score a third goal to seal their victory. When the match is over; the other scores are given. Tottenham have won their match – does that guarantee them fourth place in the Premier League and a lucrative place in next season’s Champions League?

Does it matter? Does any of it matter? Sitting watching twenty-two men kick a ball around a pitch in a faraway country seems a bizarre way to pass the time in a city where football would be far down the list of priorities. The football stadium was once a very important place, but for reasons far removed from sport. During the 1994 genocide, thousands of people found it to be place of refuge because of its close proximity to the United Nations’ offices.

The earlier part of the afternoon had been spent at the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. A place of tranquility, where a flame in the gardens burns on the hundred days of the genocide anniversary each year; the tight security surrounding it is a reminder of the continuing threat of violence.

The gardens are filled with tropical trees and flowers; the terraces they occupy might be no more than ornamental gardens, were it not for the fact that the remains of 258,000 people lay buried beneath the great slabs that cover much of the lawns.

Indoors, the story of the genocide is told through multi media means. This is not killing on an industrial scale like the Nazis, this is not impersonal murder through the gas chamber or the bullet; this is hideous hands on, personal mutilation of victims. A glass display case contains the weapons of slaughter; machetes and hoes and hammers among them. A rusty chain is a reminder of a family who had been chained together and buried alive. When their corpses were found, they were still fastened together. The militias strove to devise as hideously painful ways as possible of killing their victims; killing children in front of their parents; hacking people slowly to pieces; raping women repeatedly before dismembering them. The awful reality was overwhelming.

While the world stood by, for more than three months the killing continued. The foreign troops sent in to evacuate expatriates might have been sufficient to prevent what followed, but few seemed interested in the lives of people in a small African country. This was three years after the first Gulf War demonstrated the power of television to beam instantly around the world images from extreme situations, yet the world pretended it did not know.

Tears and silence were the only response to the memorial. Our companion lost his four brothers; he stood in quietness.

In a world where such things could happen, football seemed faintly ridiculous.

The Biblical response to the demands of justice in our world has an inescapably individual dimension. The evangelical writer Ronald Sider’s ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’ published in the 1970s, stressed the role of individual choice and lifestyle in allowing a generous response to the needs of the poor. Sider’s perspective became unfashionable: prosperity theology asserted the bible verses from Deuteronomy that wealth was a sign of blessing , while liberation theology argued that change must come through addressing unjust structures. Aid and development agencies focussed upon issues of debt and trade and, in shifting the onus for change to the level of governments and institutions, perhaps deflected attention away from the requirement for us as individuals to respond with the generosity we expect from our governments.

“And what does the LORD require of you?” asks the prophet Micah, “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Justice and mercy are matters of individual choice and are exercised in a world where individual choices make a difference. Development projects are often about sums in thousands rather than in tens of thousands and are of a scale where individual contributions can determine whether or not they are possible. The sums of money spent in purchasing one model of a car rather than another, or in choosing a particular holiday, are sums that would correspond to a significant percentage of many roject budgets. It is not true to claim that there is nothing we as individuals can do to change the world; we have the capacity to change at least small parts of it; whether we do so, whether we respond to the Lord’s requirements, is our choice.

I have become old and hard; I can stare straight ahead in the knowledge that I cannot change the world alone.  When I return to Ireland, I will be able to cope with the things I have seen, well, most of them.  The stories of the 1994 genocide will always be beyond comprehension.

This visit will be easier than my first visit to the developing world. On the Feast of Holy Innocents, 28th December 1990, I went to the Philippines.  I had read much about what lay ahead and attended extensive briefings, but no matter how much I had tried to prepare for what was to come, I couldn’t cope with the reality of what I met.

Seeking somewhere to pray before going to Victoria Station for the journey to Gatwick, I had stepped into Westminster Abbey, only to be confronted by a demand for payment.  Deciding that the Church of England wasn’t much interested in praying, I went instead to Westminster Cathedral, where a beautiful Latin Mass for the feast day was being sung.  There were clouds of incense and a sense of the transcendent.

A day later it all seemed a travesty of the Gospel, as I travelled through the streets of Manila, I wondered what abbeys and cathedrals had to do with anything.

It was a haunting trip, people living on the streets, people living on the city dump, people with nothing.  A priest who spoke for the poor was murdered and we went to his wake, his bishop said that unless people were like the priest, they were not Christians at all.

Returning in late January, as the news was filled with stories of billions of dollars being spent on the First Gulf War, I had repeated flashbacks, panic attacks in the early hours of the morning.  In retrospect, the taking of the anti-malarial drug, Larium might not have helped, although it was the best option and came with a warning.  I could not claim I had not read the small print.

I devised a strategy for coping with the attacks: I imagined being in a refugee camp with a dying child, trying to conjure up each detail; I then looked around at my five bedroomed Victorian Rectory, I counted each thing I had, I then thought on my greatest treasures of all, my wife and baby son.  The attacks would be dispelled and I would return to sleep.

The panic attacks mercifully went away but the thought process remained useful.  When the days are horrible, as sometimes they seem to be,  I look at the pictures from Darfur and the other truly painful places of the world and I ask myself,  what do I know of anything horrible? What do I know about about realities?

In the days to come, I shall think of home and the so many good things there and I shall pray that God may be with those who really need him.

Their eastward journey was the return of the westward journey made by settlers years, decades, even centuries before.  The dangers were not so great, but for those making the journey, it probably seemed as forbidding.

I once preached at the Anglican church in a small lumber and mill town about an hour outside of Vancouver. It was not remote at all by Canadian standards, more like a suburb. But to us it was a very long way from anywhere. The next parish one way was in Vancouver, the next parish the other way was a long way away. It had a beautiful new church building with a fine set of church halls and offices.

The rector  had just been appointed to another parish, so the parishioners were in the process of organizing a congregational meeting with the Archdeacon to discuss their hopes for a new incumbent. One of the ladies asked me in passing, “You are not interested are you?”

I smiled and walked on. I didn’t like to say that to me this town felt very far from anywhere and that I was missing BBC radio so much that I had thought of buying a short wave radio to try to listen to the World Service in the hope of hearing news that was not about the United States.

We travelled on from that place and I thought about the first Europeans who had come to settle in these wide and rugged places. The whole of Canada was once covered by the territories of the native peoples, but they were mainly hunter gatherers and they moved from place to place according to the season and the food supply. The native people were subjected to the most appalling treatment by the authorities; and for the ordinary settler the country must have seemed the most hostile of places: a harsh environment with savage winters and local people who were not pleased to see you.

The settlers were followed by the churches. Intrepid clergy naively unaware of what dangers lay in wait for them, headed out into the vastness. To make the westward journey from these shores in those times could often mean never seeing home or family again. The churches made many mistakes and got some things seriously wrong, but no-one could doubt the sincerity of those who left everything behind to go out to share what they believed. It took considerable faith to head out into the unknown.

What did those who left the old world to make their lives in the new world make of their sons being pulled back into the mud and hell of Europe? Perhaps the Newfoundland Memorial and the Vimy Memorial and the Saint Julien Memorial speak eloquently of the pain of warm and gracious people.