It’s been a day of having open eyes to the wonder of all that you see about you.
So I think of the volunteer in the shop who is here for a few months before returning to Ridley Hall Theological college to train as a vicar. She did my church history module. And I notice the man mowing in the rain.
Perhaps up here they have different words for rain and today’s word could be ‘barely’ but in the south, we would call this rain. And there’s a man in a t-shirt shovelling manure. I don’t suppose the rain makes much difference when a job has to be done. And the unstoppable smile on a fellow pilgrim coming back from swimming, yes in the rain.
We have a seminar on ‘mermaids tears’, a phrase for plastic detritus, where our plastic rubbish has found itself at sea, and broken down into the smallest of sand like nurdles. It’s toxic. Slide after slide shows how bad it is. Statistic after statistic makes it all sound utterly insurmountable. The Americans are impressed that the Uk have banned microbeads in our shampoo etc. Yes industry can do more but it helps if we pressure them, refuse plastic packaging. We keep at it in whatever small ways we can aware that for some this is super difficult as they struggle to choose between eating and heating and so for them the discussion of Eco sustainability is a hard call.
We climb to the top of Dun-I for a fabulous view. Its quite something to be on an island and to just be able to glimpse the encircling sea. It’s magical. After egg sandwiches, we climb down and walk to the ‘white strand of the monks’. So called because this is where Norsemen landed and slaughtered Christians. (Photo is of me on that beach).
Evening worship is an Agape Meal, a sort of Holy Communion, where we share water (not wine) and a water biscuit (as a bread alternative). The leader, she tells us she’s 34, and that she’s angry, and has been living with this anger for as long as she can remember.
“I was born into a world on fire”. It might be a quote from Gret Thunberg. It’s a fair point. My parents were too. They were born into a world of war. But for me war and fire have been on the distant fringes of my life. She points to climate change, to gender inequality, financial inequality with billionaires paying to go to space and yet unwilling to save their own planet, the unchallenged misogyny we have seen both in number 10 and in the White House (I think she means Boris and Trump), and how the rest of us who want life to go on the same keep quiet or find minorities to throw their anxiety at such as Trans people.
She moves onto hope by calling us to be an Ally. We young people, she says, need you old people (I’m 54) to speak up, call out descrimination. Don’t buy into the hate. Think about who you vote for and why, use whatever privileges you have to make kind choices.
She closes with a quote from that speech that Greta Thunberg gave at the UN. “There will come a time when we will look back and people will ask what we did during this crucial time. I, for one, will not be silent while the world is on fire.”
It’s a good speech.
We sing a hymn “She sits like a bird brooding on the waters” about the Holy Spirit as Wild Goose. It has the line in it invoking God to be the “enemy of apathy, and heavenly dove”. So the challenge is to have the courage to be an ally.
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(Photo is of me on beach where the monks got slain by Vikings).