Parish Letter - March 2023

Dear friends.

This month marks the 80th year of my life and the 53rd Parish letter that I have written. You may disagree with the second number but not the first!! Quite frankly I am running out of things to communicate and to say. But with God’s help here goes. 

We live in an age of communication and information and all of it becoming faster and to some people more incomprehensible. My grandparents knew a mouse as a grey thing with a tail that lived beneath the floor boards and ate cheese. Nowadays I have a mouse that lives on my desk and communicates with my computer allowing me to write this letter. How it does this is a mystery to me. My grandparents and indeed my parents had a pencil, a piece of paper and a good knowledge of mental arithmetic as their computer. Technology is a thief of mentality. I would get blank looks if I told my parents that I was “Surfing the net”. Today it’s all ringing and buzzing and tinny tunes that seem to control people’s actions. Politicians need “Spin doctors” to help them present their policies to the public. Appearance is the be all and end all.

We as Christians can live with information, we have lots of it of great value to humankind. It’s locked up in our Bible, in our teachings and in the way we behave towards others. We as Christians can seem to struggle when it comes to communicating that knowledge to others and making it stick. Communication demands truth but truth is hard to face, truth needs trust and openness because you never know what another person’s reaction will be.

I believe there is more communication, trust and information in a smile than in a hundred words. God’s presence is in a smile, God’s presence is in the holding of someone’s hand in a time of trouble or distress, God’s presence is in simply being there in silence for someone.

We do not need technology to speak to God, we just need to open our minds and if we feel like it our mouths. Our culture of information can hinder our communication with God at it’s basic level, I don’t need Google to write a sermon (But it has helped) !! 

To smile at someone, to forgive and to show a way to reconciliation brings peace and healing to a broken world.

God communicates and we are called to be hearers of the 

word. Try smiling and watch God work.

 

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost”.

JRR Tolkien

 

Phillip