Virtual Methodist

Last weekend there were a number of celebrations of the Easter Rising that is seen as the key moment in modern Irish republicanism. Many of these celebrations had a greater "historical re-enactment" character than in previous years (which were more overt celebrations of the more recent Republican campaign of violence) akin to the recent re-enactments associated with the celebrations of the Ulster Covenant etc. This is clearly only a dry run for a full blown re-enactment in 2 years time... By that stage, the only thing missing will be the Royal Navy lying at anchor in Dublin Bay and firing a broadside in commemoration of the flattening of central Dublin by them! Doubtless the commemorations will take place over Easter weekend in 2016, as they did this and every other year, but the actual anniversary of the beginning of the rising on Easter Monday is 24th April. 98 years ago today Patrick Pearse stood on the steps of the GPO and proclaimed ...

I've effectively been offline for a couple of days thanks to ongoing technical difficulties together with a lack of time in which to address them properly... I'll be back on the phone tomorrow... Anyway, that has meant I've missed a couple of days of "thanksgiving" as per my most recent self-imposed blogging discipline... Had that not be the case yesterday I would definitely have been thanking those who helped out at our Coffee Morning at the manse and those who donated to the Save a Heart Campaign which we were raising money for, a scheme whereby a team from the Royal Victoria Hospital Cardiothoracic Department are helping to revitalise cardiac care in Nigeria. In the light of that, on Friday I had planned to put on record, yet again, my thankfulness for our own wonderful, if much-derided, National Health Service and the privilege it is to work as a chaplain within it. But I may well come back to that later in the month... But for today I offer an awkward ...

I wonder what Simon Cowell would make of this? Being a little under the weather over the weekend I ended up watching the nonsense that is "The X Factor" and remembered again why I loathe these programmes... What passes for talent in Britain's pop culture these days is so mass-manufactured and over-produced that it has no real depth or authentic poignancy. That is occasionally subverted in the auditions and more frequently in "Britain's Got Talent" but in both, the genuinely talented is more than swamped by those who are simply wanting to ape other artificially produced celebrities and those who are more to be pitied than scolded. The following entry from "Ukraine's Got Talent" would never make it within a million miles of its British equivalent because of form, subject matter and, most importantly, its length ("Sorry dear, it has to be less than 3 minutes...")... It's long even by the standards of most of the things I post...

This morning in a brief reflection on Downtown Radio, my thoughts focused on a gentleman I had never heard of until last week. I wonder if you have heard of him? The life, and more specifically the death of Franciszek Honiok, radically affected the lives of millions of others including our own. According to the testimony of Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trial, on the night of August 31, 1939, Honiok was taken from a German concentration camp, where he, a German Silesian and supporter of Polish independence had been interned. He was given a lethal injection, dressed in a Polish uniform and shot. His body was transported to the town of Gleiwitz on the border of Poland and Germany, where, after a staged attack on a German radio station (pictured), his body was left outside. This was then used as proof that it was Poles who had attacked that installation, which, in turn, was cited as the final straw which forced Germany to invade Poland on this day 70 years ago. This man, who...

On this day any words by me seem trivial. Instead I post the words of "Woodbine Willie", the Rev. G.A. Studdert Kennedy , a padre in the Great War. He published many poems , most of which were deeply influenced by his experiences on the Western Front. Some are profoundly anti-war. Some seem anti-church, or at least anti-the hypocrisy that seems endemic in churches. But here's a short one for the day the guns fell silent... for a short while at least. Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain, Waste of Patience, waste of Pain, Waste of Manhood, waste of Health, Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth, Waste of blood, and waste of Tears, Waste of Youth's most precious years, Waste of ways the Saints have trod, Waste of Glory, waste of God, - War! Shalom

Found this gem while searching for material for our Sunday morning Remembrance Service. It's not appropriate for that but thought it was worth re-posting here. The story behind it's creation can be found here (I know... posting something from the Sunday Mail... I'll be struck off the pinko-liberal Christmas-card list). Having been created in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday it depicts the 169 British servicemen and women killed in Iraq up until that point. an additional 7 have died since then... Lance Corporal Sarah Holmes, Sergeant John Battersby, Trooper Lee Fitzsimmons, Guardsman Stephen Ferguson, Sergeant Duane Barwood, Nicholas Brown. Add to this the 122 casualties in Afghanistan , over 4000 US and other coalition servicemen in both Iraq and Afghanistan , and innumerable Afghan and Iraqi deaths. Will we remember them? Shalom