Tom and I lowered the canoe into the river beside an old alder stump that had seen fifty years of floods. The water gurgled its river song, and somewhere meandering-miles downstream the salt sea whispered on the sandy bar below Barnstaple town. Rivers seem to remain unchanged, but for new gravel banks and fallen trees, for generations. Climbing into a canoe is to pass into another ancient privileged land where you are an honorary citizen of the river. Your new neighbours may object a little, like the rafts of dabbling mallard, but on the whole they let you pass with little notice. And so, with friends Ben and Kit, we entered the river world for a magical day, and paddled downstream enraptured, gliding sometimes silently, sometimes with companionable talk, sandy banks, tangled roots, over ridges of rock where the river leapt and foamed a little. Soon we came to Junction Pool where the Mole runs into the Taw. Anyone who has read and loved Williamson's Tarka the Otter knows these fabled ottery places where Tarka caught his first Sea-trout and where he learnt to fear man. Old oak woodland bobbed with new wild daffodils, grassy banks were brilliant green, buds swelled on branches trailing in the river, and flood debris reminded us that the river sometimes rose up muddy and heartless, flooding fields and tearing away fences.
No otters today, but we enjoyed herons flying above their rookery in Head wood, buzzard pairs sailed and circled above the secret river, and the white throated dippers flew from rock to water-cascading rock, sometimes disappearing from sight beneath the river torrent. But finest of all were the kingfishers. How they love this river! Every stretch seemed to have its azure and orange banksman. One flew upstream over our paddles, sun catching the lustre of azure back. We both involuntarily gasped as if it was for the first time we had been thrilled by this shooting and dazzling trajectory of light and beauty. Well I can see why the poet priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” But his point, apart from a gift for rejoicing in God's creation, was to say that all of life is worship for those who see the incarnate Christ. He finishes his sonnet with “For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.” Christ entered this world; he has earthed heaven in ten thousand ways so that all men, if they will open their eyes and their hearts, can see God at work in all things, in all of creation. Life is worship, whether it is the Sabbath hymnal of the gurgling river and flaming kingfisher messengers, or the work and care we spend out for our families and employers on a Monday.
27 February 2008 – Косово и метохија
It is hard for a foreigner to say anything about Kosovo without sounding either smug or fatuous. The West is trying to move things on in a rational way, but it is a legal, moral and emotional problem that will not be moved on without pain and perhaps tears. I feel for Serbian friends. And whilst I disagreed with NATO's recourse to bombing and invasion in 1999, we were all relieved to see the back of Serbian para-military police in Kosovo. This poster seen in Raška just over the border says Glavu dajem – Kosmet ne dajem (My head I give but not Kosovo) and other rhetoric along the same lines; plenty share this and recent history tells us they mean it.
Kosovo is a high fertile basin walled in by inhospitable mountains. Not surprisingly people have always sought to settle there, and when allowed, they have put down deep cultural roots. The Serbian name, Kosovo i Metohija, reminds us that it is the cradle of Serbian civilization and spirituality. Here the brief flowering of a Medieval empire began. The name Metohija means holy lands and refers to the many important Serbian monasteries and churches founded here. And it was here that they met the Turks in 1389 on Kosovo Polje. The Serbs chose battle, and inevitable and eventual defeat rather than compromise their statehood and spiritual freedom. This choice has been repeated many times, more recently facing the Austrians before WW1 and the Germans before WW2. Whilst the West learnt to be rational in comfortable prosperity, the Serbs hung on to their soul through fire. We have a lot to thank them for and we should be patient and helpful.
The very geography of Kosovo has drawn settlers, and the storms of imperial history gusting around it have caused many major movements of people. Large Serbian migrations left Kosovo to escape Turkish oppression and reprisals. “Turks” (that is Slavic moslems, Albanians and ethnic Turks) left Kosovo in tens of thousands during the first Balkan war of 1912 that pushed the Ottomans out. The Germans dismembered Yugoslavia, temporarily, attaching Kosovo to a greater Albania in 1941, and more recently Tito accepted Albanian migrants and refugees from the insane Maoist regime of Albania. After the 1999 expulsion of the Serb military, vengeful Albanians flooded back in expelling another wave of Serbs (and gypsies). Burning villages and sad migrations form a timeless Balkan pattern.
It is hard to summon up much passion for nationalism. Waving flags, whether the Serbian tricolour or the Union Jack, stir distasteful memories. Most of us are an extraordinary mixture of genes and cultures, and the idea that cultural diversity is dangerous is absurd. The “otherness” built into each of us provides hate enough for shame and war. No, diversity is what makes the colourful fabric of human societies filled to the brim with potential. God made his creation with an astonishing and beautiful diversity. That same creative genius, and potential, is mirrored in human culture, tradition and mythology. But as usual it is flawed; our fear of otherness makes us hate our fellow man as often as we love him. But, God came to earth as a man, and through Christ's sacrifice, as Paul tells the Ephesians, he “destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
The breaking down of that wall between strangers and the wall between man and God gives us a context for the exercise of compassion for those who are grieving, and a patience to work for reconciliation. An opportunity is coming up. No one seems to have mentioned the Eurovision Song Contest due to take place in Belgrade. Marija Šerifović won last year with her song Molitva (prayer). Oh dear! What is going to happen? Certainly an occasion, if it happens, for all of us foreigners to exercise patience and understanding.
7 February 2008 – Beauty of Eden
What is the difference between despair and anger? I get angry about plenty of things in the world, but I seldom give way to despair. Our reckless and selfish disregard for the natural environment is likely to make the ecologically aware very angry, and perhaps understandably drive many to despair. I found myself contemplating the differences when I asked a friend if he would paint us a picture, not something I am used to doing but rather exciting. My subject incidentally is the wonder of Adam at the dawn of Creation, perhaps when he is naming the animals. Or maybe the innocent joy, of both Adam and his Eve, in that Eden of uncorrupted desire and wonder. Adam the steward; husbandman of the Creator's joyful genius, knitted and embroidered timelessly and marvellously, laid out before us, to explore and enumerate right down to its genetic code and antediluvian palaeontology. And dear artist, please don't overlook the translucent and gleaming helix serpent, entwined around our fallible wills!
I received 3 sample paintings to aid our dialogue but I was warned that the Family Portrait was “a bit saccharine”. I don't see that at all; but I am not in step for a moment with contemporary fashion. I see a painting full of light and fun, a celebration of family, love, beauty, colour, landscape, the bigger issues of ecology perhaps. There is lots to celebrate yet. Is it possible, that contemporary art is mordant and cynical? Even anger, which I respect, is a little too hopeful. The other 2 pictures I found monochrome, which may be a prejudice, but I don't catch the sense of celebration that the person of hope can still find in the wreckage of the world. The She-Bear Awakes is interesting however; what would the she-bear of old England (with mutated paws that make you feel eerily responsible) think, after centuries-long hibernation, of her arboreal paradise tamed and sullied?
I am angry about the ecological disaster of our planet, and more recently, increasingly exercised by the folly and loss of the West's wretched wars. But I do not despair because I have hope that there is a future. Just today the American primaries are transfixing us like a football contest, but against all the odds in such a brutal environment of vested interest and defence of privilege, there are some voices of goodness, something beyond selfishness. The people might just be encouraged to make their better selves heard. Hope is like a migration call. It is wired into us so that it knows the difference between right and wrong, and that the difference matters. If we thought it didn't matter, as all of us sometimes are tempted to feel, we would indeed despair like prisoners in a secret jail. But it does matter, and God above and beyond all has chosen to make himself known to us, especially, as St Paul puts it, through “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. We should be angry, but with hope we shall have reason to be angry and never to despair.
North Devon's green hills just glistened with water in the unaccustomed sun. Black crows of all sorts seemed to billow and swirl like tea leaves in the stiff breeze. Jackdaws sit one with another on the roof or pirouette in the gusty air. “Those who hope in the Lord” said Isaiah will “soar on wings like eagles”, or ravens. Those largest of the crow family are also paired off, folding wings and dropping like divers and as if for joy they croak almost like cow bells, a sound as ancient and beautiful as Eden.
6 February 2008 – History and pain
Serbia's presidential elections teetered in the pro-Europe Tadić's favour, but only just. Serbia remains deeply divided and hurt. Multi-ethnic and “European” Vojvodina and the North voted more strongly in favour of the Democratic candidate, but the Serbian centre and South was convincingly in favour of the Radical party candidate; for them Kosovo is non-negotiable, and in effect the European Union and its pragmatic agenda to cut Kosovo loose can go hang. They have a good point although the educated urban population is equally pragmatic in wanting to put a sorry history of friction with the Kosovo Albanians behind them. There is a life to be lived, most of them feel; those of us who are pro-European Union on many grounds, not least for the hope that it will reduce the risk of European wars, want to see barriers removed whilst ethnic aspiration and identity adequately recognized, even celebrated. Getting the Western Balkans into the EU seems a safer environment for moving on together, if and only if its members accept the rules and laws of European civil society.
But this is the stumbling block. In Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro there are people sitting in cafés and going about normal life who are guilty of war crimes during the civil war. Liberal minded people in all of these societies, as well as the European War Crimes Tribunal, rail against this. It can drive you to despair or anger, depending on your disposition towards the world. But these same people's grandparents, I am guessing, came out on the streets of Belgrade in 1941 to protest at their government's treaty with Hitler which would have kept Yugoslavia out of World War 2. The people refused to abandon their fellow Slavs, especially the Russians. The treaty was torn up, the Government went into exile in London, and fierce retribution fell upon the people of Yugoslavia, especially the Serbs. Swift invasion was followed by a Fascist reign of terror during which some one and half million people perished. That sort of heroism, which greatly aided the Allies, comes from the same stock that we find so inconvenient over Kosovo. This is an issue of justice and pragmatism; the facts of history and the reality of national pain.
27 January 2008 – Returned to the rooky wood
Did the world suddenly turn last week? Many of us who have been wringing our hands with a mix of anger and shame over the environmental despoliation of the planet have long anticipated a settling of both natural and economic balance sheets. If you have a theocentric world-view you know that our reckless greed and imperious attitude to the poor will come back to judge us. One bank has failed, but the solution is to sell it but not without Treasury guarantees thus “privatising gains and socialising losses”. But there will be more of them, and now the markets have adjusted downwards leaving a pit in the stomach, as if a stampede wasn't already likely. But, in a nick of time there was an incroyable explanation; Societe Generale was torpedoed by a rogue trader spilling £3.7bn losses. Turbo capitalism is greedy and dangerous; well, to be fair to economic theory, We are greedy and dangerous. If we could only sober up for a moment we might try to make democracy more democratic and take ownership of our economies with their consequences for people and the natural environment.
After an enjoyable afternoon in the Tate Britain gallery looking at a blizzard of masters we walked along the river to Chelsea. Feeling the need for tea and rest we settled down at the table of one of those companionable and exclusive cafés nestling in a small square of very expensive houses. Well pored over newspapers lay in a happy heap, a couple of smart Russian women chattered energetically behind us, locals came and went, a French sounding waiter made us a pot of insipid tea and after a long and pleasant interval charged us £8.40! That was money happily spent but something of a record for me! If only one could have taken a magic carpet over the river to Lewisham were a day later we bought 2 rounds of bacon butties made by a cheerful Pakistani for £3.20! We must blame property prices I suppose, but no matter how far the world turns and property falls it seems hard to conceive Chelsea becoming a wasteland of greasy-spoons and white vans.
Our travels took us to Cambridge where the odd contemplative moment was snatched in a church, places that had lived at the heart of the Reformation. The theocentric world-view reassures us that God is in charge of history, yet his walk on earth was in humility among those who knew how far they had fallen; the woman who came to Jesus to anoint his feet with precious oils did a costly act with a gratitude that should teach us all. It would turn the world the right way up. And with huge gratitude we went with my sister to the Norfolk coast at Burnham Overy to enjoy flocks of small black Brent geese and the whistling widgeon feeding and dabbling in flooded meadows behind the sea wall. A stiff wind made birding difficult, but what a joy to see waders feeding, duck flighting, geese grazing, oyster catchers calling. Sight of the day had to be a barn owl hunting over the pastures, broad pale wings buffeted by the rain and wind over the so green grass and pools. And praise God for aconites, yellow glistening wet coming up through the winter leaves. Back in London a walk along the embankment found swirling flocks of starlings coming to roost under the Albert bridge; suddenly a sparrow hawk attacked from nowhere, scattered a few birds and plucked one out of the air. Now there is sun and a real promise of the changing season. The Jackdaws are excited, great tits are on station singing, and market turmoils notwithstanding the rooks have returned to their rooky wood.
Tom and I lowered the canoe into the river beside an old alder stump that had seen fifty years of floods. The water gurgled its river song, and somewhere meandering-miles downstream the salt sea whispered on the sandy bar below Barnstaple town. Rivers seem to remain unchanged, but for new gravel banks and fallen trees, for generations. Climbing into a canoe is to pass into another ancient privileged land where you are an honorary citizen of the river. Your new neighbours may object a little, like the rafts of dabbling mallard, but on the whole they let you pass with little notice. And so, with friends Ben and Kit, we entered the river world for a magical day, and paddled downstream enraptured, gliding sometimes silently, sometimes with c
ompanionable talk, sandy banks, tangled roots, over ridges of rock where the river leapt and foamed a little. Soon we came to Junction Pool where the Mole runs into the Taw. Anyone who has read and loved Williamson's Tarka the Otter knows these fabled ottery places where Tarka caught his first Sea-trout and where he learnt to fear man. Old oak woodland bobbed with new wild daffodils, grassy banks were brilliant green, buds swelled on branches trailing in the river, and flood debris reminded us that the river sometimes rose up muddy and heartless, flooding fields and tearing away fences.
No otters today, but we enjoyed herons flying above their rookery in Head wood, buzzard pairs sailed and circled above the secret river, and the white throated dippers flew from rock to water-cascading rock, sometimes disappearing from sight beneath the river torrent. But finest of all were the kingfishers. How they love this river! Every stretch seemed to have its azure and orange banksman. One flew upstream over our paddles, sun catching the lustre of azure back. We both involuntarily gasped as if it was for the first time we had been thrilled by this shooting and dazzling trajectory of light and beauty. Well I can see why the poet priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” But his point, apart from a gift for rejoicing in God's creation, was to say that all of life is worship for those who see the incarnate Christ. He finishes his sonnet with “For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.” Christ entered this world; he has earthed heaven in ten thousand ways so that all men, if they will open their eyes and their hearts, can see God at work in all things, in all of creation. Life is worship, whether it is the Sabbath hymnal of the gurgling river and flaming kingfisher messengers, or the work and care we spend out for our families and employers on a Monday. 
It is hard for a foreigner to say anything about Kosovo without sounding either smug or fatuous. The West is trying to move things on in a rational way, but it is a legal, moral and emotional problem that will not be moved on without pain and perhaps tears. I feel for Serbian friends. And whilst I disagreed with NATO's recourse to bombing and invasion in 1999, we were all relieved to see the back of Serbian para-military police in Kosovo. This poster seen in Raška just over the border says Glavu dajem – Kosmet ne dajem (My head I give but not Kosovo) and other rhetoric along the same lines; plenty share this and recent history tells us they mean it.
It is hard to summon up much passion for nationalism. Waving flags, whether the Serbian tricolour or the Union Jack, stir distasteful memories. Most of us are an extraordinary mixture of genes and cultures, and the idea that cultural diversity is dangerous is absurd. The “otherness” built into each of us provides hate enough for shame and war. No, diversity is what makes the colourful fabric of human societies filled to the brim with potential. God made his creation with an astonishing and beautiful diversity. That same creative genius, and potential, is mirrored in human culture, tradition and mythology. But as usual it is flawed; our fear of otherness makes us hate our fellow man as often as we love him. But, God came to earth as a man, and through Christ's sacrifice, as Paul tells the Ephesians, he “destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” 
What is the difference between despair and anger? I get angry about plenty of things in the world, but I seldom give way to despair. Our reckless and selfish disregard for the natural environment is likely to make the ecologically aware very angry, and perhaps understandably drive many to despair. I found myself contemplating the differences when I asked a friend if he would paint us a picture, not something I am used to doing but rather exciting. My subject incidentally is the wonder of Adam at the dawn of Creation, perhaps when he is naming the animals. Or maybe the innocent joy, of both Adam and his Eve, in that Eden of uncorrupted desire and wonder. Adam the steward; husbandman of the Creator's joyful genius, knitted and embroidered timelessly and marvellously, laid out before us, to explore and enumerate right down to its genetic code and antediluvian palaeontology. And dear artist, please don't overlook the translucent and gleaming helix serpent, entwined around our fallible wills!
I received 3 sample paintings to aid our dialogue but I was warned that the Family Portrait was “a bit saccharine”. I don't see that at all; but I am not in step for a moment with contemporary fashion. I see a painting full of light and fun, a celebration of family, love, beauty, colour, landscape, the bigger issues of ecology perhaps. There is lots to celebrate yet. Is it possible, that contemporary art is mordant and cynical? Even anger, which I respect, is a little too hopeful. The other 2 pictures I found monochrome, which may be a prejudice, but I don't catch the sense of celebration that the person of hope can still find in the wreckage of the world. The She-Bear Awakes is interesting however; what would the she-bear of old England (with mutated paws that make you feel eerily responsible) think, after centuries-long hibernation, of her arboreal paradise tamed and sullied?
I am angry about the ecological disaster of our planet, and more recently, increasingly exercised by the folly and loss of the West's wretched wars. But I do not despair because I have hope that there is a future. Just today the American primaries are transfixing us like a football contest, but against all the odds in such a brutal environment of vested interest and defence of privilege, there are some voices of goodness, something beyond selfishness. The people might just be encouraged to make their better selves heard. Hope is like a migration call. It is wired into us so that it knows the difference between right and wrong, and that the difference matters. If we thought it didn't matter, as all of us sometimes are tempted to feel, we would indeed despair like prisoners in a secret jail. But it does matter, and God above and beyond all has chosen to make himself known to us, especially, as St Paul puts it, through “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. We should be angry, but with hope we shall have reason to be angry and never to despair.
Did the world suddenly turn last week? Many of us who have been wringing our hands with a mix of anger and shame over the environmental despoliation of the planet have long anticipated a settling of both natural and economic balance sheets. If you have a theocentric world-view you know that our reckless greed and imperious attitude to the poor will come back to judge us. One bank has failed, but the solution is to sell it but not without Treasury guarantees thus “privatising gains and socialising losses”. But there will be more of them, and now the markets have adjusted downwards leaving a pit in the stomach, as if a stampede wasn't already likely. But, in a nick of time there was an incroyable explanation; Societe Generale was torpedoed by a rogue trader spilling £3.7bn losses. Turbo capitalism is greedy and dangerous; well, to be fair to economic theory, We are greedy and dangerous. If we could only sober up for a moment we might try to make democracy more democratic and take ownership of our economies with their consequences for people and the natural environment.
After an enjoyable afternoon in the Tate Britain gallery looking at a blizzard of masters we walked along the river to Chelsea. Feeling the need for tea and rest we settled down at the table of one of those companionable and exclusive cafés nestling in a small square of very expensive houses. Well pored over newspapers lay in a happy heap, a couple of smart Russian women chattered energetically behind us, locals came and went, a French sounding waiter made us a pot of insipid tea and after a long and pleasant interval charged us £8.40! That was money happily spent but something of a record for me! If only one could have taken a magic carpet over the river to Lewisham were a day later we bought 2 rounds of bacon butties made by a cheerful Pakistani for £3.20! We must blame property prices I suppose, but no matter how far the world turns and property falls it seems hard to conceive Chelsea becoming a wasteland of greasy-spoons and white vans.
Our travels took us to Cambridge where the odd contemplative moment was snatched in a church, places that had lived at the heart of the Reformation. The theocentric world-view reassures us that God is in charge of history, yet his walk on earth was in humility among those who knew how far they had fallen; the woman who came to Jesus to anoint his feet with precious oils did a costly act with a gratitude that should teach us all. It would turn the world the right way up. And with huge gratitude we went with my sister to the Norfolk coast at Burnham Overy to enjoy flocks of small black Brent geese and the whistling widgeon feeding and dabbling in flooded meadows behind the sea wall. A stiff wind 
made birding difficult, but what a joy to see waders feeding, duck flighting, geese grazing, oyster catchers calling. Sight of the day had to be a barn owl hunting over the pastures, broad pale wings buffeted by the rain and wind over the so green grass and pools. And praise God for aconites, yellow glistening wet coming up through the winter leaves. Back in London a walk along the embankment found swirling flocks of starlings coming to roost under the Albert bridge; suddenly a sparrow hawk attacked from nowhere, scattered a few birds and plucked one out of the air. Now there is sun and a real promise of the changing season. The Jackdaws are excited, great tits are on station singing, and market turmoils notwithstanding the rooks have returned to their rooky wood.