How you look at it

I’ve been as touched as much as others by the story of the antique lace wedding dress of her great, great grandmother’s which a recent bride rediscovered and wore at her own wedding and then thought she had lost when a dry cleaner firm went out of business.  It was identified in a heap in the abandoned shop, easily mistaken for a pile of discarded lace.  I’m briefly thinking of swathes of the Christian tradition as being that dress.

The essays in the catalogue of the Jerusalem exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art included a quotation read out to me yesterday: “It is in the same [Crusader] period that Islamic scholars increasingly began to interpret Qur’anic discussions of jihad, or struggle, to embrace the concept of fighting as a religious duty, rather than an inner struggle of a defence of a community.”

Members of a large school group in St Nicolas’ today were tasked with drawing things in the church which were symbolic of faith, and were directed in particular towards the font, the stained glass and so on.  I suggested that a tin of carrots was symbolic of the faith of the person who had bought it as an extra item when shopping to place in the Food Bank collecting box when coming to church on Sunday.  I checked at the end: four of them had drawn the tin.

Meanwhile, a Duke of Edinburgh Award group have returned yet again to St Nicolas' to work at the western edge of the churchyard extension on which for many years has been dumped surplus earth from digging graves and general rubbish.  There will be room for at least an additional fifteen burials when they have done, quite apart from the back rows of graves being in a more seemly setting which is something I'd promised some of the next-of-kin a very long time ago.