Post Cordoba reflections

Sunday morning, Bible Sunday, was my last visit to Calahonda to celebrate the Eucharist. Having gone to bed early, to optimise the advantage of the clocks going back an hour, I woke up well before the alarm, and even left the house twenty minutes early. Once I'd parked the car outside the church I realised that I had enough time to take a stroll down to the sea shore. It means crossing the N340 road bridge and heading through a street with a series of beach front exclusive residences, until I found a narrow lane alongside a stream which took me down to the water's edge. I was rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of a yellow wagtail, and a view of the sun over the waters, a little higher than usual at this time of morning. 

After a moment of quiet and a little Chi Gung exercise on the sand, I returned to the church, and entered at the usual time, to get ready for the service with a congregation of just over thirty. After taking my leave of those unlikely to come to next Sunday's 'bring 'n share' lunch at St Andrews, I drove back to Los Boliches where there was a congregation of forty five surrounded by the flower festival exhibits from the previous two days, still looking good. It was a successful venture, attracting around seventy visitors and receiving nearly four hundred euros in donations.

Apart from food shopping, and a brief visit to the church office in the afternoon the only thing I did all day was write up the Cordoba trip, which involved researching historical detail I'd deliberately avoided looking up before I went. As with other sacred sites in Spain, if not across Europe, a Roman temple site had been built over in the fifth century by Christians, in this case Visigothic invaders from Germany, then taken over by muslims, then re-taken by Christians. Such sites were strategic places in the power politics of each age, and religion a major dimension of this. But what of now?

Cordoba's mosque/cathedral is a UN World Heritage Site, in a European Community country, a venue for international tourism, a manifestation of 20th century globalisation of culture and its consumption. World trade has become an accepted if sometimes contentious feature of human existence. The work of the United Nations and all its specialised agencies, just like the European Community can be regarded as an interim step on a long agonising journey towards unified world governance. This goal is resisted by many who remain stuck with their ethnocentric political and economic self interest. If globalising impulses really did bring peace, prosperity, justice and security to all earth's citizens, it would signal an evolutionary step change for humankind. As long as the world remains so deeply divided between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, however, such reconciling enterprises are no more than glimpses of a distant utopia beyond reach.

I wonder if threats to places and things accorded World Heritage status from climate change, pollution, environmental damage, population explosion, or war will be enough of an extra stimulus to world citizens to make a difference in the challenge facing this generation to deal with so many critical issues facing our future?