Hindsight

A cold night and a grey morning to wake up to. I preached at the St Catherine's Parish Eucharist. There were about two dozen present. A retiring collection was taken for Ukraine and over £300 was raised. USPG is acting as a channel for aid donations on behalf of the diocese in Europe, which has a chaplaincy in Kyiv. I'll make my donation through them. Clare tried giving on-line through Disasters Emergency Committee channel, but was puzzled when it didn't go through properly. I suspect their banking channel was being overwhelmed at the time.

More than one and a half million Ukrainians have left the country since the invasion started. Despite the clampdown on mentioning the war, let alone protesting, there are been anti-war demonstrations in cities all over Russia, and thirteen thousand people have been arrested for protesting, four thousand of them today in Moscow, so clearly news about the war is getting out and slowly a wave of indignation is rising among the ordinary people. What would be the critical mass of numbers that would bring pressure to bear on the regime to abandon their plans, I wonder?

After lunch I sat down to relax, and was surprised to wake up two hours later. I didn't even feel tired, that's the puzzle. Then took a brisk walk up to Llandaff Cathedral, to take advantage of the climb up the Dean's Steps. I realised yesterday that I need to be climbing more steps every day, as it was hard work climbing up the steep path from shore level to cliff top, an ascent of about seventy metres. Back in the day when the CBS office was on the top floor of the Motorpoint Arena office suite, I would climb the eighty odd steps of the back stair office entrance on every visit, three or four times a week. There are a few short steep slopes around this district but nothing to compare with the Motorpoint back stairs. No wonder I find long climbs hard work these days - not breathlessness, but leg muscles stiffening.

Nothing of interest on telly this evening, so I continued work on a project for Good Friday. I am doing a midday service at St John's, and want to produce an on-line equivalent to go out at the same time. The idea is to look back from the perspective of the 'darkness at noon' enveloping Calvary to the weeks that led up to our Lord's crucifion. So many warnings given by Jesus that went unheeded, not understood by his followers. 

The present situation with Putin's brutal assault on Ukraine is posing the question - how did we not see this coming? The west is in a relationship of mutual dependency with Russia on some key trading issues as well as energy. This has developed without due heed for his mindset which was formed by the KGB in the era of soviet tyranny. How could this have not been fully taken into account in the scramble to do business? We see what we'd prefer to see, today as two thousand years ago.