Justin in Jerusalem

After nearly a week of clouds and rain, it was a pleasant surprise to wake up to blue skies and sunshine. No news of further aid convoys being allowed into Gaza after yesterday's opening of the Rafah crossing. Meanwhile Israeli bombardment of Gaza continues, in preparation for the ground assault. The compound of the Greek Orthodox church of St Porphyrus  in Gaza city was hit on Thursday last killing 18 people. It's said to be the oldest church in Gaza dating from as early as 425AD.

The Radio 4 Sunday programme, interviewed the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem and the Archbishop of Canterbury on a visit there. They made a plea to the Israeli military to consider urgently the plight of all those exposed to great danger, who have lost their homes and are running out of food and water. They also made an urgent plea for initiatives of reconciliation and peace making to begin. Recently a similar appeal was made by the heads of all Christian churches in Jerusalem, gathered together under the media spotlight. I've not seen this reported until now. It's violent men on both sides with the power of life and death over others who hog the attention of newsmakers and media influencers.

Clare and I attended the St Catherine's Parish Eucharist . There were three dozen adults and eight children in the congregation, and Fr Rhys presided. Before lunch, I worked on next week's Sway and the relevant liturgical reading files for distribution. I made an effort to get ahead as tomorrow when I normally do this, we plan to visit Owain and inspect the work he's done on his new apartment. Then I had a short siesta and went for a walk around Thompson's Park until tea time. 

At short notice this week, Christian Aid Wales organised a vigil service to pray for Israel and Palestine in Llandaff Cathedral at six this evening, so we walked there to join fifty others who responded to the call for prayer together. The bilingual service lasted just half an hour and involved eight people reading quotations from suffering people on both sides. There were several others there from St Catherine's and clergy friends as well, making the effort after a day's work. 

We got home in time for 'The Archers', and after supper watched 'Antiques Roadshow', and the first of a series of three episodes of a documentary about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, key Nazi organiser of the Holocaust in 1961. Eichmann was convicted on the basis of evidence from transcripts published in Life magazine of recorded conversations between himself and Nazi sympathisers. The tapes themselves were unavailable having been hidden after the event. 

It was some years before they found their way into German government archives, and for political reasons it was only in 2020 that the surviving 15 hours worth of 70 hours of taped conversations were released to an Israeli documentary team. I recall hearing of this trial when I was a sixth former, and reading about it. The Holocaust, I already knew about, as I'd been told about it by my mother, and seen footage of it in documentaries about the war on telly.

Then in the ten o'clock news, a report from the UN that a further 14 aid trucks have crossed into Gaza during the day. Sufficient diplomatic pressure on Israel seems to have secured the passage of more trucks in the aid convoy in the days to come. We'll see. 

Finally the Anglican identity of the bombed Al-Ahli hospital has been given fair coverage on prime time BBC news, thanks to the visit of Archbishop Justin Welby to his episcopal counterpart in Jerusalem. He gave a superb interview in St George's Cathedral about the need for reconciliation, including the following observation: "How you fight determines whether peace and reconciliation is possible in the long run" Let's hope that this wise counsel has its impact on leaders on both sides who have a choice to think about their plans of action before this conflcit spirals out of control into an widespread international war.

Night away

Another call came in about officiating at yet another funeral overnight. I've been quite busy since the start of the year, plugging gaps in the Parish caused by Fr Mark being on sick leave. While I was updating my records, Clare asked me to help her check over a flight booking with her. She and Kath are going to fly to Arizona in October to visit Rachel and Jasmine.

I returned to St German's at the end of the morning to celebrate Mass, but instead of staying for the Christian Aid Lent lunch following, drove up to Kenilworth to be sure of arriving before Rhiannon returned from school. It was my turn to look after her overnight, as Kath and Anto were driving to a Sonrisa band gig over in the Welsh borderland and wouldn't return until well after midnight. 

I cooked supper for us, and was then left mostly to my own devices, as she's now at that stage when she likes to spend a lot of time in her room communicating with her friends. It'll be another year or so before she and her parents consider she's confident enough to be left on her own. Meanwhile I get to spend a little extra time with her occasionally. It's lovely to watch her growing and enjoying being a teenager.

   

Old assets, new uses

With a trip to St German's for Mass and Christian Aid Lent lunch at the end of the morning, I woke up thinking about the church hall wi-fi connectivity problem, then went hunting through my stored redundant technology bits and pieces to see what I could find. There were four Powerline adaptor plugs and ethernet cables, plus a box containing a complete wi-fi router, redundant after our broadband upgrade last year. That was about the time when I bought a wi-fi extending Powerline adaptor set, which was incompatible with the slower originals. I had to lay out more than I expected to complete the upgrade, and thus had a spare set working, in any case at a decent speed.

After Mass and lunch, I installed the kit and found that it worked as planned. The spare wi-fi extender that had been bought also connected, enabling the signal to travel to the furthest extent of the long steel and concrete building. This little success brought me no end of good cheer. I hate to see good working kit go to waste. There's still a lot more I wish I could find a use for, however.

On my afternoon walk, to the shops and the post office in two separate outings, I continued my Lenten 'wombling' effort, collecting this time thirty eight separate cans, paper cups, glass and plastic bottles, along my 3 km route. That's an average of a dozen pieces discarded per kilometre, much the same as I estimated yesterday. The number of slim energy drink cans among the detritus is remarkable, some of them tossed in the few days since I last passed by. As these beverages are marketed to sustain people who are being unusually physically active, I wondered if there's a correlation between this and total disregard for one's physical environment. 

As I was entering Tesco's, at Canton Cross, a mum and a granny emerged with a kindergarten age child in a strop, who dashed a small yoghourt drink from her lips, which hit my coat and splashed me with drops. They apologised but the child refused to, and refused defiantly to pick up the carton and take it to a bin two metres away. After I'd passed them I thought too late what I should have said to the child to bring home the fact that this behaviour was unacceptable - all the situation needed was to say "I'll tell your teacher you've been naughty!"

Within ten metres of the store entrance, curiously, there are no fewer than three litter bins, yet one can walk several hundred metres along Cowbridge Road and side streets leading off it, and rarely find a bin. It's no wonder people have got out of the habit of using them.

After supper I went over to St Catherine's Church Hall to collect some church keys I inadvertently left at St John's yesterday. The Parish youth club was in full session, with table football, ping-pong and an assortment of other table games being played, by over a dozen youngsters, and watched over by several parents, plus Fr Phelim. As the hall is a 19th century wooden building, an original temporary mission church in good repair, still finding use in the church grounds. I felt as if I was stepping back in time forty years to my days as a Curate. Even in these days of electronic devices and games, it's great that there's still a social space in which physical playful activities still continue to give pleasure and forge bonds between children that might even last a lifetime.