Diocese of Down & Dromore

During the past 3 mornings Bishop Harold has been giving the listeners to Radio Ulster his 'thoughtsfor the day'. In case you missed them, or you would like to read them for yourself, here they are:

Tuesday 17th January

Everybody’s doing it. Nobody’s sure they can pronounce it. At first we hardly noticed it, and now it has become the big hit of 2005. I don’t know whether you’re on the easy, the moderate, the advanced or even the fiendish. You can find it in the papers, in books, in board games and computer games, and Carol Vorderman can instruct you on how best to approach it. It is, of course, Sudoku.

I have to admit to being thoroughly addicted. A good Sudoku puzzle can while away a train journey, pass a winter evening, or put you to sleep at night! It can also be one of the most frustrating and tormenting games imaginable. Especially at that moment when you relalise there are two sevens in the same box or on the same line, and there’s nothing you can do with that particular one other than draw a line through it and give up!

Sudoku is, they say, a game of pure logic. It’s all or nothing. You must never take a chance or make a guess. You must be certain before you write that number into that box. There is only one right answer. But the problem is that most of us make mistakes, and in many cases the mistakes are irreversible. The entire game is lost. I did see a version recently when looking for Christmas presents which appealed greatly to me. A Sudoku where you could wipe the slate clean, and start all over again, which in truth is the only answer when it gets into a total mess.

Many us play the game of life as though it were Sudoku. Everything is in the right place. All the answers are clearly right. Neat and tidy and under our control. We long for a life that is perfect. Then suddenly the moment of truth comes when some line or box cannot be properly solved. Then we can’t live with the image of perfection we have built up for ourselves and failed to attain to. We even create a kind of religion which seems to say: It’s all or nothing: get everything right or you’ve lost the game. Well, I’m grateful to have a Lord who comes along into the confusion and imperfection of our lives, and wipes the slate clean –many times. A Christ who himself is perfect and has solved every puzzle, who says: Come here: I’ll give you the clues, and show you some of the answers. And even if you mess it up, well, I’ll get you started all over again.

Wedneday 18th January

When I say my prayers each morning, I have a book beside my place of prayer which tells me about ‘the day that’s in it’. What particular person, theme or occasion is associated with that day.

Well, today, according to my book, since 1902, 18 January, is the beginning of the Week of Prayer (or rather Octave because it is eight days) for Christian Unity. Eight days of prayer that Christ’s own plea to his Heavenly Father might be fulfilled in all Christians: that we may all be one.

A few years ago, I remember offering the opinion that the Week of Prayer for Christians Unity had become rather ‘tired’. One of those lovely imaginative headline writers in a local paper created the headline from that comment: ‘Bishop tired of Week of Prayer for Christian Unity’. Well, do you know, in some ways I am! I am tired of the formality of it, when the same faces appear to do the same things in the same way each year (although I realize that this is at least a reminder to us); I am tired too of our divisions, so irrelevant to an up and coming generation; and I am tired of denominational allegiance taking precedence in so many of our churches over the essentials of the Christian faith which we hold in common.

And so, I want to make just one practical suggestion in this ‘Thought for the Day’ at the beginning of this important week. How would it be if everyone who names the name of Jesus Christ were, during this week, to visit a church of a different tradition: Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Methodist, Church of Ireland. Either a church which is open just to look around or to offer a prayer for the unity of Christ’s people; or a service in a church with a totally different way of doing it, or an informal gathering. And if you can’t do that, what about just listening to a person of a different tradition saying what they value in their church? In doing so, we might discover riches we didn’t know existed; we might glimpse a new angle on the face of Christ, and we would certainly enliven this important week of prayer. As one advertiser says: ‘Just do it!’.

Thursday 19th January

What are your fears? What is it you would dread being asked to do if you were a contestant on ‘I’m a Celebrity –Get me out of here’, Is it being put into closed spaces; or being surrounded by rats or spiders or snakes; or being asked to jump into deep water. Well, I’m not going to tell you my phobias- that would be too risky! But what I will tell you is this: I absolutely love heights! Nothing thrills me more than looking down on the world from the CN Tower in Toronto, or taking off and zooming upwards in a plane. And, last year, on a holiday in New Zealand, I had the opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for some time: Paragliding. My wife and friends watched from the beach as I jumped off the cliff (in tandem, of course!). I can thoroughly recommend it.

Somehow, from a height, the world seems a different place. Everything is calm, miniature, like a scale model, beautifully coloured and formed, as you swoop across like a bird, held up by amazingly strong air currents.

I rather like the world that way. ‘From a distance’ as Bette Midler puts it. ‘God is watching us, God is watching us, God is watching us from a distance’. If I had been God (perish the thought) I would have left it like that. The world looks like a much better place from a distance. Even driving through the countryside in Ulster at the height of the troubles, we would be saying to ourselves ‘From a distance…There is harmony’. From a distance you see the big picture too. But for the Christian faith, the God who sees the big picture and who could have kept himself out of it, is also amazingly interested in coming down to earth in Jesus- the very thought of which inspired many thousands of us to go to church over the last month.

It was nice to be paragliding up there. Refreshing, exhilarating, actually amazingly calm. Carried along by the strong air currents. But it is in the ordinary, the day-to-day, the down to earth things that our essential lives exist. And it is there, near, not from a distance that God meets with us. He’s here with us now. See where you spot him at work in your life today.