Back again

Sorry for my absence from this little blogging space of mine but I have been suffering from a combination of being busy, a great sadness in my heart caused by the terrible bushfires and subsequently not having much to say for myself - added to the fact that I have study to do… 

I can tell you though that I have this evening been practising the Georg Friedrich Handel version of the Coronation Anthem: 'Zadok the Priest' on the harpsichord, and I still manage to make it sound like rubbish… but I will improve with practice - I hope!

Here is a much better version and what a glorious, uplifting, piece it is. 

The beginning of this work never fails to give me a shiver!

The fires

This is a picture from the Herald Sun newspaper site, of Marysville where 1 in 5 people are believed to have perished...

The Victorian bushfires have been much on my mind this week. AGA’s brother phoned to say that they had seen the burnt remains of their house at Flowerdale, on TV, but are not allowed to go to look at it themselves because the army are still combing the area for dead bodies. Many people they new are presumed dead. Now we read of eight charred bodies found huddled around a baby they were presumably trying to save when the fires hit. As the Prime Minister said, many good people have died.

Some silly people ask where God was when this happened.  They always take it out on God when something bad happens but never say 'God is here' when something good takes place. Our Lord God is still as convenient a scape goat for unbelievers as He was all those centuries ago when he came to Earth to die for our sins!

There have been horrific stories and heroic stories. Tales of seemingly miraculous escapes and reports of those sadly waiting to find some trace of their lost ones presumed dead. We are told that some people will never be found – their bodies cremated in the intense heat. 

Around 1 million animals are believed to have perished: pets, livestock and wildlife: this includes small colonies of little known species that are close to extinction. 

Incredibly a thief has been caught on camera actually stealing the collection tins for the victims of these fires (now, I believe captured) from various places while another has been captured by the police for looting along with others who actually lit some of the fires in the first place!! Despite these few instances of wickedness there has been a great outpouring of good which justifies my belief that people are on the whole more given to good than to wickedness. Money has been pouring in, as have clothing and toys and everyday items for those who have lost their homes and livelihoods. Companies are donated free mobile phones and computers to allow contact with farflung family. A manufacturer has donated a large quantity of shoes to replace those that people lost (along with everything else they owned) while running for their lives (something you might not think of). Animals too are thought of and food, medication and other things are also in abundance – all donated out of the goodness of the hearts of all sorts of people.

All sorts of aid have arrived along with large sums of money as everyone digs into their purses to produce their ‘mite’ to assist. 

On the whole, many ‘goodnesses’ have come about as a result of these terrible fires. Goodness that cannot help but please Our Lord God. 

And finally there is this story to please your heart, especially if you are an animal lover. I won’t paraphrase it but will insert it verbatim from the Herald Sun (www.heraldsun.com.au) dated 14 February:

LEVI the unwanted stray turned into a hero when he dragged his 90-year-old owner away from her burning house and into a dam.

Gladys "Val" Cross, who adopted Levi when no one else wanted him, had the little terrier on a lead as the fire approached.

She went outside to turn off the power at her Steels Creek home without realising the fire was already on top of her.

As the house exploded in flames Levi dragged her more than 100m through smoke and across burning grass to the farm dam.

The determined war widow sheltered with Levi in the dam for more than four hours, watching her farm burn.

She even managed to pin-point the explosion she believed was the end of her brand new washing machine.

As soon as the fire front passed, neighbour Joanne Spears went to check on Ms Cross and came away feeling numb, certain she was dead.

"The house completely caved in. I kept thinking 'we've lost Val'," Ms Spears said. "We were pretty much in mourning for her. I came in and rang her niece and told her to expect bad news."

Later that night she asked passing firefighters to search for Ms Cross, and they soon returned with the 90-year-old sitting in the front seat.

Ms Spears was thrilled but not surprised to hear her neighbour survived. "If anyone was going to survive that fire it was Val."

Ms Cross escaped with burns to her face and legs, and is in the Maroondah Hospital, but her problems won't stop when she is discharged.

Friends said she was insured until six months ago when she had a stoush with her insurance company over their demands to deadlock the house. She thought it was dangerous for elderly people to be deadlocked inside in case of an emergency.

"She will hate living anywhere else," Ms Spears said.

"She is incredibly independent and competent, and I know she will not want to live anywhere other than on her property with her dog."

Englische Narzissen

English Daffodils

79 euro cents per bunch so we bought a few bunches to brighten things up a bit in this drab grey winter world…

And their scent is lovely too.

Meanwhile in Victoria seems are just as grim and it affects me mightily.  There was even a small outbreak in Chirnside Park which is where my house is!  But it was quickly doused.

I became a Victorian yesterday. 

As I watched the scenes of destruction I wondered at the fact that I felt so distressed and I realised that it was because those people are my people, that place is my home. I was no longer someone from England who had been taken to Australia against his will when a child but someone who had fallen in love with his adopted country. I can understand how Ruth felt when Naomi asked her if she wanted to go back to Moab.   Things had changed for Ruth and things have now changed for me.

A terrible day

This is a very sad day for AGA and I. 

As I write this 80 people are dead (25 of whom are firefighters) and I guess there will be a lot more. On Friday these people were alive and going about their daily work.  Probably they were complaining about the hot weather.  

Today they are all dead.

And then there are countless animals killed. Houses burnt down and whole towns have disappeared as a result of the bushfires in Victoria. If you read the news you will see such names as Marysville, Kinglake and Flowerdale. These are all places I know. They are also places that AGA went each year on holidays with his family when he was a child. Now all gone. Destroyed. No more.

But this is a small loss compared to the deaths and terrible injuries suffered by people. And then there are those who have no injuries but who have been left with just the clothes they escaped in while all else they had has been destroyed.

And some of these fires have been deliberately lit...

I won’t go into details as you can read it all for yourself online if you so choose, or see it on TV, however I will tell you that apparently the cause of these fires that led to so many of the deaths and losses is a result of what they call ember fires, starting as a result of the trees exploding and or the burning leaves being blown through the air by the fierce strong winds, and starting fires elsewhere.

The people of Marysville had no inkling that fire was about to erupt. Reports say that people are laying dead in the streets – there was no time to get away before they were engulfed.

It is a terrible, terrible tragedy.

I rang my mother today because our house is on the edge of suburban Melbourne. The 100km stretch of out of control bushfires is, relatively speaking not that far away although ti should be contained before it gets too close. She tells me that she is prepared just in case. various papers are all set to one side and the catbox for Henry is by the door. She says that while they are sure that Chirnside Park (where our house is) will be safe, people are wary and everyone keeps looking towards the fields and tree covered hills. There is nervous tension in the air.
She tells me she has spent a lot of time in tears over the deaths and losses suffered by people and the poor animals. She also told me that last night she went outside and looked up at the sky. At present the smell of smoke is everywhere and the sky is a dirty orange colour and yet as she looked up she saw a huge rainbow. She thought it very eerie and yet at the same time comforting. God with His people?

So please pray to Our Lord God. Pray for those who died, for those who are injured, for those who have lost everything, for those who mourn and for those who will be haunted by what they have seen for a long time to come.

NB: my two photos came from Today's edition of the French newspaper Le Figaro.

A Prayer request

I seem to making many prayer requests at the moment.  But that is what part of practicing the presence of God is all about.  Anyway, I shall say no more but paste in the e-mail I just received from my Mother who lives in Melbourne, Australia:

Dear Kirk, it is baking hot. Outside the temperature is 46.2C, { 47.5C in Avalon } It is like an oven. Very strong winds are making everything very unpleasant. Needless to say I have not been outside except to water the garden first thing this morning. The leaves are just dropping from the trees at an alarming rate, like Autumn.
All blinds are down and the curtains are closed to keep the house as cool as possible. Air conditioner is on with fingers crossed that the electricity keeps going.
There are five bush-fires on the go so the fire-fighters are having a very hard time trying to protect everyone and their properties but the strong winds have caused the fires to get out of control.
We are all waiting for the cool change. Pray for rain as we need it desperately.

So there you are.  Could you please pray with me for rain to come to this suffering part of the globe...

St Louis

No not the city in America but one of God's glorious saints!  King of France and brother-in-law to King Henry III of England.

While I was in Paris last weekend I visited the basilica of St Denis which is in one of that city's northern suburbs.  Here are the tombs of almost all of the French Kings and Queens.  It was quite amazing to visit and I took lots of photos (of course).

I thought I would share this one with you.  It is the reliquary (I couldn't get any closer) of St Louis: All that remains of his body after the French revolution saw the destruction of almost all of the bodies of the dead kings and queens.  It is his finger and I prayed for his intercession on behalf of the Catholic blogging community!

I took this picture in the church of St Eustache which I like to visit because it is near my favourite cooking supply shop, Madame de Pompadour was baptised there and the great Jean Philippe Rameau is buried there...  The sun was shining through the stained glass window and so I moved until it was just behind the crucifix before taking it.

Sir David Attenborough and suffering

I have been quiet these past couple of weeks but there were two very difficult assignments to complete. However I have been thinking of my little blog and occasionally reading the posts of others. Here is a nice long post on a topic that has been much on my mind over the past few days…

The other day I read an interview with Sir David Attenborough in the Telegraph and today I read another one in BBC Wildlife. The theme of the interviews was Charles Darwin and the theory of Evolution

In the reported interview it became fairly obvious (although not stated) that Sir David is an atheist. This surprised me not a little as I would have thought that with all the wonders he has seen, it would foster a belief in God. The brutality of Nature seemed among other things to be a fairly conclusive argument for Sir David who refers to people like myself as only believing in a benevolent God because I see hummingbirds. He also (albeit gently) mocks my belief that God created all creatures by stating in the BBC article that he couldn’t believe that God created a chaffinch one day and then decided to create a bullfinch on the next. This led to a mutual mocking of Our Lord God by both Sir David and the interviewer as to why He would do so. 

In the Telegraph article Sir David says that religion didn’t really come into his childhood and he remembered listening to a lecturer at University whom he admired, speaking of God’s Creation of the World and being surprised that a supposedly intelligent man would actually believe in such a thing. It interested me that he wasn’t led to think that if this intelligent man believed in God then there must be something in it. No, in his precociousness he immediately judged the man not to be as intelligent as he first thought.

(This also reminded me of some on the incidents related in the Screwtape Letters.)

Sir David’s disbelief in, as he put it, a benevolent God (and by association, any God at all) was the fact that he could only think of "... a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs." (The Telegraph)
The inference in this highly emotive argument being: How could a supposedly Benevolent Being who created the World, create a worm that would cause such a horrible condition.

From that the unspoken assumption is that therefore there is no such thing as God.

As an interesting aside Sir David does seem to hold that if there is a God, He will be benevolent one, thus betraying a Christian mindset. It doesn’t enter his mind that a god who created the World might not be as benevolent as he would like…

It seems to me that as far as the press is concerned, the God of the Old Testament has been effectively disposed of, as the creation of a barely civilised people and not worth our consideration. By picking out bits and pieces from the whole, God’s role in the Old Testament is reduced to that of an often angry being raging for blood, punishment and death. The beautifully consoling words of the Prophets like Isaiah are swept under the carpet and it is such incidents as the wars and subsequent killing of various Amelekites and Moabites etc that is focused upon – and then of course there is the Sodom and Gomorrah incident.

Having apparently dealt with the Old Testament to such an extent that anyone truly believing in what it contains, who isn’t Jewish, is immediately labelled a crank; the Press and the intelligentsia now seem intent upon blackening the name of Our Lord God in the New Testament as well. Thus we have the Discovery Channel (according to the internet news) believing that they have discovered the family tomb of Our Lord, his wife Mary Magdalene and their son Judah who they presume was the ‘lad who laid his head in Our Lord’s lap during the Last Supper’.

Oh Lord how we must offend Thee!

Anyway, I decided to look up the worm that Sir David speaks of. I found it and while it doesn’t seem to actually bore through a person’s eyeball it is nonetheless the cause of pain and suffering in that region. I also found about the Guinea worm that causes horrible injuries and disfigurement and this led me to think of malaria carrying mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, tigers that kill people, those horrible photos of sharks capturing seals off the South African coast that they seem intent on pushing down our throats at every given opportunity, as well as all the other horrible things we witness in the natural world and then I thought of our loving God and the answer is. . .

I don’t know why these things exists and why they happen as they do.

But that doesn’t mean that ergo I no longer believe in God.

That’s like saying I don’t believe that Mr Obama exists because I can’t understand why he would want to sanction abortions!

Mr Obama exists and will continue to exist whether I like what he says or not and the same goes for The Holy Trinity.

I cannot understand why terrible things happen in this world. I admit that it is difficult for me to comprehend but I do know that Almighty God exists. It is nor a belief as such. It is a fact! Perhaps one day one of these horrible things will happen to me or someone I love dearly. That still won’t have any bearing upon my knowing that God exists.

God does exist. Whenever something bad happened my father would always say: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

We are not God and so we do not His plan, nor His methods. I think that to try and judge God is a sin. All we can do is pray for succour in our pain and trouble and didn't the Holy Father say only the other day that not one tear is shed but the Lord God sees it. 

Our earthly pilgrimage was never going to be a bed of roses and for some it is even more of a trial than for others. We must have faith that the Lord God is with us. Always. 

I not only 'merely' believe in God, I KNOW that my Lord God is! 

Blessed be Holy Trinity now and for ever more!!!!

Lucy - an update

Thank you so much for your prayers. Lucy is recovered - to a degree. The Vet has told my sister that she must not allow Lucy outside any more as the stress and strain of it all is proving too much for the old lady. It is a quiet life inside from now on. Every one is relieved that she has come through it relatively unscathed and she is gradually starting to eat food again. She always was a tough old thing.
Once again I thank you all for your prayers and the one good thing that came out of it is that I have discovered, through my blogging amigo Adrienne, the wonderful blog hosted by Esther, called Prayers for our pets. I strongly suggest you pay it a visit. I shall be doing so daily so that I can add my prayers to on behalf of those in need.