I think that April and May just might be my favourite months of the year. It never fails to thrill me with delight as I drive into Ickenham along Long Lane and see the abundance of colour on the cherry blossom trees, having first passed a swathe of daffodils by the side of the A40. The vista of the blossom trees lasts only a very short while before the breezes blow the petals along the ground like confetti. It is also in May that wild flowers come into their own in the meadows. I was fortunate in the last week in May to be in the French Pyrenees and one of the most beautiful places I visited was the Circe de Gavarnie. It is a very high cliff face about 2 miles across at the end of a valley. It is a place of great beauty and majesty. Snow was still on the mountaintops, the meadows were rich with the colours of the spring flowers, crystal clear water babbled everywhere, and pure white clouds drifted across a deep blue sky. And it reminded me of a piece of writing by Thomas Merton. He wrote:

All nature is meant to make us think of paradise. Woods, fields, valleys, hills, the rivers and the sea, the clouds travelling across the sky, light and darkness, sun and stars, remind us that the world was first created as a paradise for the first Adam, and that in spite of his sin, and ours, it will once again become a paradise when we are all risen from death in the second Adam. Heaven is even now mirrored in created things. All God’s creatures invite us to forget our vain cares and enter into our own hearts, which God Himself has made to be His paradise and our own. If we have God dwelling within us, making our souls His paradise, then the world around us can also become for us what it was meant to be for Adam – his paradise. (Thomas Merton: No Man is an Island)

When we can stop and take time to stare at the world around us, we begin to realise not only what a wonderful creation it is, but that it must have been made by a wonderful Creator and cannot just have ‘happened’ by chance. And the more I look, the more I see God in all things and realise He is worthy of thanks and praise.
Revd Ken Tombs.

FROM ST GILES’ REGISTERS

Baptisms
May 22nd     Imogen Grace Bridge
                    Finlay Robert Bridge
       29th      Elsie Mae Potter
                    Lloyd Frederick Christopher Potter
                    Daniel John Stroud
Jun. 12th     Lewis John Davey-Lee
                   Tara Louise Hamilton
                   Nicola Salhotra

Weddings
May 7th       John Bernhard Bandler and Naomi Abigail Newstead
Jun. 4th      Christopher Richard Burton and Lisa Marie Stuart
       10th     Stuart Patrick James Campey and Carrie Hooper

Cremations at Breakspear Crematorium
May 6th      Maria Karla Price, aged 38
      18th     Stanley Wheeler, aged 95
                  William Lesley Paget Robinson, aged 81 (after service in St Giles’ Church)
      20th     Kathleen (Kitty) Mary Coningsby Smith, aged 95

I recently read from an anonymous source:
“Johnny liked church pretty well except for the intercessory prayers, which he thought were far too long. So when his dad asked the priest to say grace one day at a meal, Johnny was worried. But, to his surprise, the prayer was brief and to the point. Pleased, Johnny said: “You don’t pray long when you’re hungry, do you?”

We read in Matthew Chapter 6 verse 7: “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words”; so perhaps Johnny’s concern is shared at times even by Jesus.

Unsurprisingly, being in the business of communication, Christians tend to want to use words in generous measure…and, if fewer words are to be used, then how can the message be given the impact it needs?

Fortunately new technology has offered some scope and, increasingly churches are making use of sound systems, digital projection, web sites to name but a few examples; and at a meeting on Church structures there was even the suggestion that one whole layer of the structure might become “virtual” in the sense of avoiding the need to meet with one another. It was argued that this would solve the problem of finding suitable venues.

Already emails have replaced some of the items, which traditionally relied on the postal system. I couldn’t help wondering whether, in the current context, St Paul would be replacing his letters with electronic forms of communication.

However, perhaps more common and widely used are the text messages that are sent on mobile phones. These messages use a facility called SMS (short message system), which, as it says, relies on being short enough to fit on the small display that occupies the small space above the numbers and letters for dialing. As a result, the young people, in particular, who mainly choose this means of communication, have developed an abbreviated language that often leaves the older generations wondering how to understand so much transmitted “news/ideas/requests” in so few characters and numerals.
An enquiry arising out of concern for your health might simply be: “ruok?”

Strangely enough, we can find times in ancient history when the classical languages also chose economy of characters. New Testament Greek, for example, attached numeral meanings to its letters for expressing dates and numbers; while Hebrew managed to do without vowels and to get many varied meanings to fit the same written word. How often we find notes in our Bibles to say that there are possible alternatives to the translation given in English.

Of all the short messages and abbreviated word forms, in my opinion, there are none packed with so much meaning, explanation and life-changing revelation as the single Symbol used by the early Christians (fish symbol)

It represented an acrostic, for the Greek word fish pronounced ICHTHUS

The letters each having a meaning:

Dennis Dove