Dear Friends,

 

I hope you’ll all be coming to our annual summer Fete, which will be held on Saturday 22^nd July on the field below the school. The theme this year will be ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, the title of Jules Verne’s classic, and if you really want to enter into the spirit of the occasion, you can think of an appropriate fancy-dress outfit, and dress up for the parade.

 

These days. of course, you don’t have to take 80 days to get around the world; you could do it in not much more than a weekend. People are accustomed to travelling much further now, and they frequently do so – though the cheap flights which make all this travel possible, raise huge questions in the debate on global warming. When I first got married, we spent our week’s honeymoon in a farm cottage on the edge of the Cotswolds; in contrast, the couples marrying in our parish this summer could, between them, compile a holiday brochure of exotic places: Australia, USA`, India, the Maldives, Greek islands, to name but a few of their chosen destinations. So it seems that the world is getting smaller.

 

Unfortunately, as the world has got smaller, so, it seems, have some people’s minds: it takes more than Easyjet to widen the horizons of many. It was an answer I received while collecting locally for Christian Aid recently which prompted me to write on this theme: when I introduced myself as the person who’d come to collect the envelope, the response from one householder was ‘Not for me, thank you’. I was momentarily lost for words. How could I begin to explain that this was the whole point of what an organization such as Christian Aid is about: realising that the world doesn’t begin and end with ‘ME’. Living here in this relatively affluent part of the world, we’re not the people in desperate need of ‘aid’ – but if you look behind the more sensational headlines in the media, there are stories almost every day of areas in the world where the harvests are failing because of drought (and the global warming recklessly caused by the self-centred West of the world is partly to blame for that) and through no fault of their own, powerless people simply do not have enough to live on.

 

So help to remind us that we are part of a world-wide family, of which many members are not as fortunate as we are, our parish is soon to be twinned with a parish in Zambia – the Anglican Church in Zambia has a long-standing link with our Diocese of Bath & Wells, and we shall be a part of that. Wraxall school, too, will be linked with a school in our Zambian parish. We’ll keep you posted in the magazine with news of our twinning arrangements, as soon as we have more details.

 

So do come to our fete on July 22^nd and have fun on your fantasy journey round the world – and remember, too, that the world is much bigger than our comfortable little corner of it.

John Wesley used to say ‘The world is my parish’ – ambitious, maybe, but I can see what he was getting at.  A hymn from our new hymn book puts this well:

 

When the church of Jesus shuts its outer door,

lest the roar of traffic drown the voice of prayer:

may our prayers, Lord, make us ten times more aware

that the world we banish is our Christian care.

 

If our hearts are lifted where devotion soars

high above this hungry suffering world of ours:

lest our hymns should drug us to forget its needs.

forge our Christian worship into Christian deeds.

 

 

With love, 

Rosey