It is a perfect autumn day. The sun is out and the temperatures will peak in the mid-twenties. There is the gentlest hint of a breeze, just enough to bump the odd yellow or red leaf from it's perch. The contrast of colours in the back garden is spectacular: it's hard to imagine how the grumpiest soul could not be calmed by the warm tapestries woven in the way only the natural world can do.

This being Easter, and the Blue Mountains being a tourist destination, the roads are clogged with travellers, with some places being no-go zones for locals. For most people it is a minor inconvenience, but if you had to work and had no choice but use the roads, it might be a major frustration. Like bushfires, tourism must be lived with.

A few days ago I inexplicably lost my wedding band, probably while gardening. Extensive searches have failed to turn anything up but I will keep looking. It's a mystery how it happened, since I did have gloves on at the time. I will likely keep looking forever, I think.

'Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.'

Emily Bronte

Good Friday once again. Two thousand years have passed since that first Friday on which the innocent Christ was put to death. And while observances of it have declined, a consequence of an increasingly faithless population, the meaning is the same as the first day. It has not lost of a jot of its significance for those who understand the gravity of what occurred.

I leave it to Christina Rossetti to express what I cannot.

Good Friday
 
Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?
 
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
 
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.
 
Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

There are good reasons why pride was once seen as perhaps the deadliest of sins. Typically it came before a calamitous fall. Even if you disagree with anything religious, it is almost impossible not to see the out-working of prideful behaviours in public life today. Without mentioning any names, folks swelled by their own high self-regard, disdain for others and general attitude of superiority (or blind belief in their own indominable agency) will invariably come a cropper.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with taking a healthy pride in your work, in your appearance or in what you have achieved in life. The problem occurs when it swells into something much larger and often uglier, ultimately finding a home in arrogance, conceit and vanity. Once you begin to think yourself superior to your neighbour, for whatever reason, then you have strayed into the realm of negative pride. And it can only get worse from there unless you recognise the malady for what it is and take action.

I speak as a fellow sufferer, having my own portion of intellectual arrogance to blame for a multitude of sins. That is because pride is both a problem in itself and the father of many other problem behaviours. It can spawn murderous jealousy, envy, rage, violence, adultery, theft and so forth. It is the very image of atheism, which contends that there is no God and that 'I will go it alone.' I mean no offence to those atheists who have come to the sad conclusion that there is only the material universe and are none the happier for it, but those swelled by pride and ego.

I am guilty of pride and need to fight against it. But beware, it is insidious and has many 'mild disguises'. Ultimately, the only cure is to cultivate actively a sense of humility, a quality openly mocked in modern popular culture. It is a hard road, but, according to those who have trod it, very much worth it.

I don't usually give big shout-outs but this one is very due. I recently had a health scare with a melanoma (detected late) which meant I had to have surgery at the Royal Prince Alfred Melanoma Unit in Camperdown. Melanoma's are scary things because they are very aggressive cancers and kill a lot of people, sometimes within a few months. Understandably I was worried and nervous and planning for the worst, just in case.

But the doctors, nurses and staff at RPA are that good - compassionate, kind, efficient and skilful, that being in their hands brought much relief, as I am sure many others have found too. I cannot express my gratitude more fully which wells up inside me every time I think of them. Truly, I am grateful.

As for my faith, I have found that in throwing myself at the mercy of God, it has only redoubled my ardour. In short, I am much closer to God and for that reason alone, any suffering was well worth it. It's a shame that affliction seems such a booster to faith when we should be growing all the time.

But that, I suppose, is part of the human condition. Meanwhile, let's

Consider the lilies of the field
 
Flowers preach to us if we will hear:--
The rose saith in the dewy morn,
I am most fair;
Yet all my loveliness is born
Upon a thorn.
The poppy saith amid the corn:
Let but my scarlet head appear
And I am held in scorn;
Yet juice of subtle virtue lies
Within my cup of curious dyes.
The lilies say: Behold how we
Preach without words of purity.
The violets whisper from the shade
Which their own leaves have made:
Men scent our fragrance on the air,
Yet take no heed
Of humble lessons we would read.
 
But not alone the fairest flowers:
The merest grass
Along the roadside where we pass,
Lichen and moss and sturdy weed,
Tell of His love who sends the dew,
The rain and sunshine too,
To nourish one small seed.

Christina Rossetti

The US Presidential race has settled predicably into a Biden Trump rematch. Only the demise of one or the other, whether through natural causes or imprisonment, can stall this inevitable showdown. It is not unlike four years ago and not hugely unlike four years before that (though Clinton was certainly very able), but it still marks a generally unhealthy trend in the United States. A lack of renewal.

If you dig back into the recent past of Presidential elections, you will find plenty to find encouraging. Obama vs McCain and Romney (all decent men), Bush W vs Gore and Kerry, Clinton vs Bush and Dole, Reagan vs Carter and Mondale, and so forth, it is clear that we are living in times that are producing unwanted outliers.

Biden is a good man and pretty capable but he is well past his prime. Trump is not a good man and may be quite incompetent, if his first term is anything to go by. This should not be the competition that the world's self-proclaimed premier democracy is handing an astonished planet.

We should always have older men and women in positions of prominence in our democracies. They can bring wisdom and insight and are in a better position to recall the mistakes that have not been learnt in the past, lest me make them yet again. 

But the torch needs to be passed onto younger people, something which may happen after this contest is over.

The Prodigal Son is one of the most popular of Jesus stories in Luke's gospel, and little wonder why. There is something for everyone to be found there - the ungrateful child who demands his birth right, leaving home and travelling to a 'far country.' There is the jealous older brother who cannot fathom his father's kindness to his miscreant sibling. Then there is the father, whose one and only concern is the safe return of the one who went away.

Most people at some stage are prodigals and may remain so all their lives. The pull of the material world is very great, particularly today. Money, status, power sex, drugs and the like are formidable sirens, calling on different levels in different time and ways. The promise is great, the experience almost always disappointing in the long run and often becoming disastrous. It strikes me that humans were not really built for unrelenting affluence, rather a struggle to get by that builds character, community and fellow-feeling.

I was a prodigal once, a bit of a wanderer in the desert too. The lure of good times almost always turned sour, leaving only a rising anxiety. Like the father in Jesus story, who ran to meet his son and greeted him with kisses, God accepted this prodigal back with unsurpassing love. What can I say, but thank you.

 I had a longer than usual conversation with an AI Chatbot the other day, having resolved to ask it serious questions about the world with pointed follow up questions. I was surprised by the quality of the answers.

On the Ukraine Russia conflict, AI went through in detail all the possible end-game scenarios, doubtless drawing upon the troves of information online. It baulked repeatedly though at my question about the possible Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons, giving copious caveats as to why this would be dangerous and unwise.

Well, of course it is dangerous and unwise and naturally, every other avenue should be explored first. I knew that already and wasn't trying to goad the poor program into military adventurism. But this chatbot has culled all the sensible answers that any reasonable person might think or say and so had been lead to the proffered conclusion.

Here here! I say too. But the planet is not entirely ruled by reasonable people. Would someone let loose a billion casualties to appease their vanity and pride? History tells us yes. We all hope that it would not be so.

The other night I was scrolling through FB when I came to a science page, one which I am following. That is to say, it purports to be a science page. This post featured a rubbish bin in a hotel room that someone had put a Bible into, with the description, 'Putting out the trash' I couldn't understand such a needless attempt at giving offence or to whom it was directed. But it has nothing to do with science, with professes to have nothing to say about God or Faith.

While I am sure that there are some Christians who post anti-science information on social media (equally silly), most probably live happily with both their faith and what science has to say about the phenomenological universe. For me, these two systems do not need to interact actively, for as the Catholic Catechism says, ' Good theology and good science to not contradict each other.' If I was to draw a Venn diagram, perhaps only a sliver of the two circles would overlap. So I am puzzled by what drives people to pick on the faith of others.

They may have had a bad experience of religion as children or teens. Or they may have an inflated view of the power of science to explain 'everything', which is scientism. Maybe they are just mean-spirited.

Coming back to the Faith after a long absence has equipped me better to handle the usual arguments marshalled against Christianity. Ultimately, faith is faith, a leap in the dark with a view to finding out whether something is true or not. I have found it to be true.

I found it to be true yesterday when I attended the Melanoma Clinic at RPA in Camperdown for surgery. The doctors and staff were fantastic, I cannot praise them enough, but God was there too, reassuring me, calming me, working through processes that I could not see but knew were real and abiding. I cannot prove it but I know it to be true beyond any doubt.

You see, there doesn't need to be any dissonance between God and science. Only thinking makes it so.

'I love the fitful gusts that shakes

 The casement all the day

And from the mossy elm tree takes

 The faded leaf away

Twirling it by the window-pane

With thousand others down the lane'

So goes the first verse of John Clare's 'Autumn'. Clare was the son of a farm labourer, a celebrator and chronicler of the English countryside, which underwent significant changes during his lifetime. Being from 'lowly stock', he was not taken seriously until a major revision of his work in the 20th century. And rightly so as he is a fine poet in every sense!

Autumn usually brings out the melancholy in me but I would prefer to choose another emotional pathway as this season progresses. We have had precious little autumn weather, the days being hot and sticky or even mild and sticky, the nights little different.

But today it is beginning to feel genuinely autumnal, or, at least, the seeds of autumn are planted and growing. Several of the mature trees in the back garden are yellowing and some have falling leaves. They fall crisply and with a perfunctory resignation to the grass which collects them in its vast green sieve.

Last night we had light rain and lingering fog, which left the early morning very much like a 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.' Another Romantic for another time!

March again. Last night was very warm and humid and it was hard to sleep. We ran the fan but that was largely an exercise in moving hot air about. But we were glad to have it anyway.

I have very recently entered a period of what you what call a potential health crisis. In the end it will be a matter of life or death, but of course, I want to choose life. My darling wife Ann said to me today that she would like to donate half of her remaining life to me, which she said prayerfully and with absolute conviction.

What can you say to someone who loves you so much. I was speechless, grateful and crying at the same time. What a blessing she is. I do love her so.

And another blessing is my faith. I pray always and every more intently and hope that it is in the Will of God that I might survive. He knows the end from the beginning and in His goodness and love, he hears me. And I am reminded daily that 'I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.'