From the Rector

Dear Everybody, hello again.

I recently had the good fortune to attend a conference in Brazil. Although most of the time was spent in a conference facility in a basement in Sao Paulo, I did go off to see the waterfall at Iguassu. It's the one in the film "The Mission", and really spectacular - the broadest in the world. There's a walkway halfway up the falls, so that you can go out into the middle and get soaked by the spray at a safe distance. It was exhilarating. Nature at  its grandest.

And then I come home and find that nature has been at its meanest. Floods in Yorkshire, many people driven out of their homes. The floods made no distinction between those who were fully insured and those who weren't, so many people will have lost virtually everything.

And two bishops are reported as saying that the floods are God's punishment. In fact, they didn't say that, but it could be moved around to look like that; you have to be so careful what you say and how it can be taken, these days. They said that environmental degradation was one of the consequences of our corrupt nature. And that is a logical statement, in its own way.

The trouble is, that when someone is in a state of disaster or loss, however logical you may be, logic is not what is called for. What they want is sympathy, understanding from their point of view and not from an objective point of view. In a time of crisis, it is an unusual person who thinks collectively. Normally, we only have enough energy to think about ourselves and our close ones. So people will be thinking: "how is my corruption vast enough to cause floods?", and they may even feel blamed for what has happened to them.

Nature is spectacular, but sometimes also overwhelming.' Help first, work out what happened and why later.

God bless you

David Head