St Mary’s Musings                                  Waste not..want not!

Perhaps a few of us will remember the wartime imperative about not wasting anything at a time when just about everything was in short supply! Today with plentiful supplies available – one might say excessively abundant supplies - of food and consumer goods, sensitivity to and awareness of waste has been much reduced. Although some households carefully choose their purchases, and conscientiously recycle their plastic, paper and glass, the evidence is undeniable of a crisis in waste management and waste pollution worldwide.

The season of Lent traditionally offers the opportunity both to give up something we like and to do something we might not normally choose to do. As children we gave up sweets, and saved our pennies for the Missionary box or similar charity. As adults today the choices are wider and can have much more impactful consequences. The choice of foods, without plastic wrapping, locally grown rather than transported half way across the world to our table; water from the tap rather than in plastic bottles which will take hundreds of years to decompose if not recycled. 

Around 100,000 tons of plastic rubbish makes up the 600,000 square miles of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The situation with landfill is no better. Here one of the worst culprits is the fashion industry. Very few people now buy clothing expecting it to last for repeated wearing over a long time. ‘Fast Fashion’ sees cheap clothes, produced in sweatshops abroad, worn once or twice then discarded. The charity shops normally have a comprehensive selection of sizes and styles, - recycling off the peg, giving financial aid for any number of charities. Oxfam for example saves over 7000 tons of clothing from landfill annually.

Lent gives the chance to look at our lifestyle, to change our ways, to play a small but nevertheless important part in waste reduction. Giving up some favoured foods and composting our food wastes. Repairing worn or broken items if we can rather than replacing them. Being more careful about the segregation of waste items into the rubbish bins. Making more visits to the charity shops, for toys, hardware, clothes, gifts, the list is endless! There is no such thing as junk – it is good stuff in the wrong place. Sir David Attenborough has made it clear, “For the sake of our planet we must focus on our waste crisis”.

God’s Divine providence is the source of all that we have. We cannot rightly be careless about consumption, hasty about waste or thoughtless about throwaways. We pray that God’s Spirit will move in us this Lent and bring us to care more for our precious world.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   David Peacock
                        

Reflection for the month - April

Stations of the Cross

The fourteen stations, to be seen as you move around the church, take us through the final hours of Christ’s passion and death upon the cross. Suffering and dying for our salvation, He carried the burden of our sinfulness for our redemption.

Take a little time to stand before each station and, if you can, place yourself there. Imagine at the first station it is you who is the subject of the story, a sinner, responsible and going to die for your own sinfulness, and in so doing realise the terrifying consequences to follow which will end in your own death.  Consider the crushing weight of the cross as it is dropped across your back, raw from flogging.

Remember how dearly our mothers loved and cared for us, as we see Jesus facing His mother as His walk to Calvary begins.

Jesus fell three times beneath the weight of the cross, how many times do we fall under the temptations to sin? Who is our ‘Simon’ there to help us up and on our way again?

Jesus left the impression of His holy face on Veronica’s towel – what impression will we leave for others to hold in their memories of us?

The women of Jerusalem wept for Jesus. Who might be weeping for us?

The utter indignity and the terrible pain of crucifixion are surely beyond our imagining. How could anyone inflict such treatment on Jesus to the point that He called out asking God if He had been forsaken, yet for all that torment He said, “Father forgive them”. Do we so readily forgive those who offend us?

At the thirteenth station Jesus is taken down from the cross and in the fourteenth laid in the tomb. We are left as would have been his followers, desolated and sorrowing. Thankfully we know, as perhaps they would have hoped, that there is a fifteenth joyful and glorious station – the Resurrection. Dying He destroyed our death, rising He restored our life. Amen.