Christmas Message; Bourne Local December 2006

Christmas in Bourne, for me at least, has a familiar pattern. Happy, well-attended carol services (this year as for several years past the Salvation Army in the Corn Exchange, and the Methodist congregation in their own church), one or two visits to old peoples’ homes, and buying mince pies at Burtons (where I buy my bread throughout the year).

This year, so far as I could judge, the crowds in the shops, the queues in the Post Office and the traffic on the roads, were at least as great, perhaps greater, then ever before.

In our uncertain world, Bourne seems thankfully prosperous, neighbourly, safe and secure.

I have been in several places in the last two years which were none of those things. On of them was the Congo (where I was one of the E.U.’s election observers in November). There per capital income is £60 a year, average life expectancy is 45 years (and falling) and a ten year civil war has killed 3 million people (the number killed from Great Britain and France together in the First World War).

Another was the Darfur area in the Sudan, where a million people have been killed in fighting or have died from resulting displacement, and a further million are currently living on food aid in vast refugee camps, several of which I visited.

A third was Iraq, where I wanted to visit our fighting men and women`. There too, life is cheap. Terrorists daily target men, women and children. Our troops and R.A.F. crews never know when they will be the victims of a bomb by the roadside or a missile.

However civilised our existence may be here, much of the world has not become a safer or a kinder place in the two thousand years since Jesus was born.

In 2007 we must continue to do what we can to contribute to stability, and to relieve suffering and poverty, in the Third World. We must also keep up our defences, and pursue the fight against terrorism.

And I hope we do not forget, once Christmas is past, the message of universal love and hope that came from Bethlehem and Nazareth all that time ago.

A very happy Christmas to you all.