Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. Usually at this time of the year one of my greatest pleasures has been to go into the garden in the early evening and watch swifts dive and dart in the sky. I haven't seen a single swift this year. Partly as a result of bad weather in the Mediterranean last winder but more significantly because of a long term loss of insects swifts have declined by 38% since 1995. This of course is just one indicator of the devastation that is happening to our environment. Earlier this year I did a rather grandfatherly thing. I wrote a New Year Letter to my Grandsons, sharing with them the main forces that have shaped the times I have lived through. I said that my life had been lived in a society based on hope. The hope engendered by the Attlee government at the end of World War II, the hope in the turbulent Sixties that the world really could be radically changed for the better, the hope in the 1980s that capitalism might lift the world's poor out of poverty. Now, I wrote, the challenge facing their generation is much greater-how to stop things getting worse. Not just the environment but the gross and growing inequalities between rich and poor. Of course they rightly have the optimism of the young but they are not living in a society impelled by hope as my life has been. Some will think that view too pessimistic, and attitudes can indeed change with surprising rapidity. Like most of the country I took no interest in Women's football, now I am enthralled by the skill of the England team, not least last night in the match against Norway. I have not taken much interest in doubles at tennis since the great Australians Hoad and Rosewall won Wimbledon. Now, as a result of Andy Murray playing I, like very many others, delight in the game again. Suddenly, surprisingly, change has come. Cardinal Newman wrote. "To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often." For a Christian that means change from just being made in the image of God to growth into the divine likeness. That of course applies to the individual. But society and its members are bound up together. I change as a result of changes in society, and society changes as a result of individual efforts to change it. Whether we like it not, society is going to change. The question is whether we are simply going to be passive and allow society to change us, or whether we are going to be a participant in trying to change it. Is the deprivation of the environment going to worsen, the gap between the rich and poor widen even further? Or can we find a new way to improve the whole quality of life for everyone?