The Green Chalice by Mark Coleman

Are you ready for the festivities ?! I have been taken this year with the adverts for sparkling jewellery. Swaroski. Should I shouldn’t I ?  All the advertising is playing on our anxieties about getting everything ready for Christmas. We don’t want to let anyone down, it has to be a perfect Christmas. Be prepared. Fill up the fridge, buy all the shopping, ….surprise, delight your guests. (Perhaps at the back of our minds there’s compete too…) So much of our economy runs on exploiting anxiety. Marketing creating needs that we can only satisfy by buying something. We know it’s wrong, and we know it doesn’t really brings happiness, but we do it anyway. Unlike commercial Christmas froth Advent is a time of preparation for something profound. But what are we going to get ready for? How do we get ready for Christmas, for the arrival of the baby Jesus? Each year we re-enact the drama. We pretend Jesus hasn’t arrived. It’s a very good practice because it means we ha...

What are people like ? Some are saints, some are sinners...you may say. Perhaps in the current age we would say : “Some are celebrities, some are scroungers” We do have a way - don't we - of putting things into binaries, black and white, yes and no, good and bad, this and that. It works for computer code but I don't know if it works for human beings made in the image of God..... Perhaps now more than in previous ages and certainly since the economics of the Thatcher era arrived, the neoliberal economics that makes the market its God, we have so many stories that make people other than ourselves...and so make it possible to cut their wages, to implement austerity. We have heard the stories about those who are poor and how they are to blame for their property because of the lack of initiative, laziness, fecklessness etc.  In today’s Rochdale Observer the story about poor children not being ready for primary school can be told to us as poor parenting causing t...