Dear Friends,

Just outside the vestry door at St. James', Elstead, growing happily between the flagstones, there is a solitary flower (or, given the context, should I call it `a weed` ?).  Goodness knows how it got there; probably from a seed dropped by some passing bird.  I have watched it grow over the weeks and, not being very `up` on flowers, was suitable impressed as it climbed past my knees, and then my waist, and headed for my shoulders.

Now it has flowered - a glorious, single flower - and soon it will turn to seed and die.  Then, and only then, I shall pull it up and put in on the compost (unless someone else gets there first, of course).  It reminds me of Ecclesiastes:
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal...
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace."  [Eccl 3  NIV]

Many people like this passage, but are not perhaps aware that the writer's conclusion is: "Everything is meaningless."  `We live; we die.  That's it`  Well, not quite.  For his eventual conclusion, at the end of the book, is: "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole [duty] of man.  For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.  [Eccl 12:13-14]  So, as the man said: "There's more !"

For that solitary flower ?  Maybe.  If the seeds are somehow gathered and scattered  (perhaps I could enter next year's Flower Show in the `grown from the wild` section).  For us ?  Maybe.  But only if we have a living faith.  Otherwise, after everything's season, "everything is meaningless".  This is what Pope Benedict XVI was saying to his audience in the University of Regensburg when he quoted a 14^th century Byzantine Emperor.  The Pope was extolling reason (in a university!), but reason and reasoning that includes room for God; for love; for the spiritual; he was attacking the modern, Western attitude to reason which can see no room for these things.  In doing so, he quoted a 14^th century dialogue in which one participant (the Orthodox Christian Emperor) attacked the other (a Persan Muslim) for the tendency of Islam, as he knew it, to force conversions at the point of a sword.  No reason; no love; no spirit.

For one who says he wants dialogue with Islam, it was an unfortunate quotation - memorable, but stranded (like my flower) amidst the `academic flagstones` of his lecture.  To redeem the situation, for there to be a favourable "judgement", for there to be "more", the Pope needs to admit that Christians, too, have forced conversions at the point of a sword - but we don't any more.  We added reason to what can otherwise all too easily become the whims of mavericks (Christian, Islamic or otherwise).  We need to hold to that - and do all we can to hold others to it - otherwise "everything is meaningless".