Roger Cohen: Beyond conspiracy, progress
By Roger Cohen
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
On the outskirts of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan there's a modest junkyard of the Soviet empire. It's filled with the hulls of T-55 and T-62 tanks and the tubes of multiple rocket launchers. Some of the tanks are intact. I guess high-explosive anti-tank missiles penetrated the turrets and coated the interior of the steel shells with blood.
I drove past this memorial to imperial hubris a couple of months ago on my way to a base of the nascent U.S.-trained Afghan Army. The army needs money; it might sell those metal carcasses for scrap. Why not? The detritus of human events, and their constant ebb and flow, turn the head.
Military guys deal in worst-case scenarios. But no Soviet-era planner of the 1979 invasion could have imagined being humbled in the Hindu Kush by a bunch of Islamic holy warriors; and no American cold warrior could have imagined those CIA-funded Islamists turning on the United States and bringing down the Twin Towers in 2001.
Yet all of this happened. Just as it happened that the Soviets were once our allies and Communists from central Asia raised the hammer-and-sickle on the Reichstag as Hitler's Germany burned in 1945.
And then, almost at once, the Soviets became our enemies while the Japanese, despite Pearl Harbor, became our friends. And at last, the Soviets became Russians who were no longer enemies but rivals.
The mantle of enemy passed with the Cold War's end. It went to purveyors of another totalitarianism, haters of modernity, atavistic murderers of unbelievers (and their own), fanatics for whom free will and sexuality are so intolerable that a savage God must be raised up to suppress them in jihad's name.
The relation of these jihadists to Islam is as twisted as Stalin's to Marx, or the gulag's to the liberation of the masses, but the draw of absolutism has not abated.
The problem with liberal societies is that they are as dull as they are successful. The mortgage, the tax man, the lobbyist and the vote leave a thirsting. Revolutions are made for freedom, but its exercise is mundane, which can be intolerable. Only the terrorized - from East Berlin or Baghdad - understand that "Give me normality" is a rousing cry. For a Pole, the absence of drama feels like paradise.
But history lurches and will not pause. Its strangeness prompts some to believe there must be a hidden hand. Conspiracy theory is the refuge of the feeble-minded, but that has not stopped it becoming rampant in an age where every voice has a digital loudspeaker.
Americans and Canadians training young Afghan recruits near Soviet junkyards in a faraway land must be the work of someone, a plot of international speculators, or perhaps the Mossad agents who, for the conspiracy-minded, planned 9/11!
Most of life, however, is unplanned. It's banal and capricious, a frustration to any puppet master - which does not make it any less precious, of course, or fragile.
At Kandahar airport, I overhead two U.S. soldiers:
"I don't wanna die," the first said.
"Yeah, that's the reason."
"Keep your head down."
They parted. Their words stayed with me. I've been thinking of them and other U.S. servicemen and women in this holiday season. What we all want is pretty simple. Home about sums it up.
I boarded a U.S. military flight to Kabul and some special-forces guys - no uniforms, sniper-scopes on their assault rifles - got on board, too. One sat next to me. I asked: "What's your line of business?"
"Oh, doing some private work for the government but it would be too long a story to tell you."
I nodded. He was from Perth, Australia: a long story, indeed. Perhaps he'd been out in the badlands on the Afghan-Pakistani border battling the Taliban, or down in the southwest, where the Iranian border area is said to be full of guys without uniforms.
Afghanistan, like Poland, is still a small country flanked by larger ones. Unlike Poland, it has not found the means to contain those larger countries' interests. The Great Game goes on.
Its continuation may suggest nothing changes, or only changes to stay the same. But that would be a pessimistic view. On a train the other day, gliding through the mists of Belgium along pale lines of poplar trees, I thought of the slaughter at Passchendaele just 90 years ago. We forget too many miracles, European peace among them.
More recently, there was the Passchendaele-like slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war, with its one million dead for nothing, its Cold-War fog and its Cold-War maneuvers. Openness is advancing, even in the Middle East. This is the age of empowerment. The back-to-the-Caliphate boys cannot resist it. Their own junkyard awaits them.
Thursday, 27 December 2007
A global trek to poor nations, from poorer ones Jason Deparle Thursday, December 27, 2007 c/o IHT
A global trek to poor nations, from poorer ones
By Jason Deparle
Thursday, December 27, 2007
JUAN GÓMEZ, Dominican Republic: The scrap-wood shanties on a muddy hillside are a poor man's promised land.
They have leaky roofs and dirt floors, with no lights or running water. But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.
Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned "devil" and deported him four times.
Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.
"We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor," he said. "When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken."
Across the developing world, migrants move to other poor countries nearly as often as they move to rich ones. Yet their numbers and hardships are often overlooked.
They typically start poorer than migrants to rich countries, earn less money and are more likely to travel illegally, which raises the odds of abuse. They move to countries that offer migrants less legal protection and fewer services than wealthy nations do. Yet their earnings help sustain some of the poorest people on the globe.
There are 74 million "south to south" migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved "south to north," or from poor countries to rich ones.)
Nicaraguans build Costa Rican buildings. Paraguayans pick Argentine crops. Nepalis dig Indian mines. Indonesians clean Malaysian homes. Farm hands from Burkina Faso tend the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford. With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow.
"South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people," said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. "These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don't go."
The Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, has been large, longstanding and filled with strife. The Spanish-speaking Dominicans still refer angrily to a Haitian occupation that ended in 1844. The Creole-speaking Haitians point to 1937, when a Dominican massacre along the border is estimated to have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.
Haitian workers started coming in large numbers nearly a century ago, as seasonal help in sugar cane fields. But many now work year-round on farms or urban construction sites, which raises their visibility and the chance for conflict. Estimates vary greatly, but Dominican officials put Haitian migrants at one million, or 11 percent of the population.
As Haitians see it, the problems go beyond hard work and low pay to the systemic violation of their rights. Dominicans profit from their labor, they say, but deny them work papers, deport them at will and discriminate on the belief that Haitians have darker skin.
"There is no justice here," Moises said.
Dominicans often present themselves as generous neighbors of limited means, forced to bear the burden of Haiti's failed state, indigence and epidemic disease. They say they offer Haitians jobs and health care — 30 percent of the public health budget is spent on Haitians, government officials say — while enduring lectures about human rights from countries far from the fray.
"Ay-yai-yai-yai," said General Adriano Silverio Rodríguez, the commander of a new border force, when describing how Americans would respond if they shared a border with a country as troubled as Haiti. "That wall they're building — it would be longer and taller."
Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is $2,850; in Haiti it is $480.
The clash of civilizations can be seen along the Massacre River, a muddy, waist-deep waterway that divides them. On the Dominican side, Dajabón is a market town of 10,000 people, with paved streets, public utilities and a new Internet café. Its Haitian counterpart, Ouanaminthe, is seven or eight times as big, with no municipal lights or running water. The dirt roads are strewn with trash and pigs.
Twice a week, Dominicans open the bridge, and thousands of Haitians rush across to buy goods that are scarce on their side: eggs, nails, flour, concrete, carrots, salami, juice, cooking oil, chickens and plastic chairs. Guards patrol the area, trying to ensure the Haitians' return.
Bribery and violence are common. In a case now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Dominican soldiers are accused of indiscriminately firing on a smuggler's truck, killing six Haitians. Two dozen Haitians in a smuggler's truck suffocated last year. Their bodies were dumped on the road.
Unwritten Rules
The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.
"We do not intervene in the workplace," said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. "We understand the needs of the agricultural sector." He acknowledged that the situation "benefits the landowner."
Gathered here at a small hilltop church squeezed among the shanties, the workers talked of the hardships they had fled and those they had encountered. Jacqueline Bayard said the threat of deportation left the workers powerless. Katline Auguste said the lack of legal papers had kept her from visiting her children in Haiti for three years.
Lorvil Seus said he lived in fear of vigilante violence, as in a famed incident in nearby Hatillo Palma, in which a Haitian pastor was killed — and 2,000 Haitians deported — after the murder of a Dominican woman. Reprisal killings spread, and three Haitians were burned to death near the capital, Santo Domingo.
Moises voiced gratitude as well as complaints, explaining that he had once walked from Haiti with his malarial daughter in his arms, and Dominican doctors had saved her. "We can only thank them because they helped us," he said.
Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers "need us to work." Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. "It's a business they have," he said.
"We are living in their country," he said. "We have to take it."
Colliding Interests
Dominican officials often say that the colliding interests that surround immigration are similar to those in the United States, but that poor countries like theirs have fewer resources to cope Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, said that the solution to the Haitians' problems was to promote development in Haiti and that the United States had to do more. "The developed countries talk a lot about Haiti, but the necessary aid just doesn't come," he said. By providing jobs, he said, "we do more than the whole international community combined."
Some south to south migrants are "pushed" by wars and political crises. Others are "pulled" by jobs and better wages. Some follow seasonal work. Some put down roots. Some countries — Argentina is one — have been quick to give amnesty to migrants. Others, including Nigeria and Indonesia, have subjected them to mass deportations.
Many countries simultaneously send and receive large migrations. One reason there are jobs for Haitians is that so many Dominicans have left for the United States. The president, Leonel Fernández, was largely reared in New York City.
That exposes what Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, calls a common double standard. "Many countries want good treatment for their own people abroad but they don't treat immigrants well themselves," he said.
Egyptian police officers An Indian film star, Hritik Roshan, set off a deadly riot in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2000 when he was quoted as saying he "hated" the Nepalis. Costa Ricans sometimes deride Nicaraguans as "Nicas." In 2005, two Rottweilers killed a Nicaraguan suspected of being a burglar, as an approving crowd watched. Jokes flooded the country, praising the dogs.
Still, Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year.
"Destination countries benefit from foreign labor," Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that "promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families."
"Just letting migration happen is not good enough," he added.
The Dominican Republic has no such framework. This year alone, the conditions of its Haitians have been the focus of two documentary films, a photo exhibit in Paris and a United Nations investigation that found "a profound and entrenched problem of racism."
Who Is a Citizen?
One battle now playing out involves the right to citizenship, which the Dominican Constitution promises to anyone born on Dominican soil except the children of diplomats and visitors "in transit." But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants were essentially in transit and therefore their children had no citizenship rights, though in many cases these families have lived in the country for decades.
Critics say that the ruling conflicts with international law, including a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights two months earlier, and that the government is using it to deny papers to Dominicans of Haitian descent, impeding their ability to work, study and vote.
Nationalists are trying to get the anti-citizenship provisions written into the Constitution.
"We could have hundreds of thousands of so-called Dominican nationals who on cultural, emotional and political grounds would see themselves as Haitian," said Pelegrín Castillo, a leading nationalist legislator.
"Every day there are more Haitians in the Dominican Republic," he added. "We are overwhelmed."
For many Haitians, the journey ends where it began — in the muddy border town of Ouanaminthe, which receives scores of deported migrants each week. Most arrive penniless. Some sleep in City Hall.
Wesbert Sertil, 27, was among the unfortunates. Tired of hearing his in-laws complain that he could not feed his children, he borrowed $50 a year ago and boarded a smuggler's truck. But the construction work he found was sporadic, and he sent money home just twice, totaling $90.
He was leaving work one day when military men asked for his papers. After a few days in a border-town jail, he was sleeping in abandoned houses, and asking a religious group for food.
His village was an eight-hour bus ride away, and the family that had urged him to go was unaware of his pending return. Smugglers approached him on the streets, but Sertil planned to use any money he could scrounge to buy a ticket home. "I got desperate and went to the Dominican Republic," he said. "I'm not going back again."
He noted that there were plenty of Haitians willing to take his place.
By Jason Deparle
Thursday, December 27, 2007
JUAN GÓMEZ, Dominican Republic: The scrap-wood shanties on a muddy hillside are a poor man's promised land.
They have leaky roofs and dirt floors, with no lights or running water. But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.
Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned "devil" and deported him four times.
Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.
"We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor," he said. "When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken."
Across the developing world, migrants move to other poor countries nearly as often as they move to rich ones. Yet their numbers and hardships are often overlooked.
They typically start poorer than migrants to rich countries, earn less money and are more likely to travel illegally, which raises the odds of abuse. They move to countries that offer migrants less legal protection and fewer services than wealthy nations do. Yet their earnings help sustain some of the poorest people on the globe.
There are 74 million "south to south" migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved "south to north," or from poor countries to rich ones.)
Nicaraguans build Costa Rican buildings. Paraguayans pick Argentine crops. Nepalis dig Indian mines. Indonesians clean Malaysian homes. Farm hands from Burkina Faso tend the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford. With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow.
"South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people," said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. "These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don't go."
The Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, has been large, longstanding and filled with strife. The Spanish-speaking Dominicans still refer angrily to a Haitian occupation that ended in 1844. The Creole-speaking Haitians point to 1937, when a Dominican massacre along the border is estimated to have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.
Haitian workers started coming in large numbers nearly a century ago, as seasonal help in sugar cane fields. But many now work year-round on farms or urban construction sites, which raises their visibility and the chance for conflict. Estimates vary greatly, but Dominican officials put Haitian migrants at one million, or 11 percent of the population.
As Haitians see it, the problems go beyond hard work and low pay to the systemic violation of their rights. Dominicans profit from their labor, they say, but deny them work papers, deport them at will and discriminate on the belief that Haitians have darker skin.
"There is no justice here," Moises said.
Dominicans often present themselves as generous neighbors of limited means, forced to bear the burden of Haiti's failed state, indigence and epidemic disease. They say they offer Haitians jobs and health care — 30 percent of the public health budget is spent on Haitians, government officials say — while enduring lectures about human rights from countries far from the fray.
"Ay-yai-yai-yai," said General Adriano Silverio Rodríguez, the commander of a new border force, when describing how Americans would respond if they shared a border with a country as troubled as Haiti. "That wall they're building — it would be longer and taller."
Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is $2,850; in Haiti it is $480.
The clash of civilizations can be seen along the Massacre River, a muddy, waist-deep waterway that divides them. On the Dominican side, Dajabón is a market town of 10,000 people, with paved streets, public utilities and a new Internet café. Its Haitian counterpart, Ouanaminthe, is seven or eight times as big, with no municipal lights or running water. The dirt roads are strewn with trash and pigs.
Twice a week, Dominicans open the bridge, and thousands of Haitians rush across to buy goods that are scarce on their side: eggs, nails, flour, concrete, carrots, salami, juice, cooking oil, chickens and plastic chairs. Guards patrol the area, trying to ensure the Haitians' return.
Bribery and violence are common. In a case now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Dominican soldiers are accused of indiscriminately firing on a smuggler's truck, killing six Haitians. Two dozen Haitians in a smuggler's truck suffocated last year. Their bodies were dumped on the road.
Unwritten Rules
The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.
"We do not intervene in the workplace," said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. "We understand the needs of the agricultural sector." He acknowledged that the situation "benefits the landowner."
Gathered here at a small hilltop church squeezed among the shanties, the workers talked of the hardships they had fled and those they had encountered. Jacqueline Bayard said the threat of deportation left the workers powerless. Katline Auguste said the lack of legal papers had kept her from visiting her children in Haiti for three years.
Lorvil Seus said he lived in fear of vigilante violence, as in a famed incident in nearby Hatillo Palma, in which a Haitian pastor was killed — and 2,000 Haitians deported — after the murder of a Dominican woman. Reprisal killings spread, and three Haitians were burned to death near the capital, Santo Domingo.
Moises voiced gratitude as well as complaints, explaining that he had once walked from Haiti with his malarial daughter in his arms, and Dominican doctors had saved her. "We can only thank them because they helped us," he said.
Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers "need us to work." Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. "It's a business they have," he said.
"We are living in their country," he said. "We have to take it."
Colliding Interests
Dominican officials often say that the colliding interests that surround immigration are similar to those in the United States, but that poor countries like theirs have fewer resources to cope Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, said that the solution to the Haitians' problems was to promote development in Haiti and that the United States had to do more. "The developed countries talk a lot about Haiti, but the necessary aid just doesn't come," he said. By providing jobs, he said, "we do more than the whole international community combined."
Some south to south migrants are "pushed" by wars and political crises. Others are "pulled" by jobs and better wages. Some follow seasonal work. Some put down roots. Some countries — Argentina is one — have been quick to give amnesty to migrants. Others, including Nigeria and Indonesia, have subjected them to mass deportations.
Many countries simultaneously send and receive large migrations. One reason there are jobs for Haitians is that so many Dominicans have left for the United States. The president, Leonel Fernández, was largely reared in New York City.
That exposes what Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, calls a common double standard. "Many countries want good treatment for their own people abroad but they don't treat immigrants well themselves," he said.
Egyptian police officers An Indian film star, Hritik Roshan, set off a deadly riot in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2000 when he was quoted as saying he "hated" the Nepalis. Costa Ricans sometimes deride Nicaraguans as "Nicas." In 2005, two Rottweilers killed a Nicaraguan suspected of being a burglar, as an approving crowd watched. Jokes flooded the country, praising the dogs.
Still, Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year.
"Destination countries benefit from foreign labor," Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that "promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families."
"Just letting migration happen is not good enough," he added.
The Dominican Republic has no such framework. This year alone, the conditions of its Haitians have been the focus of two documentary films, a photo exhibit in Paris and a United Nations investigation that found "a profound and entrenched problem of racism."
Who Is a Citizen?
One battle now playing out involves the right to citizenship, which the Dominican Constitution promises to anyone born on Dominican soil except the children of diplomats and visitors "in transit." But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants were essentially in transit and therefore their children had no citizenship rights, though in many cases these families have lived in the country for decades.
Critics say that the ruling conflicts with international law, including a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights two months earlier, and that the government is using it to deny papers to Dominicans of Haitian descent, impeding their ability to work, study and vote.
Nationalists are trying to get the anti-citizenship provisions written into the Constitution.
"We could have hundreds of thousands of so-called Dominican nationals who on cultural, emotional and political grounds would see themselves as Haitian," said Pelegrín Castillo, a leading nationalist legislator.
"Every day there are more Haitians in the Dominican Republic," he added. "We are overwhelmed."
For many Haitians, the journey ends where it began — in the muddy border town of Ouanaminthe, which receives scores of deported migrants each week. Most arrive penniless. Some sleep in City Hall.
Wesbert Sertil, 27, was among the unfortunates. Tired of hearing his in-laws complain that he could not feed his children, he borrowed $50 a year ago and boarded a smuggler's truck. But the construction work he found was sporadic, and he sent money home just twice, totaling $90.
He was leaving work one day when military men asked for his papers. After a few days in a border-town jail, he was sleeping in abandoned houses, and asking a religious group for food.
His village was an eight-hour bus ride away, and the family that had urged him to go was unaware of his pending return. Smugglers approached him on the streets, but Sertil planned to use any money he could scrounge to buy a ticket home. "I got desperate and went to the Dominican Republic," he said. "I'm not going back again."
He noted that there were plenty of Haitians willing to take his place.
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
Church leader's 'recycle' message Reverend John Owen c/o The BBC's Christmas Message series 2007
Church leader's 'recycle' message
A church leader has called on people to think of the environment this festive season by recycling leftover food and unwanted Christmas presents.
The Reverend John Owen, leader of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, said "the nativity had a minimal effect on the environment".
He added that everyone should remember their "duty to the planet".
Meanwhile, the head of non-conformist chapels in Wales said the idea of making Christmas secular was "foolish".
Mr Owen, who is Moderator of Presbyterian Church of Wales for 2007-08, welcomed the Bali agreement on tackling climate change signed by world leaders.
He said: "Yet this does not mean that we as individuals should rely on our governments to save the planet.
"Rather, we should redouble our efforts to take action and campaign against climate change.
"Over the festive period, when we focus on celebrating Jesus's coming, we should remember our duty towards our planet by recycling and trying to avoid food waste.
Nobel Peace Prize
"Even unwanted presents can be recycled and put to good use through, for example, charity shops and freecycle schemes."
Mr Owen, from Ruthin in Denbighshire, said he wanted to remind people in Wales that "people in developing countries suffer because we draw excessively on the world's resources".
One of the elders of the church is Sir John Houghton, the former head of the Meteorological Office and member of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who was born in Dyserth in Denbighshire and now lives in Aberdyfi, Gwynedd.
Sir John and the IPCC team shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore for their work on tackling climate change.
Meanwhile, the leader of Union of Welsh Independent Churches said although Christmas was an event on the Christian calendar "it tends to embrace others".
'Football'
Dr Geraint Tudur, the union's general secretary, said it was "nonsense" to say that "doing away with the religious dimension will bring people together".
He said: "People have been coming together over Christmas for centuries, despite their differences.
"Even where there are religious differences, friendship can be seen trying to close the gap that keeps people apart.
"We all remember the story about British and German soldiers leaving their trenches in the middle of the Great War to play football and enjoy each other's company for a few hours.
"And when was that? On Christmas Day, which shows the spirit of the festival."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/wales/7158431.stm
Published: 2007/12/24 08:54:07 GMT
© BBC MMVII
A church leader has called on people to think of the environment this festive season by recycling leftover food and unwanted Christmas presents.
The Reverend John Owen, leader of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, said "the nativity had a minimal effect on the environment".
He added that everyone should remember their "duty to the planet".
Meanwhile, the head of non-conformist chapels in Wales said the idea of making Christmas secular was "foolish".
Mr Owen, who is Moderator of Presbyterian Church of Wales for 2007-08, welcomed the Bali agreement on tackling climate change signed by world leaders.
He said: "Yet this does not mean that we as individuals should rely on our governments to save the planet.
"Rather, we should redouble our efforts to take action and campaign against climate change.
"Over the festive period, when we focus on celebrating Jesus's coming, we should remember our duty towards our planet by recycling and trying to avoid food waste.
Nobel Peace Prize
"Even unwanted presents can be recycled and put to good use through, for example, charity shops and freecycle schemes."
Mr Owen, from Ruthin in Denbighshire, said he wanted to remind people in Wales that "people in developing countries suffer because we draw excessively on the world's resources".
One of the elders of the church is Sir John Houghton, the former head of the Meteorological Office and member of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who was born in Dyserth in Denbighshire and now lives in Aberdyfi, Gwynedd.
Sir John and the IPCC team shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore for their work on tackling climate change.
Meanwhile, the leader of Union of Welsh Independent Churches said although Christmas was an event on the Christian calendar "it tends to embrace others".
'Football'
Dr Geraint Tudur, the union's general secretary, said it was "nonsense" to say that "doing away with the religious dimension will bring people together".
He said: "People have been coming together over Christmas for centuries, despite their differences.
"Even where there are religious differences, friendship can be seen trying to close the gap that keeps people apart.
"We all remember the story about British and German soldiers leaving their trenches in the middle of the Great War to play football and enjoy each other's company for a few hours.
"And when was that? On Christmas Day, which shows the spirit of the festival."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/wales/7158431.stm
Published: 2007/12/24 08:54:07 GMT
© BBC MMVII
As Cuba's economy withers, its ecology thrives By Cornelia Dean Tuesday, December 25, 2007 c/o IHT
As Cuba's economy withers, its ecology thrives
By Cornelia Dean
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Through accidents of geography and history, Cuba is a priceless ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so worried about what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power and, as is widely anticipated, the American government relaxes or ends its trade embargo.
Cuba, by far the region's largest island, sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals, some seen nowhere else.
And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba's economy has stagnated.
Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes.
Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and elsewhere, met last month in Cancún, Mexico, to discuss the island's resources and how to continue to protect them.
Cuba has done "what we should have done — identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside," said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law School who attended the conference.
In the late 1990s, Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new environmental laws.
But, he said in an interview, "an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer" when the embargo ends.
By some estimates, tourism in Cuba is increasing 10 percent annually. At a minimum, Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, said in an interview at the conference, "we can guess that tourism is going to increase in a very fast way" when the embargo ends.
"It is estimated we could double tourism in one year," said Rey, who heads environmental efforts at the Cuban ministry of science, technology and environment.
About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs from Haiti west almost to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It offers crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell's thrush, whose summer home is in the mountains of New England and Canada, and the North American warblers that stop in Cuba on their way south for the winter.
Zapata Swamp, on the island's southern coast, may be notorious for its mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas.
Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in the region. Its relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial for numerous marine species, including some whose larvae can be carried by currents into waters of the United States, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology.
Lindeman, who did not attend the conference but who has spent many years studying Cuba's marine ecology, said in an interview that some of these creatures were important commercial and recreational species like the spiny lobster, grouper or snapper.
Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. And like other corals in the region, they reeled when a mysterious die-off of sea urchins left them with algae overgrowth. But they have largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices.
Diving in them "is like going back in time 50 years," said David Guggenheim, a conference organizer and an ecologist and member of the advisory board of the Harte Research Institute, which helped organize the meeting along with the Center for International Policy, a private group in Washington.
In a report last year, the World Wildlife Fund said that "in dramatic contrast" to its island neighbors, Cuba's beaches, mangroves, reefs, seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their biggest threat, the report said, was "the prospect of sudden and massive growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts."
To prepare for that day, researchers from a number of American institutions and organizations are working on ecological conservation in Cuba, including Harte, the Wildlife Conservation Society, universities like Tulane and Georgetown, institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden, and others. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle migration and land use patterns.
Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a tradition of collaboration that dates from the mid-19th century, when Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. In the 20th century, naturalists from Harvard and the University of Havana worked together for decades.
But now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of problems. The Cancún meeting itself illustrated one.
"We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the United States," Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero, the director of the Cuban science and environment agency and leader of the Cuban delegation, said through a translator in opening the meeting. "This we cannot do." While the American government grants licenses to some (but not all) American scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban researchers seeking permission to come to the United States, researchers from both countries said.
So meeting organizers turned to Alberto Mariano Vázquez De la Cerda, a retired admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate from Texas A & M and a member of the Harte advisory board, who supervised arrangements for the Cuban conferees.
The travel situation is potentially even worse for researchers at state institutions in Florida. Jennifer Gebelein, a geographer at Florida International University who uses global positioning systems to track land use in Cuba, told the meeting about restrictions imposed by the Florida Legislature, which has barred state colleges from using public or private funds for travel to Cuba.
As a result of this move and federal restrictions, Gebelein said "we're not sure what is going to happen" with her research program.
On the other hand, John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that he had difficulty obtaining permission from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs.
"I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do," said Thorbjarnarson, who did not attend the conference. "It is not easy to walk that line."
But he had nothing but praise for his scientific colleagues in Cuba. Like other American researchers, he described them as doing highly competent work with meager resources. "They are a remarkable bunch of people," Thorbjarnarson said, "but my counterparts make on average probably less than $20 a month."
American scientists, foundations and other groups are ready to help with equipment and supplies but are hampered by the embargo. For example, Maria Elena Ibarra Martín, a marine scientist at the University of Havana, said through a translator that American organizations had provided Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other equipment. They shipped it via Canada.
Another thorny issue is ships.
"If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out on a ship," said Robert Hueter, who directs the center for shark research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, and attended the Cancún meeting.
But, he and others said, the United States government will not allow ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in the previous six months, and the Cuban government will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters.
One answer might be vessels already in Cuba, but nowadays they are often tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Cancún meeting said.
And even with a ship, several American researchers at the conference said, it is difficult to get Cuban government permission to travel to places like the island's northwest coast, the stretch closest to the United States. As a result, that region is the least-studied part of the Cuban coast, Guggenheim and others said.
Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of information researchers almost everywhere else take for granted: the Internet.
Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to the Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to people who need it most.
In any event, "we find we do not have access," Teresita Borges Hernández, a biologist in the environment section of Cuba's science and technology ministry, said through a translator. She appealed to the Americans at the meeting to do "anything, anything to improve this situation."
Guggenheim echoed the concern and said even telephone calls to Cuba often cost as much as $2 a minute. "These details, though they may seem trite," he said, "are central to our ability to collaborate."
Gebelein and several of the Cubans at the meeting said that some American Web sites barred access to people whose electronic addresses identify them as Cuban. She suggested that the group organize a Web site in a third country, a site where they could all post data, papers and the like, and everyone would have access to it.
For Guggenheim, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they contemplate a more prosperous future can be seen 90 miles north, in the Florida Keys. There, he said, too many people have poured into an ecosystem too fragile to support them.
"As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort," Guggenheim said, "we don't want to see and they don't want to see the same mistakes, where you literally love something to death."
But there are people skeptical that Cuba will resist this kind of pressure. One of them is Houck.
The environmental laws he worked on are "a very strong structure," he said, "But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the wrong thing. Over time, you can wear the law down."
That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, "where there's no armed citizenry out there with high-powered science groups pushing in the opposite direction. What they lack is the counter pressure of environmental groups and environmental activists."
As Rey and Daniel Whittle, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, put it in the book "Cuban Studies 37" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), "policymaking in Cuba is still centralized and top down." But, they wrote, "much can be done to enhance public input in policymaking."
Rey said in the interview that Cubans must be encouraged to use their environmental laws. By "some kind of cultural habit," he said, people in Cuba rarely turn to the courts to challenge decisions they dislike.
"There's no litigation, just a few cases here and there," Rey said. "In most community situations if a citizen has a problem he writes a letter. That's O.K., but it's not all the possibilities."
Rey added, "We have to promote more involvement, not only in access to justice and claims, but in taking part in the decision process."
"I know the state has a good system from the legislative point of view," Rey said. But as he and Whittle noted in their paper, "the question now is whether government leaders can and will do what it takes to put the plan on the ground."
By Cornelia Dean
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Through accidents of geography and history, Cuba is a priceless ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so worried about what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power and, as is widely anticipated, the American government relaxes or ends its trade embargo.
Cuba, by far the region's largest island, sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals, some seen nowhere else.
And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba's economy has stagnated.
Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes.
Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and elsewhere, met last month in Cancún, Mexico, to discuss the island's resources and how to continue to protect them.
Cuba has done "what we should have done — identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside," said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law School who attended the conference.
In the late 1990s, Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new environmental laws.
But, he said in an interview, "an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer" when the embargo ends.
By some estimates, tourism in Cuba is increasing 10 percent annually. At a minimum, Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, said in an interview at the conference, "we can guess that tourism is going to increase in a very fast way" when the embargo ends.
"It is estimated we could double tourism in one year," said Rey, who heads environmental efforts at the Cuban ministry of science, technology and environment.
About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs from Haiti west almost to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It offers crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell's thrush, whose summer home is in the mountains of New England and Canada, and the North American warblers that stop in Cuba on their way south for the winter.
Zapata Swamp, on the island's southern coast, may be notorious for its mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas.
Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in the region. Its relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial for numerous marine species, including some whose larvae can be carried by currents into waters of the United States, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology.
Lindeman, who did not attend the conference but who has spent many years studying Cuba's marine ecology, said in an interview that some of these creatures were important commercial and recreational species like the spiny lobster, grouper or snapper.
Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. And like other corals in the region, they reeled when a mysterious die-off of sea urchins left them with algae overgrowth. But they have largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices.
Diving in them "is like going back in time 50 years," said David Guggenheim, a conference organizer and an ecologist and member of the advisory board of the Harte Research Institute, which helped organize the meeting along with the Center for International Policy, a private group in Washington.
In a report last year, the World Wildlife Fund said that "in dramatic contrast" to its island neighbors, Cuba's beaches, mangroves, reefs, seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their biggest threat, the report said, was "the prospect of sudden and massive growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts."
To prepare for that day, researchers from a number of American institutions and organizations are working on ecological conservation in Cuba, including Harte, the Wildlife Conservation Society, universities like Tulane and Georgetown, institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden, and others. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle migration and land use patterns.
Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a tradition of collaboration that dates from the mid-19th century, when Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. In the 20th century, naturalists from Harvard and the University of Havana worked together for decades.
But now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of problems. The Cancún meeting itself illustrated one.
"We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the United States," Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero, the director of the Cuban science and environment agency and leader of the Cuban delegation, said through a translator in opening the meeting. "This we cannot do." While the American government grants licenses to some (but not all) American scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban researchers seeking permission to come to the United States, researchers from both countries said.
So meeting organizers turned to Alberto Mariano Vázquez De la Cerda, a retired admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate from Texas A & M and a member of the Harte advisory board, who supervised arrangements for the Cuban conferees.
The travel situation is potentially even worse for researchers at state institutions in Florida. Jennifer Gebelein, a geographer at Florida International University who uses global positioning systems to track land use in Cuba, told the meeting about restrictions imposed by the Florida Legislature, which has barred state colleges from using public or private funds for travel to Cuba.
As a result of this move and federal restrictions, Gebelein said "we're not sure what is going to happen" with her research program.
On the other hand, John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that he had difficulty obtaining permission from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs.
"I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do," said Thorbjarnarson, who did not attend the conference. "It is not easy to walk that line."
But he had nothing but praise for his scientific colleagues in Cuba. Like other American researchers, he described them as doing highly competent work with meager resources. "They are a remarkable bunch of people," Thorbjarnarson said, "but my counterparts make on average probably less than $20 a month."
American scientists, foundations and other groups are ready to help with equipment and supplies but are hampered by the embargo. For example, Maria Elena Ibarra Martín, a marine scientist at the University of Havana, said through a translator that American organizations had provided Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other equipment. They shipped it via Canada.
Another thorny issue is ships.
"If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out on a ship," said Robert Hueter, who directs the center for shark research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, and attended the Cancún meeting.
But, he and others said, the United States government will not allow ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in the previous six months, and the Cuban government will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters.
One answer might be vessels already in Cuba, but nowadays they are often tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Cancún meeting said.
And even with a ship, several American researchers at the conference said, it is difficult to get Cuban government permission to travel to places like the island's northwest coast, the stretch closest to the United States. As a result, that region is the least-studied part of the Cuban coast, Guggenheim and others said.
Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of information researchers almost everywhere else take for granted: the Internet.
Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to the Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to people who need it most.
In any event, "we find we do not have access," Teresita Borges Hernández, a biologist in the environment section of Cuba's science and technology ministry, said through a translator. She appealed to the Americans at the meeting to do "anything, anything to improve this situation."
Guggenheim echoed the concern and said even telephone calls to Cuba often cost as much as $2 a minute. "These details, though they may seem trite," he said, "are central to our ability to collaborate."
Gebelein and several of the Cubans at the meeting said that some American Web sites barred access to people whose electronic addresses identify them as Cuban. She suggested that the group organize a Web site in a third country, a site where they could all post data, papers and the like, and everyone would have access to it.
For Guggenheim, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they contemplate a more prosperous future can be seen 90 miles north, in the Florida Keys. There, he said, too many people have poured into an ecosystem too fragile to support them.
"As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort," Guggenheim said, "we don't want to see and they don't want to see the same mistakes, where you literally love something to death."
But there are people skeptical that Cuba will resist this kind of pressure. One of them is Houck.
The environmental laws he worked on are "a very strong structure," he said, "But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the wrong thing. Over time, you can wear the law down."
That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, "where there's no armed citizenry out there with high-powered science groups pushing in the opposite direction. What they lack is the counter pressure of environmental groups and environmental activists."
As Rey and Daniel Whittle, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, put it in the book "Cuban Studies 37" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), "policymaking in Cuba is still centralized and top down." But, they wrote, "much can be done to enhance public input in policymaking."
Rey said in the interview that Cubans must be encouraged to use their environmental laws. By "some kind of cultural habit," he said, people in Cuba rarely turn to the courts to challenge decisions they dislike.
"There's no litigation, just a few cases here and there," Rey said. "In most community situations if a citizen has a problem he writes a letter. That's O.K., but it's not all the possibilities."
Rey added, "We have to promote more involvement, not only in access to justice and claims, but in taking part in the decision process."
"I know the state has a good system from the legislative point of view," Rey said. But as he and Whittle noted in their paper, "the question now is whether government leaders can and will do what it takes to put the plan on the ground."
Pope calls for end to conflicts Vatican and Bethlehem scenes c/o the BBC 2007.
Pope calls for end to conflicts
Pope Benedict XVI has appealed for just solutions to the conflicts in the Middle East, Iraq, Africa and elsewhere in his annual Christmas message.
He denounced terrorism and violence that victimised children and women.
His address came as millions of Christians around the world celebrated the traditional day of Christ's birth.
In Bethlehem, biblical place of Jesus' birth, more pilgrims visited the town for Christmas than in any year since the Palestinian uprising began in 2000.
'Joy, hope and peace'
The Pope spoke from a balcony in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, overlooking the square where thousands of people had gathered in the winter sunshine.
He said he hoped the "light of Christ" would "shine forth and bring consolation to those who live in the darkness of poverty, injustice and war".
An enthusiastic crowd broke into chanting during pauses in the Pope's address.
In his Urbi et Orbi speech (Latin for 'To the City and the World') he said: "May this Christmas truly be for all people a day of joy, hope and peace."
He urged political leaders to have the "wisdom and courage to seek and find humane, just and lasting solutions" to "ethnic, religious and political tensions... [which are] destroying the internal fabric of many countries and embittering international relations".
The address was broadcast live on television to dozens of countries and was followed by greetings in about 60 languages.
Bethlehem Mass
In the Pope's midnight Mass at the basilica, he urged people to find time for God and the needy.
In front of the Basilica, a new floodlit Nativity scene was unveiled.
This year, the larger-than-life-size statues of the baby Jesus and his family have been placed in a Nativity scene set not in a Bethlehem stable but in a room in Joseph's house in Nazareth.
Vatican officials say the change was made to illustrate the notion that Jesus was born everywhere, not just in Bethlehem.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Muslim, joined the midnight Mass in Bethlehem and emphasised that not only Christians were celebrating the festival.
"The new year, God willing, will be a year of security and economic stability," he said.
"We pray next year will be the year of independence for the Palestinian people," he added.
Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the Catholic leader in the Holy Land, called for peace in the Middle East as he led the Mass.
"This land belongs to God. It must not be for some a land of life and for others a land of occupation and a political prison," he said in a sermon delivered in his native Arabic.
Security fears
Local officials in Bethlehem say double the number of pilgrims have visited this year compared to last.
Fears about security and Israel's West Bank barrier - an eight-metre (24ft) concrete wall separating the town from Jerusalem - have discouraged potential visitors in recent years.
Israel says the barrier is vital to prevent attacks by Palestinian militants.
During the second Palestinian uprising, which started in September 2000, tourism collapsed.
Relative stability for past two years however has led tourists and pilgrims to return to the town in larger numbers.
But the BBC's Bethany Bell says there are still far fewer tourists than there used to be before the uprising and that many of those celebrating outside the Church of the Nativity were local people.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7159674.stm
Published: 2007/12/25 13:21:18 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Pope Benedict XVI has appealed for just solutions to the conflicts in the Middle East, Iraq, Africa and elsewhere in his annual Christmas message.
He denounced terrorism and violence that victimised children and women.
His address came as millions of Christians around the world celebrated the traditional day of Christ's birth.
In Bethlehem, biblical place of Jesus' birth, more pilgrims visited the town for Christmas than in any year since the Palestinian uprising began in 2000.
'Joy, hope and peace'
The Pope spoke from a balcony in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, overlooking the square where thousands of people had gathered in the winter sunshine.
He said he hoped the "light of Christ" would "shine forth and bring consolation to those who live in the darkness of poverty, injustice and war".
An enthusiastic crowd broke into chanting during pauses in the Pope's address.
In his Urbi et Orbi speech (Latin for 'To the City and the World') he said: "May this Christmas truly be for all people a day of joy, hope and peace."
He urged political leaders to have the "wisdom and courage to seek and find humane, just and lasting solutions" to "ethnic, religious and political tensions... [which are] destroying the internal fabric of many countries and embittering international relations".
The address was broadcast live on television to dozens of countries and was followed by greetings in about 60 languages.
Bethlehem Mass
In the Pope's midnight Mass at the basilica, he urged people to find time for God and the needy.
In front of the Basilica, a new floodlit Nativity scene was unveiled.
This year, the larger-than-life-size statues of the baby Jesus and his family have been placed in a Nativity scene set not in a Bethlehem stable but in a room in Joseph's house in Nazareth.
Vatican officials say the change was made to illustrate the notion that Jesus was born everywhere, not just in Bethlehem.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Muslim, joined the midnight Mass in Bethlehem and emphasised that not only Christians were celebrating the festival.
"The new year, God willing, will be a year of security and economic stability," he said.
"We pray next year will be the year of independence for the Palestinian people," he added.
Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the Catholic leader in the Holy Land, called for peace in the Middle East as he led the Mass.
"This land belongs to God. It must not be for some a land of life and for others a land of occupation and a political prison," he said in a sermon delivered in his native Arabic.
Security fears
Local officials in Bethlehem say double the number of pilgrims have visited this year compared to last.
Fears about security and Israel's West Bank barrier - an eight-metre (24ft) concrete wall separating the town from Jerusalem - have discouraged potential visitors in recent years.
Israel says the barrier is vital to prevent attacks by Palestinian militants.
During the second Palestinian uprising, which started in September 2000, tourism collapsed.
Relative stability for past two years however has led tourists and pilgrims to return to the town in larger numbers.
But the BBC's Bethany Bell says there are still far fewer tourists than there used to be before the uprising and that many of those celebrating outside the Church of the Nativity were local people.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7159674.stm
Published: 2007/12/25 13:21:18 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Keeping the faith in China James Reynolds BBC News, Beijing The Growth of China's Christian community c/o BBC
Keeping the faith in China
By James Reynolds
BBC News, Beijing
At an underground church service in China, you pray as quickly as you can - and hope the police do not come running in.
At the end of an alleyway in the north of Beijing, 40 Chinese Christians gather in a small classroom. At the beginning of the service, they bow their heads and pray.
Their priest, Zhang Minxuan, stands in front of them. Twenty years ago he was a barber with no interest in religion. Then he got into trouble with the Communist Party and was jailed. After that he became a Christian.
Since then he has led an underground church and been detained a dozen times.
I need to spread Christianity and I need to print the bible and distribute it to fellow believers
Cai Zhuohua
"One day, God will bring our church out of the darkness and into the light," he tells his followers in the classroom. Their eyes shine back at him.
"I will pray for the government no matter how much they persecute me," Mr Zhang says.
"In the end I believe that God will convert them. I will never give up my relationship with God - no matter what happens."
Underground Christians make the Chinese Communist Party nervous.
There are millions of them in this country. They worship wherever they can - often in private homes.
They do not want to be controlled by Beijing, so they refuse to sign up to the state-sanctioned church.
The party is wary of any organisation that does not pledge its loyalty to the state.
Jail sentence
At his home in Beijing, Cai Zhuohua reads from the Old Testament.
In his sitting room, next to an old television set, there is a stack of bibles.
Mr Cai is another leader in China's underground Christian movement.
He is too nervous to allow us to meet his congregation - in case the police identify them from our reports.
Cai Zhuohua has been a Christian since he was a teenager.
A few years ago he had 10,000 bibles printed and delivered to fellow underground Christians. For this, the Communist Party jailed him for three years.
"I need to spread Christianity," he says, "and I need to print the Bible and distribute it to fellow believers - but I'm stopped from doing this."
Bible factory
So that makes what we find in the southern city of Nanjing quite a surprise.
China has its own thriving bible makers - the Amity Printing Company.
Every day the firm prints off around 9,000 bibles. But the factory is only allowed to supply bibles to the official state-approved church - not to the underground church.
Perhaps it's God's humour but we are printing millions of bibles here
Peter Deam, Amity's production advisor
The pages coming out of the presses do not seem to have much of an effect on the workers.
"I haven't read the Bible and I don't believe in Christianity," says Zhang Guohong, who's been working at the factory for 14 years.
"I have flipped through the book, but I am here to work. There is no time for me to read it."
Amity printed its first Chinese bible in 1987. Since then the company has been getting bigger and bigger.
In February 2008, Amity will move to a new site which will be able to make a million bibles a month. That may make it the world's largest bible factory.
That is quite something for the godless, Communist state.
"Perhaps it's God's humour," says Peter Dean, Amity's production advisor, "but we are printing millions of bibles here.
"We have printed 41 million bibles for the churches in China, they are distributed out through this gate, and into the networks of churches in China."
Official church
Some of the bibles end up at the Xishiku Catholic Church in Beijing.
This church is part of China's official, state-sanctioned religious establishment.
In the Catholic church, the bishops are chosen by Beijing, not the Vatican.
Everyone here answers to the Communist Party - no one has to hide or worry about getting arrested.
On Sundays hundreds of worshippers come to celebrate early morning mass. Three services are held - there are no spare seats at any of them.
This is the kind of official Christianity that the Chinese government tolerates.
The rule is simple: if you are loyal to the Communist Party, you can pray and you can worship as much as you like.
The government wants its Christians in the state-approved church where it can see them and control them.
But Christianity is growing beyond its control. One day soon, Christians may even outnumber Communists.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7150613.stm
Published: 2007/12/25 01:04:35 GMT
© BBC MMVII
By James Reynolds
BBC News, Beijing
At an underground church service in China, you pray as quickly as you can - and hope the police do not come running in.
At the end of an alleyway in the north of Beijing, 40 Chinese Christians gather in a small classroom. At the beginning of the service, they bow their heads and pray.
Their priest, Zhang Minxuan, stands in front of them. Twenty years ago he was a barber with no interest in religion. Then he got into trouble with the Communist Party and was jailed. After that he became a Christian.
Since then he has led an underground church and been detained a dozen times.
I need to spread Christianity and I need to print the bible and distribute it to fellow believers
Cai Zhuohua
"One day, God will bring our church out of the darkness and into the light," he tells his followers in the classroom. Their eyes shine back at him.
"I will pray for the government no matter how much they persecute me," Mr Zhang says.
"In the end I believe that God will convert them. I will never give up my relationship with God - no matter what happens."
Underground Christians make the Chinese Communist Party nervous.
There are millions of them in this country. They worship wherever they can - often in private homes.
They do not want to be controlled by Beijing, so they refuse to sign up to the state-sanctioned church.
The party is wary of any organisation that does not pledge its loyalty to the state.
Jail sentence
At his home in Beijing, Cai Zhuohua reads from the Old Testament.
In his sitting room, next to an old television set, there is a stack of bibles.
Mr Cai is another leader in China's underground Christian movement.
He is too nervous to allow us to meet his congregation - in case the police identify them from our reports.
Cai Zhuohua has been a Christian since he was a teenager.
A few years ago he had 10,000 bibles printed and delivered to fellow underground Christians. For this, the Communist Party jailed him for three years.
"I need to spread Christianity," he says, "and I need to print the Bible and distribute it to fellow believers - but I'm stopped from doing this."
Bible factory
So that makes what we find in the southern city of Nanjing quite a surprise.
China has its own thriving bible makers - the Amity Printing Company.
Every day the firm prints off around 9,000 bibles. But the factory is only allowed to supply bibles to the official state-approved church - not to the underground church.
Perhaps it's God's humour but we are printing millions of bibles here
Peter Deam, Amity's production advisor
The pages coming out of the presses do not seem to have much of an effect on the workers.
"I haven't read the Bible and I don't believe in Christianity," says Zhang Guohong, who's been working at the factory for 14 years.
"I have flipped through the book, but I am here to work. There is no time for me to read it."
Amity printed its first Chinese bible in 1987. Since then the company has been getting bigger and bigger.
In February 2008, Amity will move to a new site which will be able to make a million bibles a month. That may make it the world's largest bible factory.
That is quite something for the godless, Communist state.
"Perhaps it's God's humour," says Peter Dean, Amity's production advisor, "but we are printing millions of bibles here.
"We have printed 41 million bibles for the churches in China, they are distributed out through this gate, and into the networks of churches in China."
Official church
Some of the bibles end up at the Xishiku Catholic Church in Beijing.
This church is part of China's official, state-sanctioned religious establishment.
In the Catholic church, the bishops are chosen by Beijing, not the Vatican.
Everyone here answers to the Communist Party - no one has to hide or worry about getting arrested.
On Sundays hundreds of worshippers come to celebrate early morning mass. Three services are held - there are no spare seats at any of them.
This is the kind of official Christianity that the Chinese government tolerates.
The rule is simple: if you are loyal to the Communist Party, you can pray and you can worship as much as you like.
The government wants its Christians in the state-approved church where it can see them and control them.
But Christianity is growing beyond its control. One day soon, Christians may even outnumber Communists.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7150613.stm
Published: 2007/12/25 01:04:35 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Archbishop's Christmas sermon Dr Williams has said Western modernity 'eats away at the soul' c/o BBC William's Christmas Sermon 2007-BBC London
In full: Archbishop's Christmas sermon
Dr Williams has said Western modernity 'eats away at the soul'
In his Christmas morning sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, warned that if people threaten the planet there will be repercussions. Here is the sermon in full:
Eleven days ago, the Church celebrated the memory of the sixteenth century Spanish saint, John of the Cross, Juan de Yepes - probably the greatest Christian mystical writer of the last thousand years.
A man who worked not only for the reform and simplification of the monastic life of his time, but also for the purification of the inner life of Christians from fantasy, self-indulgence and easy answers.
Those who've heard of him will most likely associate him with the phrase that he introduced into Christian thinking about the hard times in discipleship - 'the dark night of the soul'.
He is a ruthless analyst of the ways in which we prevent ourselves from opening up to the true joy that God wants to give us, by settling for something less than the real thing, and confusing the truth and grace of God with whatever makes us feel good or comfortable.
'Disturbing and difficult'
He is a disturbing and difficult writer; not, you'd imagine, a man to go to for Christmas good cheer.
But it was St John who left us, in some of his poems, one of the most breathtakingly imaginative visions ever of the nature of Christmas joy, and who, in doing this, put his own analyses of the struggles and doubts of the life of prayer and witness firmly into an eternal context.
He is recognised as one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language; and part of his genius is to use the rhythms and conventions of popular romantic poetry and folksong to convey the biblical story of the love affair between God and creation.
One of his sequences of poetry is usually called simply the Romances.
It's a series of 75 short, mostly four-line, verses, written in the simplest possible style and telling the story of the world from the beginning to the first Christmas - but very daringly telling this story from God's point of view.
Out of the sheer overflowing energy of his love, God the Father decides that he will create a 'Bride' for his Son
It begins like a romantic ballad.
'Once upon a time', God was living eternally in heaven, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, with perfect love flowing uninterrupted between them.
And out of the sheer overflowing energy of his love, God the Father decides that he will create a 'Bride' for his Son.
The imagery is powerful and direct: there will be someone created who will be able, says God the Father, to 'sit down and eat bread with us at one table, the same bread that I eat.
And so the world is made as a home for the Bride.
Who is this Bride? It is the whole world of beings who are capable of love and understanding, the angels and the human race.
'Beautiful inversion'
In the rich diversity of the world, the heavens and the earth together, God makes an environment in which love and intelligence may grow, until they are capable of receiving the full impact of God's presence.
And so the world waits for the moment when God can at last descend and - in a beautiful turning upside-down of the earlier image - can sit at the same table and share the same bread as created beings.
As the ages pass on Earth, the longing grows and intensifies for this moment to arrive; and at last God the Father tells the Son that it is time for him to meet his Bride face to face on earth, so that, as he looks at her directly, she may reflect his own likeness.
When God has become human, then humanity will recognise in his face, in Jesus's face, its own true nature and destiny.
The coming of Christ is not first and foremost a response to human crisis
And the angels sing at the wedding in Bethlehem, the marriage of heaven and earth, where, in the haunting final stanza of the great poetic sequence, humanity senses the joy of God himself, and the only one in the scene who is weeping is the child, the child who is God in the flesh:
'The tears of man in God, the gladness in man, the sorrow and the joy that used to be such strangers to each other.'
Well, that is how John of the Cross sets out the story of creation and redemption, the story told from God's point of view.
And there are two things in this that are worth our thoughts and our prayers today.
The first is one of the strangest features of John's poems.
'Vision'
The coming of Christ is not first and foremost a response to human crisis; there is remarkably little about sin in these verses.
We know from elsewhere that John believed what all Christians believe about sin and forgiveness; and even in these poems there is reference to God's will to save us from destruction.
But the vision takes us further back into God's purpose.
The whole point of creation is that there should be persons, made up of spirit and body, in God's image and likeness, to use the language of Genesis and of the New Testament, who are capable of intimacy with God - not so that God can gain something but so that these created beings may live in joy.
And God's way of making sure that this joy is fully available is to join humanity on earth so that human beings may recognise what they are and what they are for.
Nothing changes, however far we fall - if we decide to settle down with our failures and give way to cynicism and despair, that is indeed dreadful - but God remains the same
The sinfulness, the appalling tragedy of human history has set us at what from our point of view seems an unimaginable distance from God; yet God, we might say, takes it in his stride.
It means that when he appears on earth he takes to himself all the terrible consequences of where we have gone wrong - 'the tears of man in God' - yet it is only a shadow on the great picture, which is unchanged.
We are right to think about the seriousness of sin, in other words; but we see it properly and in perspective only when we have our eyes firmly on the greatness and unchanging purpose of God's eternal plan for the marriage of heaven and earth.
It is a perspective that is necessary when our own sins or those of a failing and suffering world fill the horizon for us, so that we can hardly believe the situation can be transformed.
For if God's purpose is what it is, and if God has the power and freedom to enter our world and meet us face to face, there is nothing that can destroy that initial divine vision of what the world is for and what we human beings are for.
'Celebration of mystery'
Nothing changes, however far we fall; if we decide to settle down with our failures and give way to cynicism and despair, that is indeed dreadful - but God remains the same God who has decided that the world should exist so that it may enter into his joy.
At Christmas, when this mystery is celebrated, we should above all renew our sheer confidence in God.
In today's Bethlehem, still ravaged by fear and violence, we can still meet the God who has made human tears his own and still works ceaselessly for his purpose of peace and rejoicing, through the witness of brave and loving people on both sides of the dividing wall.
But the second point growing out of this is of immense practical importance.
The world around us is created as a framework within which we may learn the first beginnings of growing up towards what God wants for us.
It is the way it is so that we can be directed towards God. And so this is how we must see the world.
Yes, it exists in one sense for humanity's sake; but it exists in its own independence and beauty for humanity's sake - not as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness.
To grasp that God has made the material world, 'composed', says John of the Cross, 'of infinite differences', so that human beings can see his glory is to accept that the diversity and mysteriousness of the world around is something precious in itself.
To reduce this diversity and to try and empty out the mysteriousness is to fail to allow God to speak through the things of creation as he means to.
'My overwhelming reaction is one of amazement. Amazement not only at the extravaganza of details that we have seen; amazement, too, at the very fact that there are any such details to be had at all, on any planet.
'Extravaganza of details'
The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple. Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not become dulled by familiarity: the very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction.'
The temptation to quote Richard Dawkins from the pulpit is irresistible; in this amazement and awe, if not in much else, he echoes the 16th century mystic.
So to think of our world as a divine 'prompt' to our delight and reverence, so that its variety, the 'extravaganza of details', is a precious thing, is to begin to be committed to that reverent guardianship of this richness that is more and more clearly required of us as we grow in awareness of how fragile all this is, how fragile is the balance of species and environments in the world and how easily our greed distorts it.
When we threaten the balance of things, we don't just put our material survival at risk; more profoundly, we put our spiritual sensitivity at risk, the possibility of being opened up to endless wonder by the world around us.
Sometimes we challenge each other precisely so that we can break through what it is in each other that gets in the way of God's joy
And it hardly needs adding that this becomes still more significant when we apply John of the Cross's vision to our human relations.
Every person and every diverse sort of person exists for a unique joy, the joy of being who they are in relation to God, a joy which each person will experience differently.
And when I encounter another, I encounter one who is called to such a unique joy; my relation with them is part of God's purpose in bringing that joy to perfection - in me and in the other.
This doesn't rule out the tension and conflict that are unavoidable in human affairs - sometimes we challenge each other precisely so that we can break through what it is in each other that gets in the way of God's joy, so that we can set each other free for this joy.
This, surely, is where peace on earth, the peace the angels promise to the shepherds, begins, here and nowhere else, here where we understand what human beings are for and what they can do for each other.
'Glory to God'
The delighted reverence and amazement we should have towards the things of creation is intensified many times where human beings are concerned.
And if peace is to be more than a pause in open conflict, it must be grounded in this passionate amazed reverence for others.
The birth of Jesus, in which that power which holds the universe together in coherence takes shape in history as a single human body and soul, is an event of cosmic importance.
It announces that creation as a whole has found its purpose and meaning, and that the flowing together of all things for the joyful transfiguration of our humanity is at last made visible on earth.
'So God henceforth will be human, and human beings caught up in God. He will walk around in their company, eat with them and drink with them.
'He will stay with them always, the same for ever alongside them, until this world is wrapped up and done with'.
Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to those who are God's friends.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/7159849.stm
Published: 2007/12/25 11:31:44 GMT
Dr Williams has said Western modernity 'eats away at the soul'
In his Christmas morning sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, warned that if people threaten the planet there will be repercussions. Here is the sermon in full:
Eleven days ago, the Church celebrated the memory of the sixteenth century Spanish saint, John of the Cross, Juan de Yepes - probably the greatest Christian mystical writer of the last thousand years.
A man who worked not only for the reform and simplification of the monastic life of his time, but also for the purification of the inner life of Christians from fantasy, self-indulgence and easy answers.
Those who've heard of him will most likely associate him with the phrase that he introduced into Christian thinking about the hard times in discipleship - 'the dark night of the soul'.
He is a ruthless analyst of the ways in which we prevent ourselves from opening up to the true joy that God wants to give us, by settling for something less than the real thing, and confusing the truth and grace of God with whatever makes us feel good or comfortable.
'Disturbing and difficult'
He is a disturbing and difficult writer; not, you'd imagine, a man to go to for Christmas good cheer.
But it was St John who left us, in some of his poems, one of the most breathtakingly imaginative visions ever of the nature of Christmas joy, and who, in doing this, put his own analyses of the struggles and doubts of the life of prayer and witness firmly into an eternal context.
He is recognised as one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language; and part of his genius is to use the rhythms and conventions of popular romantic poetry and folksong to convey the biblical story of the love affair between God and creation.
One of his sequences of poetry is usually called simply the Romances.
It's a series of 75 short, mostly four-line, verses, written in the simplest possible style and telling the story of the world from the beginning to the first Christmas - but very daringly telling this story from God's point of view.
Out of the sheer overflowing energy of his love, God the Father decides that he will create a 'Bride' for his Son
It begins like a romantic ballad.
'Once upon a time', God was living eternally in heaven, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, with perfect love flowing uninterrupted between them.
And out of the sheer overflowing energy of his love, God the Father decides that he will create a 'Bride' for his Son.
The imagery is powerful and direct: there will be someone created who will be able, says God the Father, to 'sit down and eat bread with us at one table, the same bread that I eat.
And so the world is made as a home for the Bride.
Who is this Bride? It is the whole world of beings who are capable of love and understanding, the angels and the human race.
'Beautiful inversion'
In the rich diversity of the world, the heavens and the earth together, God makes an environment in which love and intelligence may grow, until they are capable of receiving the full impact of God's presence.
And so the world waits for the moment when God can at last descend and - in a beautiful turning upside-down of the earlier image - can sit at the same table and share the same bread as created beings.
As the ages pass on Earth, the longing grows and intensifies for this moment to arrive; and at last God the Father tells the Son that it is time for him to meet his Bride face to face on earth, so that, as he looks at her directly, she may reflect his own likeness.
When God has become human, then humanity will recognise in his face, in Jesus's face, its own true nature and destiny.
The coming of Christ is not first and foremost a response to human crisis
And the angels sing at the wedding in Bethlehem, the marriage of heaven and earth, where, in the haunting final stanza of the great poetic sequence, humanity senses the joy of God himself, and the only one in the scene who is weeping is the child, the child who is God in the flesh:
'The tears of man in God, the gladness in man, the sorrow and the joy that used to be such strangers to each other.'
Well, that is how John of the Cross sets out the story of creation and redemption, the story told from God's point of view.
And there are two things in this that are worth our thoughts and our prayers today.
The first is one of the strangest features of John's poems.
'Vision'
The coming of Christ is not first and foremost a response to human crisis; there is remarkably little about sin in these verses.
We know from elsewhere that John believed what all Christians believe about sin and forgiveness; and even in these poems there is reference to God's will to save us from destruction.
But the vision takes us further back into God's purpose.
The whole point of creation is that there should be persons, made up of spirit and body, in God's image and likeness, to use the language of Genesis and of the New Testament, who are capable of intimacy with God - not so that God can gain something but so that these created beings may live in joy.
And God's way of making sure that this joy is fully available is to join humanity on earth so that human beings may recognise what they are and what they are for.
Nothing changes, however far we fall - if we decide to settle down with our failures and give way to cynicism and despair, that is indeed dreadful - but God remains the same
The sinfulness, the appalling tragedy of human history has set us at what from our point of view seems an unimaginable distance from God; yet God, we might say, takes it in his stride.
It means that when he appears on earth he takes to himself all the terrible consequences of where we have gone wrong - 'the tears of man in God' - yet it is only a shadow on the great picture, which is unchanged.
We are right to think about the seriousness of sin, in other words; but we see it properly and in perspective only when we have our eyes firmly on the greatness and unchanging purpose of God's eternal plan for the marriage of heaven and earth.
It is a perspective that is necessary when our own sins or those of a failing and suffering world fill the horizon for us, so that we can hardly believe the situation can be transformed.
For if God's purpose is what it is, and if God has the power and freedom to enter our world and meet us face to face, there is nothing that can destroy that initial divine vision of what the world is for and what we human beings are for.
'Celebration of mystery'
Nothing changes, however far we fall; if we decide to settle down with our failures and give way to cynicism and despair, that is indeed dreadful - but God remains the same God who has decided that the world should exist so that it may enter into his joy.
At Christmas, when this mystery is celebrated, we should above all renew our sheer confidence in God.
In today's Bethlehem, still ravaged by fear and violence, we can still meet the God who has made human tears his own and still works ceaselessly for his purpose of peace and rejoicing, through the witness of brave and loving people on both sides of the dividing wall.
But the second point growing out of this is of immense practical importance.
The world around us is created as a framework within which we may learn the first beginnings of growing up towards what God wants for us.
It is the way it is so that we can be directed towards God. And so this is how we must see the world.
Yes, it exists in one sense for humanity's sake; but it exists in its own independence and beauty for humanity's sake - not as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness.
To grasp that God has made the material world, 'composed', says John of the Cross, 'of infinite differences', so that human beings can see his glory is to accept that the diversity and mysteriousness of the world around is something precious in itself.
To reduce this diversity and to try and empty out the mysteriousness is to fail to allow God to speak through the things of creation as he means to.
'My overwhelming reaction is one of amazement. Amazement not only at the extravaganza of details that we have seen; amazement, too, at the very fact that there are any such details to be had at all, on any planet.
'Extravaganza of details'
The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple. Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not become dulled by familiarity: the very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction.'
The temptation to quote Richard Dawkins from the pulpit is irresistible; in this amazement and awe, if not in much else, he echoes the 16th century mystic.
So to think of our world as a divine 'prompt' to our delight and reverence, so that its variety, the 'extravaganza of details', is a precious thing, is to begin to be committed to that reverent guardianship of this richness that is more and more clearly required of us as we grow in awareness of how fragile all this is, how fragile is the balance of species and environments in the world and how easily our greed distorts it.
When we threaten the balance of things, we don't just put our material survival at risk; more profoundly, we put our spiritual sensitivity at risk, the possibility of being opened up to endless wonder by the world around us.
Sometimes we challenge each other precisely so that we can break through what it is in each other that gets in the way of God's joy
And it hardly needs adding that this becomes still more significant when we apply John of the Cross's vision to our human relations.
Every person and every diverse sort of person exists for a unique joy, the joy of being who they are in relation to God, a joy which each person will experience differently.
And when I encounter another, I encounter one who is called to such a unique joy; my relation with them is part of God's purpose in bringing that joy to perfection - in me and in the other.
This doesn't rule out the tension and conflict that are unavoidable in human affairs - sometimes we challenge each other precisely so that we can break through what it is in each other that gets in the way of God's joy, so that we can set each other free for this joy.
This, surely, is where peace on earth, the peace the angels promise to the shepherds, begins, here and nowhere else, here where we understand what human beings are for and what they can do for each other.
'Glory to God'
The delighted reverence and amazement we should have towards the things of creation is intensified many times where human beings are concerned.
And if peace is to be more than a pause in open conflict, it must be grounded in this passionate amazed reverence for others.
The birth of Jesus, in which that power which holds the universe together in coherence takes shape in history as a single human body and soul, is an event of cosmic importance.
It announces that creation as a whole has found its purpose and meaning, and that the flowing together of all things for the joyful transfiguration of our humanity is at last made visible on earth.
'So God henceforth will be human, and human beings caught up in God. He will walk around in their company, eat with them and drink with them.
'He will stay with them always, the same for ever alongside them, until this world is wrapped up and done with'.
Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to those who are God's friends.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/7159849.stm
Published: 2007/12/25 11:31:44 GMT
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