Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 April 2011 13:00:38
So it's Spring in the city and I've spent the morning wandering around in the sunshine. This was not my usual mindless wandering soaking up the city, this was "work". As part of my fieldwork I found myself wandering around learning something of the history of one denomination in the city.
There was one point which particularly touched me. We reached a certain point on the journey , having travelled around seeing where various splinter congregations had planted their buildings and were told that the majority of these splinter congregations had actually come back together now, within one congregation - not where we were standing then. It had taken about 200 years of splits and division, but they were united again. We prayed, at that point, for unity in our diversity. The ironic thing for me, which I couldn't mention, was we were standing in the middle of Newcastle's Pink Triangle at this point.
After the fieldwork was over I wandered back into the city and encountered a series of stalls consisting of "leftie" material - it was a gathering celebrating St. Georges Day. It was encircled by police and had the National Front and EDL demonstrating against it. In typical form I negotiated the police lines and stood, holding the palm cross I had been given earlier in the day. I think I confused everybody a little when I crossed the police lines and put a pound in the Help for Heroes collecting tin an EDL supporter was holding. As I said to her I may totally disagree with her politics but I do agree with what she was collecting for. I then crossed back and stood on the monument amongst the lefties and anti-racists holding my cross.
Anyway, I'm going now to do a bit more wandering....having discovered that the Northumbria University gallery is closed, (and so I won't be able to go and see Norman Adams: The Way of the Cross today), I'm off to the Baltic.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the rest of St Georges Day and remember as Show of Hands put it, "it's our flag too and we want it back".