Greenbelt

We're just back from Greenbelt Christian Arts Festival at Cheltenham Racecourse. A large number of our congregation are now Greenbelt regulars and there was certainly plenty of environmental stuff at Greenbelt this year. For me the green highlights included wild food foraging with Earth Abbey before the Sunday service (see picture), an enlightening workshop with one of the makers of the Age of Stupid and Tamsin Omond's passionate call to non violent protest (and John Bell as always - this time regarding Sabbath for people and planet). I also made my contribution to Christian Aid's mass visual trespass (a video petition to be projected onto a public space), calling on Gordon Brown to get his priorities right and be present at Copenhagen this December. However, as I began my ambitious plea about halting the melting of the Arctic sea ice I found my words stumbling in recollection of Alistair McIntosh's lectures. These were profound, heartbreaking and hugely important - he talked of the inevitable burn out of activists as we see most of the world failing to respond and crucially of the need to recognise that too little is happening too late so that, whilst still doing absolutely everything we practically can to halt climate change, we also need to prepare ourselves spiritually for the catastrophe.