FOREWORD

How can a private individual make a difference, help to alleviate poverty in the some of poorer countries in the world? We feature the work of Professor Bob Orskov, who since retiring from his research institute in Aberdeen, has travelled the world setting up small scale agricultural projects to improve the lives of thousands of villagers living in the least developed parts of the earth. Bob's principle of the "Revolving Fund" succeeds because it is based on community cooperation and is owned and operated by the people who benefit from it. Balancing the demands of work with those of family is increasingly difficu1t these days and frequently the family misses out, something we may live to regret. This is the conclusion reached by Eugene O'Kelly, author of "Chasing Daylight" which we review. Flowers, foliage, sheaves of corn and baskets of vegetables are the traditional decor of Harvest Festival Services. John Robinson recalls the Harvest Rites of his child hood in rural Northern Ireland and speculates upon their significance today. Sue Good has been researching some of the myths associated with the Virgin Mary as a contribution to the recent discussion in assessing her significance in current spiritual practice. Remembrance Services take place in every part of our country in November. As The Link so far has never reflected this important community recognition of sacrifice in wartime we try to correct that omission now, with "Lest We Forget" .

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COMMUNITY PROJECTS

by Professor Bob Orskov

I have been asked to write an article about some of the community projects I have been involved in setting up in different countries during the past five years. In total we have seven in Indonesia, three in Vietnam and two in Kenya. Obviously each project has its own story and could have a book written about it! Therefore, I shall write about the projects in general terms and how they have contributed to poverty alleviation.
First of all each project has a livestock component, partly because I am a live-stock man, but also as small live-stock, such as goats, can have a very positive influence on poverty alleviation, the main aim of the projects. Live-stock also features prominently in the Higher Education links that my Institute is involved with in different countries. Here small livestock are particularly useful in so far as they give a sense of stability, effectively acting as a savings bank. Owning seven or eight goats may be equivalent in cost to having one cattle beast. Losing the latter would mean the loss of a very large investment. Losing one goat, on the other hand, is more manageable.

THE REVOLVING PRINCIPLE

Each project works with a revolving fund, which in principle means that the donated live-stock are eventually paid for by the recipient farmers who share the offspring of the first two pregnancies with a community group which is in charge of the project. In most cases, these are women's groups already established in the village. Each project, its goal and management, is set up with the active participation of the community group.

FUND FUNDING

Each community project is given start-up funding but this is a relatively small sum. The cost of each project has varied between £700 and £1400. The funding has come mainly from Rotary Clubs and from private sources; for instance, members of my own family have funded two projects and my wife and I have funded two with profits made from the sale of locally produced goods I have bought in markets in various countries. In central Java the University staff have themselves contributed to the funding of two projects.

CENTRAL JAVA

Most of the projects so far are in central Java near to Yogyacarta where there was recently a bad earthquake. Fortunately, the villages participating in the projects were not seriously affected. The first was in the village of Kwarasan, where in consultation with the women's group, it was decided to buy pregnant goats. The goats were kept in enclosures beside the houses and fed on tree leaves and branches. Fifty nanny goats and two males were purchased. The success of this project gave us the confidence to continue.
In five years, the initial fifty-two goats increased to four hundred and seventy-seven. Many of course were sold, but at the end of 2005 there were two hundred and forty-eight goats in the village, belonging to thirty farmers.
A project started in Gombang village in January 2003 with sixty-six goats, in three years, produced four hundred and fifty-three goats, three hundred and forty-five of which still remain there. Having met their own needs, the villagers themselves decided to extend the project to a neighbouring village with the offspring that were being returned to the community. Soka and Wonologi villages have had similar success, the Soka project colonising the neighbouring village. A new project is now flourishing in Ngerek. With relatively low inputs, more than two hundred families in this area are involved. With an average of four or five members in each family, the lives of at least a thousand people have been touched. The projects have had other important consequences. The University of Gadjuh Mada has become involved and so far twenty one students have based their final theses on their work with farmers in these villages and there have been two MSc. projects. This interaction of students and staff with small farmers is of immense long-term importance. It has also strengthened the community spirit in the villages, two of which have staged goat shows with prizes for the best entries!
Recently the Indonesian government has recognised the success and given money to buy six thousand goats to set up projects in about a hundred more villages.

LOMBOK ISLAND

Lombok is the first island east of Bali. Here, I was supervising a MSc. student on the use of rice straw for animal feed. The farmers were very busy harvesting the first rice crop and planting a new crop. Since time was so limited, they could not deal with the rice straw from the first crop other than by burning it. At a meeting of the farmers one evening, I discussed with them how they could use the straw for their benefit. Each farmer has on average, half a hectare of land. What came up in the discussion was that though preparation of the soil for a new crop could be speeded up by the use of a small paddy tractor, at the price of £1100, it was beyond the means of any individual farmer to by one. Here, the farmers are used to working together, as they had devised a system for keeping their Bali cattle in a single compound at night, taking turns to guard them against cattle thieves. Each farmer probably has four cattle and with around fifty farmers, there would be two to three hundred cattle in the compound.
I suggested that a cooperative way of using a tractor could be the answer. If they could make a proposal as to how this could be done, I said I thought 1 could identify - the funds to buy one. It was not long before a proposal was in my hands. Each farmer was to pay a fee for the use of the tractor, 60% of which was to go the community and 40% retained for fuel, maintenance and the labour costs of the one who took responsibility for the tractor. The 60% to the village would be used to buy weaned female calves which would be given to the farmers on the revolving fund basis according to a system suggested by them. This has been very successful and ten calves have been bought already.
When the tractor is not needed for the rice crop it is used for transport and has also been hired out to neighbouring villages to cultivate their fields. The success of this project prompted my Rotary Club to ask me to identify another village that would benefit from having a paddy tractor.

VIETNAMESE PROJECTS

As with Indonesia, I have been in Vietnam many times with different projects. Encouraged by the success of the Indonesian community projects, we tried the same pattern in Quangiri province, in central Vietnam, an area which during the Vietnam war was sprayed with 'agent orange' - in my opinion one of the greatest crimes against both humanity and the environment that I have come across.
There are people who survived it still suffering today. Here in cooperation with the women's union, we established two projects using pregnant sows - pig production is very important in Vietnam. Funding was again forthcoming from my Rotary Club.
After a year, the farmers who had been given sows had to pay back about 1.2 times the value of a pregnant sow. This project has now been running for about four years, and the two villages, An Mo and Dau Kenh have formed a joint "sow club". The results have been so successful that they now feel they have sufficient sows and are considering changing it to a cow club on the same basis. Their cattle are quite small with a mature weight of 150kg.
Another project has been set up in the village of Huon Von. In fact this consists of four villages and the revolving fund goes in turn to a different group each year.
Both in Indonesia and Vietnam, as the villagers feel they have sufficient animals for their needs, their thoughts are turning to setting up village banks with the pay-back money, enabling them to make small loans at very small rates of interest, to buy other necessities and to set up other enterprises, such as the purchase of a sewing machine. The interest is also used as a welfare fund for the villagers.

KENYA

Near to the rift valley, collaboration with Egerton University, near Nakuru, we have recently set up a dairy goat project. Thirty-five pregnant goats were provided and the number has already doubled. The village is divided into four groups and the goats have been selected particularly for milk production. Goat milk is very much in demand in Kenya as it is believed to be of benefit to AIDS patients.
At present one village is considering the possibility of setting up a project based on local chickens and they are debating amongst themselves how they will manage the revolving fund principle for this purpose. So far they have suggested that for each chicken they get, two will be donated to the community to establish other projects. They are also considering the advantage of setting up a community unit, rather than each person having a small personal flock. When they eventually come up with a good proposal I shall try to find the funding required.

On the whole these community projects have been very successful They have, in my opinion, given the participants a greater sense of security and made a positive impact in poverty alleviation. The secret of success is to let the village groups decide how they will each manage the revolving fund system, so that they have a commitment to making a success of their project. The universities in Indonesia, Vietnam and Kenya have all gained a better insight into the needs of their clients and this has in turn influenced their research activities. I feel they too are proud of the projects and so they should be!

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"Why am I doing what I am doing?" This question is at the centre of a recently published book entitled "Chasing Daylight" written by the late Eugene O'Kelly who was until May last year (2005), the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of KPMG one of the largest international accounting firms, worth 5 billion dollar and employing 20,000 people world wide.

"Chasing Daylight" belongs to that category of literature produced by people who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and who wish to give an account of their last few weeks on earth. Last year we reviewed "Rowing without Oars" by Ulla-Carin Lindquist, the Swedish TV newscaster who died of a rare motor neurone disease at the age of fifty. Although "Chasing Daylight" is not as well written as "Rowing without Oars", nor is it as intimate, because the author's ego tends to get between him and the reader, it still offers an insight into the mindset and motivations of a remarkable individual who at the end had come to question his whole life style and philosophy. It also raises questions about our own life style and encourages us to examine our values and assess our priorities.

Eugene O'Kelly had joined KPMG as an assistant accountant as a very ambitious twenty-three year old, and by dint of ability, hard work, determination and commitment, almost thirty years later emerged as the supreme authority in charge of the whole corporation. He is highly organised, methodical and orderly and expects everyone else to be the same. He values effort, commitment, efficiency and hard work above everything else, He is extremely self-confident, competitive and is obsessive about winning. He only undertakes projects in which he expects to succeed. If he fails, and if failure is the result of some shortcoming on the part of an employee, that person's future in KPMG may well be in jeopardy. His style is brusque, decisive, authoritative and exacting. He lives according to a strict time table; every minute of every working day has to be usefully employed. He sets himself goals, some to be achieved today, some tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and in 18 months time.

At the age of fifty three he is at the peak of his mental, physical and professional power, working 90 hours a week and travelling 150,000 miles a year by air, sometimes visiting clients in three different continents in one week. Being a self-made man, he is very proud of his position, of what he has achieved, of his health and energy and his ability to outpace all his rivals. He lives in New York, has been married for 27 years, has a fourteen year old daughter and an adopted daughter who is married with a husband and children. He is devoted to his family although he has little enough time to spend with them. Golf is his only relaxation. Occasionally he plays truant to play with his wife, usually late in the afternoon as the sun is setting, so that they are "chasing daylight" around the golf course. He anticipates living like this until he is 65 when he will retire to spend his time playing golf, collecting fine wines and going to the opera.

 In May 2005 he consulted a doctor about what he thought was a minor complaint only to be informed a few days later that he was suffering from terminal brain cancer and had no more than three months of life remaining to him. He and his wife and family were devastated of course and it took them several days to recover from the shock. However, he was a very tough-minded individual and quickly set about coming to terms with the situation.

First of all he went to church. He was of Irish extraction and had been brought up a Catholic but he appears to have attended an Episcopal Church. The expectation of divine intervention was not on his agenda. His was a rational mind which dismissed any chance of a miraculous cure. It was his custom to go to church when he had a particularly difficult professional decision to make. The serenity and stillness of the building gave him the peace and quietness he required to focus upon the problem and find the best solution. Now more than ever he had to think objectively. That is he had to try to calm the turmoil of intense emotions which were raging in his mind in order to think clearly. He had to remove himself from the problem and try to see it as belonging to someone else so that he could work out a strategy that was not influenced by his feelings of fear, disappointment, anger and concern for his wife and family who would have to live with the consequences long after he had departed. Abandoning awareness of self completely and controlling one's feelings in such a situation is almost impossible because it requires a level of maturity and spiritual assurance that few of us possess. Eugene O'Kelly, however, seems to have been able to think through the emotional blizzard, find a calm centre remote from self-consciousness, and been able to construct a plan of action to see him through the few months remaining to him.

His approach was to regard it as a business problem. Clearly his life had changed completely and had to be conducted on a basis totally different from what it had been before. Since quantity of life was no longer possible, quality of life had to be the principal consideration. He, therefore, decided that he should do his utmost to ensure that everyday should be as happy and fulfilling as he could make it for himself and his family. Thinking about this, led him to criticise his past way of life in which he had ruthlessly sacrificed everything for his career, spent very little time with his wife and family and had sealed himself off from all experiences other than those associated with his professional existence. Balance sheets, ledgers, contracts and the stock-market prices had occupied his days. He ought to have asked that question, "Why am I doing what I am doing?" but it never occurred to him, he was so busy enjoying the exercise of power, making money, winning a reputation as a successful and dynamic commercial leader. He had thought his life was fulfilled; now he realised he had only been busy, occupying his mind with business deals and money-raising schemes, in order to exclude the danger of entertaining any other kind of less familiar but more profound speculation about the meaning and purpose of life. Now, he Was obliged to do just that.

He set himself a number of goals. He would retire immediately from all his professional appointments. He would say farewell to all his hundreds of acquaintances starting with the least intimate and finishing with the closest, his relatives, his wife and daughters. He would plan his funeral and write a book. Above all, however, he would learn to engage with real life in all its richness in order to discover the true purpose of existence.

Learning compassion and humility was an early lesson, associated with coming to terms with his condition. Although his illness was incurable, he opted for a course of radiation treatment to slow down its progress. Five days a week, for six weeks he attended a New York hospital. This was a salutary experience. All his life he had associated with people who were energetic, healthy, competitive and working at peak efficiency. This was not so in the radiation department of the hospital. Doctors and nurses made mistakes. Machinery frequently broke down. Appointments were frequently subject to delay and a process that was scheduled for 20 minutes sometimes took hours, most of that time spent in a tiny waiting room, crammed with other patients. Accustomed as he had been to instantaneous attendance in the past, now he had to learn to be patient, to accept this level of treatment as his new way of life. Nor was he was in control. His fate was no longer in his own hands. A new power, his disease, was now in charge. He was not a god; he was a human being who was gravely ill and who was obliged to acknowledge his weakness. This is not an easy thing to do. Weakness is not a valued attribute in our impatient and susceptible society, although we are all afflicted by it, one way or another. None of us is perfect, however much we may pretend otherwise. In the waiting room, however, he quickly discovered he belonged in this community of weakness. He was now associating with the infirm, the frightened, the despairing, the hopeless and the defeated, people of all ages and backgrounds, struck down, like him, by disease and facing an uncertain future. Such pain and misery were not to be found in the luxurious, high-tech. offices in which he had spent his life, but now he realised that affliction too was a part of every-day experience and his heart went out to his fellow sufferers.

These insights led him to conclude that true personal fulfilment was a spiritual matter. Happiness, contentment were to be found through consciousness, being aware of existing every second, a heightened attention to all that was going on around him and not in manipulating the financial markets. He set out in search of 'perfect moments' as he called them, during which he would be so happy that he would lose all track of time, forget all his troubles and be intensely aware of being alive. Such an occasion would be a day spent in some remote part of the countryside, by a lake, with his wife and daughter. He wanted to become sensitive to natural beauty, hills, trees, lakes and streams, the sky and wild creatures. He wanted to feel part of Nature, to be taken out of himself.

Having spent his life existing in the present but all the time planning for and thinking about the future like most of us, he now wanted to live exclusively in the present, to be conscious of the moment and nothing else; to be aware that he was alive. Meditation, then, seemed to be the answer, as it focuses the mind on nothing but awareness of pure existence. His first attempts were failures. Eventually, the sound and sight of water, he discovered, helped him to concentrate and he could spend a whole hour in a meditative state, free of anxiety, contented and. at peace.

Within three months he had completed the tasks he had set himself, including his book, which he intended as advice for the task orientated and ambitious young business-men who would make the same mistake as he, sacrificing everything for career. Having tried to cram a life-time's spiritual awareness into three months made him realise that what we need in life, is balance, between the demands of the job and the demands of the spirit. Advice which is reminiscent of Jacob Marley's good counsel to Ebenezer Scrooge, that too much emphasis on moneymaking eventually withers up the soul.

Answering his question, "Why am I doing what I am doing?" is extraordinarily difficult because we have to examine our motives at many different levels, the social, materialist, moral, emotional, spiritual, and at the same time take into account our own personality. In any particular occasion, are we acting in the hope of material gain, or because it is expected of us, or to do someone a favour, or out of moral conviction or a sense of duty or compassion or to fulfil an ideal or ambition, or to satisfy some deep emotional or spiritual need, and so on. Eugene O'Kelly, presumably. would then ask us to consider whether or not our answer would enrich our life and enhance our awareness of the world around us and of our part in it.

Of course, being social creatures we have many obligations towards other people, but surely there must be an opportunity during the day when we can turn off the TV. the radio, the telephone, still the rampaging traffic in our minds and become aware of ourselves just existing. As a child when I was at a loose end and complained to my mother that I had nothing to do, she would say," Just sit down and content yourself". I didn't think much of her advice then, but now I realise that sitting still and finding fulfilment in my own thoughts is a very challenging activity, but one which has many beneficial effects and is certainly worth trying. W. H . Davies' simplistic-seeming poem "What is life, if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?" expresses an equally profound truth.

Eugene O'Kelly died on September 10th last year. It is doubtful if many Chief Executives will pay heed to his advice, since ambition, success and the exercise of power are formidable rivals to the still small voice; but we of a more contemplative turn of mind may very well take him at his word and chase after that spiritual daylight that illuminates every conscious soul.

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"HARVEST REFLECTIONS"

by John Robinson

My earliest recollection of harvest thanksgiving services was the large number of them that I was taken to each year by my parents. There was the morning and evening service in our church, Clough, to attend, and then evening services in the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Churches of BaIlee and Downpatrick, with possibly Killinchy and Rademon, if they did not clash in timing with the others. Because my mother was Church of Ireland before marrying, as a family we often went along to the church that she had grown up in for their evening harvest service.

My lasting memory of those early harvest thanksgiving services was the enormous effort that went into decorating the church. Produce from farm, orchard and garden, adorned the church entrance, the pulpit, window ledges, walls, pew ends and light fittings. Great care was taken to ensure that only the best produce and flowers were brought along for the harvest. Standards akin to those employed by show judges were applied in their selection. For what reason, I have often since asked myself. After all it was not a competition, or was it? As I recall, the contributions to the singing were equally competitive, with organ and choir members putting in hours of practice for the special harvest anthem and the solo parts. Precision in both note and word was paramount; thus in those harvest services that occurred relatively early in the season before the harvest was complete, or in those years that poor weather delayed harvesting, the well-known line "all is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin" in the harvest home hymn, would be changed to "some is safely gathered in"!

For the evening service, usually conducted by a visiting minister, the church would always be packed and it was not unusual to have to bring in chairs to seat people in the main aisle.

But what do 1 recall of the ministers? Although they were all male, they were a diverse bunch in terms of age, physical form and tone of voice. Looking back, they ranged from physically large and quiet spoken to small in size but thunderous in voice. Some relied entirely for their address on a prepared script; others intermittently referred to their notes; while others preached fluently for up to half-an-hour - perhaps even longer without using a note. To me, however, they all appeared to have one thing in common, they all seemed to have an uncanny ability when comforting the afflicted to afflict the comfortable! Thus 1 can recall, on a number of occasions after the service, overhearing stalwarts of the church saying to each other, "I think the minister was getting at us in his sermon, don't you?" To which the reply very often was, "I certainly do. It is a case of, 'If the cap fits' then it is meant for you to wear it. Do something!"

Very often the theme of the harvest address would be a link between the harvest of the soil and the harvest of the soul. The sermon was seen as a wonderful opportunity to draw parallels between the material harvest and the spiritual one. It was an annual reminder that, while politicians and governments and the more affluent among the listening congregation may regard material productivity as necessary for their survival and that of the nation's economy, religion taught that spiritual productivity was essential for the survival of humankind. Of course, for such a harvest theme there was much biblical material for the minister to draw upon, Jesus' parable of the sower being the of ten used example. This parable provided ministers with a perfect springboard to stir the conscience of every member of the congregation and force each to ask themselves the question, "Which soil type and by analogy which soul type am I on which this material seed that represents the spiritual word is now falling?"

The way in which this question was posed varied greatly between ministers. There were those of large proportion who leaned right out over the pulpit to the extent that I feared they would fall into the choir below, and with hands clasped down in front of them, would quietly and, with great deliberation pose the question, while at the same time appearing to scan almost individually every member of the congregation to assess the depth of their guilt regarding the state of their soul. Other with arms waving and index fingers pointing in the most threatening fashion, jumped around the pulpit as the question exploded from their lips with the full force of a lung capacity that seemed well in excess of what their frail frames could surely possess. And then there would be a deadly hush only intermittently broken by "Eh?" "Eh?" from the minister. What was he expecting us to do? Should we be jumping up and apologising for the 'stony-ground state of our soul and assuring him that we would do everything in our power to rectify it? I don't remember anyone ever doing so, but whether or not one agreed with the religious content or style of the delivery, it was great theatre.

Indeed, my recollection of ministers in those early years of my life, was that they were far more theatrical than their successors. Could that have been the attraction that drew people in their hundreds to hear them preach? Or was it a much greater acceptance by our predecessors of the importance in their daily living, of spiritual productivity or fruitfulness as instructed throughout the New Testament? Although undoubtedly well acquainted through religious teachings with this general message, they perhaps felt the an annual reminder of the key elements of the fruit of the spirit was warranted, for at least every individual member of the congregation could then do a quick ranking to see where they stood on each of the elements on love, as in love thy neighbour as thyself, goodness, kindness, patience and tolerance, faithfulness 'and fifth; gentleness, self-control, joy and peace.

Of course, in all those early harvest services great emphasis was put on gratitude and thanks. Everyone had experienced food rationing so there was good reason to be grateful for the harvest of the soil for it provided the fuels that sustained the fire of life in every living creature. So, when it came to the singing of the 'Harvest Home' hymn, "Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home", the well-above-average volume of the congregation's singing would have left no on-looker in any doubt about the congregation's gratitude. Perhaps it was, therefore, a self-driven need for the public expression of gratitude through unrestrained singing, that also swelled congregation sizes at those early harvest services.

And what do I recall about the ministers' preachings on gratitude? Just about everything we were instructed to be grateful for are things that today we all take for granted. It was assumed that we were all grateful for our daily bread. After all, saying grace before a meal was a common occurrence. Today, for our society, food is in our 'right-to-have' category, making thanks for the material harvest seem almost absurd to many young people. But what stands out most in my mind was the call by ministers for us to become a society of individuals eternally grateful for everyone and everything that touches upon our senses and makes us who we are. Grateful for the whole of life, plant, animal and human, however it came to be. Grateful for the awe-inspiring power of nature of which the transformation of the acorn to the oak tree is just one example. That for me was the take-home message from those early harvest services. One came away from them filled with a sense of gratitude, born out of humble admiration. That humble admiration, albeit based on a much larger scale, the universe, prompted Einstein to write, "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God." But with regard to humility, admiration and gratitude where is Western Society today, compared with 50 years ago? It would be very easy to conclude that we have become less humble .

Yet that is not how the Dalai Lama sees Western Society. He feels that despite our great material wealth many of us have lower self-esteem, by which I suspect he means much higher self-pity than his Tibetan nomads for whom life is a continual struggle to survive. We have probably, however, become more difficult to awe-inspire, and with respect I suggest we are less grateful. The driving force for these changes in our attitude must surely be the diminished risks to our living. We expect to live longer; indeed we see it as our right to do so. We expect better health treatment, better living standards and more affluent life styles. For many of the material things that obliterate our spirituality and that now dominate our lives, gratitude has given way to entitlement.

Do we need to change? I think we do. But how do we bring back the spiritual component of our lives that seemed to be more a part of my childhood than it is of young people's experience today; that spiritual awareness that, for example, prevents the Tibetan nomad and other so-called primitive societies for feeling sorry for themselves. It is from that inner spirit that gratitude and thanks flow. The starting point must surely be reverence for life in all its forms. An acceptance that what we have been blessed with is far in excess' of what we deserve. An acceptance that other people in other lands have not only much less than we, but in many cases much less than they have earned, much less than they need and much less than they deserve. A realization of how much others have contributed to who and what we are, a realization that we are entirely dependent upon the laws of the universe and forces that we do not fully understand, forces which lie far beyond the narrow boundaries of the monetary world that seeks to control our lives and sadly is increasingly succeeding in doing so. A realization that what we have are gifts given and not rights to be demanded. Gratitude for all these things must surely be what harvest thanks-giving in both the material and spiritual sense is all about.

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OUR LADY OF MYTH AND MYSTERY

by Sue Good

When I originally thought about this piece, I was going to call it "Mary, fact and fiction", but as I mulled it over. l realised that "fact" was the one thing that I really didn't have much of, so I opted instead for the title "Our Lady of Myth and Mystery". Most Catholics will speak of "Our Lady", possibly "Our Blessed Lady" if they're very devout, or they might call her "Mother of God".  She also has a whole range of other titles; Queen of Heaven,  Refuge of Sinners, Mother of Perpetual Succour, Star of the Sea, Mystic Rose, Lily of the Valley and so on. It is almost as if she has taken on any role that people wanted her to assume.

Of the real, historical Mary we know very little. The gospels tell us she was very young, she accepted an angelic invitation to bear a child, she nurtured that child to maturity and she was there when he was executed. When we last see her, she is with the group of men her son gathered around him. From the gospels that never made it into what we know as the bible, we are told her parents' names Joachim and Anne and the fact that they were descended from David, a convenient bit of hindsight. You see, the Messiah had to be descended from David. Joseph was a descendant of David, but by the time these gospels were written, Joseph was looked on only as a foster father, but conveniently Mary also is said to be of David's line. Nobody knows when Mary died, but we presume it must be somewhere around the middle of the first century AD and perhaps 40 years later we have the first pronouncements coming from the fathers of the early church, references to Mary as Virgin and Mother, comparisons of Mary with Eve and the extolling of Mary's role in the salvation of man. So right from the earliest days of the church, Mary was seen to have played an important part and paintings of her began to appear in catacombs. Prayers, poems and churches dedicated to Mary followed and at the Council of Ephesus in 431, Mary was given the title of "God-bearer", or "Mother of God".

But all of this went well over the heads of the ordinary man and woman. The very fact that they didn't know much about her maybe accounts for why so many legends and stories grew up to fill the gap. Mary figured largely in their everyday life, with a particularly rich stock of legends about plants and flowers. The marigold, for instance, was often placed around statues of Our Lady. It was said that she used the blossoms as coins and that during the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, they had been set upon by robbers. The thieves took Mary's purse, but when they opened it, marigolds fell out. In Sicily it is told that the Madonna's Juniper Bush opened its branches to shelter the Holy Family when Herod's pursuing soldiers drew near them as they fled to Egypt. The rosemary bush and clematis were also said to have sheltered them. The. rosemary's fragrance. arose after Mary hung her linens to dry on its branches. Lavender also was said to have received its scent after Mary laid Jesus' clothes on the. plant. to dry. It was called Mary's Drying Plant.

The notion of this very simple but courtly lady fitted well into the pattern of chivalry that obtained all through the Middle Ages and many knights dedicated themselves to Mary.

So the role of Mary now has various aspects:- a model to which all can aspire, a friend who can speak to God for us, a balance to the masculinity of the church hierarchy and someone with whom people could readily identify. This ready identification of the virgin as "one of us" was one of the main causes of the rapid spread of the Catholic church in Latin America. In the sixteenth century Juan Diego, a Mexican peasant, saw a beautiful lady, in appearance just like a native Indian, who asked him to build a church at a spot that was sacred to the indigenous people. She gave him roses, which he took to the local bishop, wrapped up in his cloak, which was made of cactus fibre. On the cloak there appeared an image of the face he had seen and the image still remains preserved on the cloth. One of the most remarkable things about the image was only discovered with the advancement of science. It was simply that, when the eye of the image was enlarged, there could be seen reflected in it the figures of Juan Diego and the bishop, with the cloak and roses. Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she is known became the object of much,. veneration throughout Latin America and the catalyst for converting the native people.

But there is another side to the Virgin Merry, a dark and mysterious side - and a side that is being seen more and more over the past century and a half. Many people are uneasy about the rapid proliferation of apparitions of the virgin, some seeing them as demonic activity, others as a re-surfacing of the latent pagan goddess cult, hiding behind Christian respectability and proof of mankind's recurring tendency to worship a mother goddess, the bringer of life and the sustainer of fertility.

The nineteenth century French novelist .Emile Zola believed that he had perceived "almost a new religion" at Lourdes. Lourdes is probably the one Marian shrine that most people could name, the place where the virgin is said to have appeared to 14 year old Bernadette Soubirous. She asked for a chapel to be built and for a spring to be uncovered, told Bernadette to pray and promised her much suffering in this world, but happiness in heaven. From this small beginnings a whole industry has grown up and sick people come in their thousands every year to bathe in the waters. The number of cures are relatively small and totally random, a fact which made the contemporary Catholic writer, Robert Benson observe "Mary, then, has appeared to me in a new light since I have visited Lourdes. I shall in future not only hate to offend her but fear also. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of that mother who allows the broken sufferers to crawl across France- to her feet and then to crawl back again. She is dark, mighty, dominant and all but inexorable."

Lourdes was just the beginning. During the twentieth century there have been 386 recorded cases of Marian apparitions. Of these, the church has said very cautiously that 8 show a supernatural character and a further 11 have the approval of the local bishop in each case. All of the rest are either "not worthy of faith" or there is no decision about them. The visionaries are a mixed bunch, both men and women from different backgrounds, although there are a good- proportion of children and adolescents involved. Contrary to public opinion, the seers are not always Catholic, or even in some cases Christian. Throughout the period, although there have been many visionaries recorded in Ireland, there have been only two in England, one in Newcastle in 1954 and one in Surbiton in 1983. No details of either are available. There are also none at all recorded in Scotland. Perhaps this is not too surprising, given the Scottish reputation for pragmatism, but consider these words, allegedly coming from Mary in one of the later appearances:- She says "Always when I work with people on earth, I must work with what is in their minds, this includes their vocabulary, ideas and beliefs. I am not allowed to destroy anything, not even erroneous beliefs. I work with their way of thinking and how they view their world."

Fatima in Portugal, chronologically,  the first of the twentieth century apparitions to gain approval also displays many of the common features of the latest appearances; The visionaries are three children minding sheep, it is 1917 and the political situation is anti-clerical. The lady appears to them on the 13th day of every month for a six month period and tells them to pray the rosary and do penance to be saved from the fires of hell. The eldest child is given a vision of hell and is told three "secrets", the last of which was released only very recently and which is supposed to reveal the end times. On the last appearance in October, the lady has promised to work a miracle. Many people come to see this and the sun appears to spin, to give off coloured rays and to fall towards the earth with terrifying effect. Not everyone present sees this spectacle, although some people ten kilometres away. do and others throughout the region report various other solar phenomena.

These solar phenomena seem to play a big part in many of the appearances and people will report being able to look directly at the sun while it spins, without doing any damage to their eyes. Other reports are of showers of diamonds, glowing red clouds, clouds of incense and showers of roses. One interesting connection here is with the sighting of so-called UFO's. During October 1967 there were reports in England of a series of lights in the sky that formed themselves into the shape of a cross. These were well documented and seen by reliable witnesses, including policemen and BBC engineers. Six months later, hundreds of people in Zeitoun, Cairo saw an apparition of a lady over the domes of the Coptic church. She appeared for two hours at a time, always at night, but never spoke and was accompanied by strange, luminous doves that often flew in the form of a cross. The figure would move across the domes, bowing and sometimes blessing the enormous crowds that gathered and the people of different faiths responded by praying in their own traditional ways.

This movement towards ecumenism is something that the Catholic church seems, to struggle with, especially if the revelations seem to deny official church teaching. Annie Kirkwood, an American from a Baptist background, claims to hear messages from Mary and has written books about these messages. The general drift is as always in Marian appearances, "pray, pray, pray", but Kirkwood also claims to have been told much about Mary's life on earth, her family background and the brothers and sisters of Jesus. As this runs counter to the Catholic tradition of perpetual virginity, many Catholic theologians would dismiss this one as the work of fallen spirits. The quotation I referred to earlier, about Mary having to work with what is in people's minds, was one from the Kirkwood revelations.

The on-going appearances at Medjugorge to several teenagers are still the subject of much controversy. Part of this is linked to historically inspired in-fighting between the local bishop and the Franciscans who are associated with the shrine. Once again we have reports of sun spinning, of photos mysteriously acquiring ghostly overlays of Mary's figure and of drops of blood appearing on the communion wafers. But the messages are at bottom always the same:- seek God by prayer from the heart, while we still may, with the additional call to bring about peace. Because the visions are still happening, it is possible to get the visionaries to question the virgin and sometimes the answers are surprising. One question about the true faith elicited the response "God is pleased by all religions", an answer which can either reassure one's belief in the commonality of man's search for God, or make one suspect the coming of the Antichrist and the downfall of religion. In the end, each person has to decide whether revelations and visions help or hinder in the search for the way to God. Perhaps there is a great significance in the words that the virgin always uses to end her messages at Medjugorge. She says "thank you for having responded to my call". Response need not imply a total belief in all that might have happened to others, just an open mind to accept whatever will be of use in one's own personal road to the source of truth. As Gandhi said "there are as many religions as there are people."

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Kirkwood The Lad and the Jester

Once, long ago, there was a man who couldn't read or write, nor did he have a skill or trade, but he did have a marvellous talent. He could juggle five objects at once, walk on his hands, stand on his head, walk a tightrope, tell jokes, dance and sing. He joined a circus and travelled the world giving pleasure to those he met, especially the poor, whose lives were hard. As he grew older, he started to think about where he could go. It was getting harder to travel around and his joints ached. But what could he do? He knew no other trade. Then he remembered one particular man who had enjoyed ms act. It was the abbot of a great monastery. He went and asked to be admitted and the abbot said to him "You have brought laughter to many houses, even to this one, and in hard times you made it easier for many of us to praise God. You are welcome in this house as long as you live. The man was overjoyed and for some time was very happy in his new life. Then he started to feel that he was useless, could contribute nothing to the workings of the monastery and worried that other monks could come to resent him.

One day as he roamed disconsolately about the monastery he wandered into the crypt underneath the oldest part of the church. There he came across an old statue of Mary, forgotten and neglected. The paint on it was chipped and she only had one hand. The baby Jesus in her arms was also ragged and dirty and it looked as though he had once carried a ball or the world in his hands, but that was gone too. As the man looked at the statue, he knew what his work in the monastery was to be. Next morning he brought down to the crypt all the tools of his trade, his juggling pins, balls and a tightrope. Every day he would come down and perform for the lady and her child, walking on his hands, juggling, even telling jokes and singing. It was hard work as he was older and stiffer now, but he knew it would please the lady. He was happy at last. Then one day, one of the young officious monks who liked to check up on everyone followed him to the crypt and saw what he was doing. Immediately he reported to the abbot, who came to see for himself. As he stood in the shadows and watched the old man singing and juggling, his heart was heavy for he knew he would have to send him away. Then something amazing happened. The old man had just achieved a great feat - juggling with five different objects, and; exhausted, he collapsed in a heap. Suddenly, the statue moved. The old wood turned into a woman with a dirty linen veil and a two-year old bouncing child. She stepped down and bent over the man, gently wiping the sweat. from his. ..brown with her ragged skirt. Then she kissed his forehead. The child had been put down on the floor and quickly, without his mother noticing, he took a bright blue juggling ball and tucked it inside his own garment. Then the woman turned to him and picked him up with a smile.

The abbot sent for the old man next day and told him to continue his work, which he did for many years, until he grew too weak. The abbot never saw the lady again until the night the old man died, when she came for him and once again wiped his brow with her dress. This time she took his soul with her and looked gently on the abbot as she passed by.

The abbot took the place of the old man and learnt how to juggle and walk on his hands. He tried every day to perform for the lady and her laughing child with the bright blue ball in his hands. He wrote many theological works and hymns in praise of Mary, and became famous. His name was Bernard of Clairvaux. They also say he prayed for the devotion of the old man's love for the poor forgotten virgin and her child.

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LEST WE FORGET

by Bill Stephen

All over the country on Remembrance Sunday, people gather in the open air in city squares, town High Streets, municipal parks and gardens, in country churchyards and on remote hill tops, wherever there is a memorial in honour of people, military and civilian, who perished in the First and Second World Wars and in subsequent conflicts in which successive governments felt duty-bound to engage. The memorials which on this day are the focus of attention vary widely in structure: some are simple plaques set into a church wall or stained glass windows or obelisks, plain stone shafts, bearing the names of the fallen, others are more elaborate statuary groups depicting heroism or sorrow or the spirit of peace, Discretion restraining Valour was a popular theme - whatever was thought to be an appropriate response at the time to the frightful carnage. of the First World War, after which most of these monuments were commissioned.

One of the most moving I have ever seen, is set in a tiny park in the middle of Rhynie, an Aberdeenshire village. A life-sized figure of a soldier, carved from a single granite block stands on a plinth bearing the names of the fallen. The soldier wears a peaked cap, an army great coat, puttees and army boots and buckled over his shoulders, his webbing to which are attached his knapsack and pouches. His hands are folded on the butt of his rifle which is reversed, muzzle to the ground, as if he were a guard of honour, standing at the graveside, of a fallen comrade. His head is bowed in reverence. His face is expressive and sensitive. His eyes clearly show that his mind is fixed on the past, recalling his dead companion and the weeks, months, years, perhaps, they spent together in the front line and perhaps before that, sitting side by side in the local school and hunting for cushets' eggs on the slopes of the Tap 0 Noth. This is an intimate, deeply felt sculpture. Perhaps the carver was expressing his own private sense of loss, as well as that of the community. There is a sense of action arrested, of energy contained, of feelings under tight control, but that grey granite figure, clad in his great coat, steadfast at his post, has a sincerity and nobility that speaks tellingly of his creator's humanity and compassion. In the attitude of the figure and in the, motivation of the sculptor we see the testament of experience. This is the real thing. This is what war means at the personal level, a sense of loss, of bereavement, of grief to be absorbed and to be lived with for ever more. Lest we forget? No one with a soul could look at that stone figure and ever forget!

But we can't ever forget war. Its consequences and relics are all around us. There are iron age forts, Roman walls, crumbling mediaeval castles, cliff top towers to repel invaders from the sea, blockhouses, air-raid shelters, concrete blocks, and from time to time unexploded bombs and mines which suddenly bob to the surface after 60 years tethered to the sea bed. There are war museums, displays of weapons ancient and modern, war-rooms and prison camps, battle ships, aircraft and tanks carefully preserved and galleries of war painting from the Bayeux tapestry to the work of war artists at the present time. There are thousands of books and films, factual and fictional that witness to our fascination with warfare, and last year we commemorated the end of W.W.2 and the Battle of Trafalgar with pomp and ceremony at home and abroad.

Many of us have our own family war mementoes, items brought home by servicemen, letters, cap-badges, photographs, medals, ration-books, gas masks, objects rich in memory, which have been part of our growing up as their associations and owners were, and with which we would not willingly part. Among other relics I have my father's army pay-book, worn and stained, but still a legible record of his military service. The last letter my mother received from her younger brother, John, before his ship was sunk in the English Channel. He complains of boredom and poor food and asks to have a box of kippers sent to him as soon as the herring season opens. I can recall how distressed she was when the telegram arrived and from then on she lost any trust in life, particularly when my father eventually returned home disabled. Thereafter, she was never free of anxiety, always waiting for the next blow to fall.

I also have two W.W.! medals, a bronze plaque, blank on one side and, embossed on the other, an image of Britannia and a confirmation that George May Tait, R.N. had fallen for King and Country. There is also a photograph, a stiff studio portrait, of 3 very young man in sailor's uniform. An earnest, boyish face looks out of the picture. It is without expression and so betrays nothing of the sitter's thoughts or feelings. His anonymity would be complete, were it not that I know he was my mother's stepbrother, that he was about eighteen years old and that days before his nineteenth birthday he was killed in some long forgotten naval action on the North Sea. My grand-father named one of his boats "The Boy George" after him. His mother died when I was about 3 years old. She was a sad, old lady, suffering from dementia, and she insisted in calling me Georgie, which confused me a great deal at the time. My Mother was reluctant to talk about him. His death had clearly affected the family very deeply and so I know nothing more about George May Tait scarcely more than one knows of any of the people whose names appear on War Memorials throughout the land, but somehow, in some ill-defined way, I feel responsible to him, as if I owed him something, in the way that one feels obliged to read all the names carved on these monuments. He is my link with that man-made catastrophe, for which humanity as a race must accept full moral responsibility. I am the only person who knows that for a very few years he walked this earth and then departed, leaving only a photograph behind. His is the only name on the local memorial to which I can link a face and the faintest glimpse of a history. All the others are like names on an index page torn from a lost book. The names on the stone tablets give away very little of the story and nothing at all of the personality of the people they commemorate. Is it enough to acknowledge as much after eighty odd years, to read the names on the memorials, to wear poppies and to lay wreaths, lest we forget? I think there is more. I think, if we pay heed to them, we will discover they are A communicating with us, not just symbolically in that they are casualties of war, but more specifically. They all had thoughts and feelings; they were aware of and reacted to their individual circumstances; they had all drawn conclusions about the sense and meaning of what was happening to them; they all had experience of events that we can barely imagine but which we should know and understand. They knew the whole story of war from A to Z.

War is barbaric, inhumane, brutalising, bitterly opposed to civilisation, enlightenment and Christianity; this is the message of their letters, diaries, poetry and prose. This is what they want us to know; this is what they wish us to pay heed to.

Their message is most dramatically conveyed in the novel, published in 1929, by the German writer, Erich Maria Remarque, "All Quiet on the Western Front, and in its film version of 1930, still the most powerful antiwar statement ever to achieve worldwide exposure. Both the novel and the film were savagely criticised my many politicians and military top brass as being dangerously pacifist and demoralising in Europe, New Zealand and The United States, but ordinary people flocked to see it in their millions all over the world, and it is still one of the finest and most accurate war films ever produced. The Nazis instituted a series of riots to prevent its being shown in Germany and the author fled to Switzerland hours before the S.S. hammered down his front door to arrest him. As it was, they arrested, tortured and executed his sister simply because she was related to him, so great was their hatred and fear of his work.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" recounts the career of a teenage German soldier who is persuaded to enlist along with his classmates by their elderly nationalistic teacher who has a romantic notion of warfare culled from ancient Roman writers and the operas of Richard Wagner. Their romantic notion of dashing cavalry charges and heroic encounters with an enfeebled enemy are squashed immediately they arrive in the front line and are confronted by mud, water, filth, rats and persistent shelling. They are condemned to live in stinking holes in the ground, frequently without food, clad in sodden and soiled uniforms and are at everyone's beck and call. The novel and the film, with brutal frankness record the day-to-day life of a frontline private soldier. The wiring parties in no-man's land; the bombardments; the enemy bayonet attack upon their trenches; the retreat; the counter attack in the face of withering machine gun fire; the return to their original trenches; the recovery of the dead and wounded; the rest days behind the front line; the field hospitals, understaffed, filthy and crammed with young men suffering from terrible wounds; and back to the front line again, and the whole process repeated. until severe injury or death mercifully brings it to an end. The soldiers quickly realise that they no longer have any control over their own destiny. Whether they survive or not, no matter how careful they are, is entirely a matter of luck. Existence has no meaning. They have no future. They make no plans. They live from second to second. They are still men, however, They think. They feel. They are aware. They are cold. They are hungry. They are afraid. Their friends are killed. Every thing is constantly changing. They feel totally abandoned by civilised society. They are caught up in catastrophic process that transports healthy young men from their homes to a muddy field where they are made to endure extremities of danger and deprivation that test the human mind and body to its very limit and beyond, and then they are killed to make room for the next batch of sacrificial victims and so on and so on.

They know something has gone badly wrong with civilisation, but can't identify what it is. They think the war was started by the Kaiser to show how powerful he was, and was supported by the Generals to keep them in work and by the arms manufacturers to make their fortunes. They feel no hatred for the enemy soldiers who they suppose are all very much like themselves, involved in an interminable agony which they cannot understand. In the words of the soldiers' song, "We're here, because, we're here, because  we're here."

Unlike most Hollywood war films, even the best of them (and this is a Hollywood film), it is utterly unheroic. There are no daring deeds, no narrow escapes and the hero is killed, ironically, in a moment of child-like innocence. A butterfly is hovering above the trench. He stretches out his hand to touch it and inadvertently raises his head above the parapet and is shot by an enemy sniper. The only triumph in war is that of barbarity and death. That is the ultimate message of every conflict no matter what the propaganda said at the beginning.

Old wars, like old soldiers never die. Our country was shaped by wars; our language was bequeathed us by war; our religion, culture, political constitution, our way of life were all forged in the white heat of battle. We are largely what the fortunes of war have made us. Had the battle gone against the winner in hundreds of different conflicts over the centuries, we would be an entirely different people today, living in a different sort of country, with different values and ideals. War changes everything, eventually, but not necessarily for the better. And one war has the nasty habit of begetting another.

Old wars live on in us, but usually we don't notice. We are what we are, however we were shaped. We look at the litter of war that surrounds us with equanimity, shrug our shoulders and move on to the next.

At any rate that seems to be the attitude of our present government. Aware of the destructive properties of armed conflict, knowing that war, however limited in scope, is always unpredictable, and cannot be controlled; realising the state directed violence is always demoralising and barbaric, no matter how sophisticated the weaponry, our government invaded a foreign country, thousands of miles away so that we would sleep more safely in our beds at night. They ignored hundreds of years of human experience and took us to war on some vague pretext that even they seem to have difficulty in defining.

The granite soldier standing on guard in the main street of Rhynie, his head bowed and his eyes lowered has on" reflection an air of resignation. Probably he is thinking, "Sooner or later we'll have it all to do all over again! They promise themselves they won't forget...but they always do and simply carve more names on the stone tablets and somehow think that is enough to persuade themselves that they are civilised and humane people."