Ministers' Page


A few days ago I travelled to Dublin with a group of musicians from a local school. We stayed in the city for five days and the students performed a number of concerts in Dublin itself and in a couple of nearby towns. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Dublin, but most of what I’d heard from other people about it was very positive—and it is, indeed, a very pleasant city of mainly Georgian architecture, with the modern developments around the dockland area showing evidence of a fast growing economy.

On the whole, though, Dublin is much like any other European capital city. The same shops can be found in the main retail areas. The streets are thronged with buses, taxis and trams. Trains rattle along overhead tracks. And from early morning to late at night the streets are thronged with workers, tourists and shoppers. It is a crowded, bustling city and it is easy to get caught up in the general busyness of it all, hurrying along the pavements and over the pedestrian crossings, even when you have no need at all to rush.

The hostel in which we spent our stay had a television in each room, tuned to receive the main Irish television channels as well as the BBC channels (and a few others as well). On the RTE (the main Irish channel) you could find many of the programmes that are aired in Britain—and most of the others were very similar in concept: chat shows, music shows, soaps, news, sport and so on. But at six o’clock, just before the main evening news programme, there was a short programme called The Angelus. The Angelus is a part of Roman Catholic tradition whereby people are encouraged to pause and reflect on the appearance of the Angel Gabriel to Mary, and a bell is rung to remind people of this moment of quiet.

Once it was actually a church bell, of course, and the villagers would pause in the fields for a moment. Now, though, the sound of a bell tolls from the television screen as images of creation and natural beauty are displayed, giving viewers the opportunity to stop for a few moments before the relentless tide of news and current affairs is once more unleashed by the news readers and tele-journalists.

I was reminded of the words of Psalm 46 in which the psalmist writes of natural disasters and the rise and fall of nations—the stuff of most news bulletins—and then God speaks to say, “Be still and know that I am God”. The reader is encouraged to stop and reflect on God’s being and presence and to acknowledge that God’s presence is always with us. To have that minute of calm at six o’clock in the midst of such a frenetic existence—of which we are forcibly reminded by the news programmes—seems to me to be an admirable way of reconnecting with God. You may not necessarily agree with the original purpose of The Angelus (which was to focus devotion on Mary), and you may think that one minute is far too short a time to take out of a busy day to recognise God’s presence, but it might be worthwhile considering whether there is a regular time that you could find each day simply “Be still and know” that God is there.





Rev Ian Hayter