What is in Kelvin's Head?

Jericho, Berlin and what wall next?

10/11/2014

I remember going on a school trip to Germany when I was a young teenager. I don’t remember that much about the visit to be honest, but I do remember the wall.

We were not in Berlin but we were staying near enough to the border between East Germany and West Germany to warrant a visit. Indeed the teachers organising the trip clearly thought that it was something that we all needed to see.

It made a big impression. I can still remember being told that we all had to behave – no larking around and no running into the grass near the wall lest we risk being shot.

That in itself was shocking.

I remember the stillness around as we climbed up a lookout tower to look over into this other country – a strange place which you could be shot at for meddling with.

And looking into the other side, we could see members of the military looking back out at us in the West.

What were we really each looking at?

In many ways I think that the anniversary this weekend of the fall of the wall should have been more of a celebration for the whole of Europe. Even those tiresome Eurosceptics in the Tory party might have been expected to have got on board for a celebration of the end of the Cold War and the fall of repressive communism.

The incredible thing to my mind is that something which seemed so fixed, so immovable has gone. How often we need to be reminded that things can change.

The Berlin Wall wasn’t just a physical wall, it was something which existed in the politics of Europe and something which existed in our minds too. The physical represented something much more.

So, what walls need still to fall. Where does Joshua’s trumpet still need to sound?

Inevitably, thinking about the Berlin Wall one’s mind turns to the wall separating Israel from Palestine and cutting right through people’s lives. Thoughts turn too to Korea.

Berlin reminds us that such divisions are not eternal and that things can change utterly.

And there will be mental walls which we can barely recognise that will yet fall too.

Freedom isn’t just a passport to the West.

[Photo Credit: Gavin Stewart – CC Copyright Attribution 2.0]

Berlin Wall

6 responses to “Repeat post – wiki video”

Tim

20/02/2009

Ah goodie. I’m sure you’ll let us know how it goes 🙂

(What an *awful*ly annoying voice-over on the video…)

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Erp

20/02/2009

Do you have the critical mass of people times effort/person to get the wiki going?

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Stewart

20/02/2009

Sounds a wonderful idea – now what topic can we use and discuss to improve our worship.

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kelvin

20/02/2009

That is a good question ERP. At the moment, the wiki is really working as an intranet. (Or perhaps an extranet). It means that several of us can work together on a page without being physically located together.

One of the things that are very prevalent in churches is the presence of dispersed teams. Keeping everyone one track by e-mail can be quite hard.

A good example of what we are doing at the moment, is using a private, protected part of the wiki so that I can work on wedding bookings with our weddings organiser.

In time, and with help from others, I will be developing various bits of cathedral documentation. We are good at doing things in St Mary’s but less good at writing them down.

Thus, a liturgical manual is one of the goals of the wiki project.

Also things like “How to organise a ceildih in St Mary’s” and “How we organise champagne for Easter Day”.

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Lay clerk

20/02/2009

“How to choose the post-Evensong pub”

And the answer to both the ones you posed is obviously “get the choir to do it”!

😉

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Robin

21/02/2009

I remember signing up for “St Mary’s Hub” a while back, but I didn’t record its URL, and I can’t now find it. Is that the wiki you’re talking about, or are you now starting from scratch with something different?

I’m just curious to see how you’re using the technology, in case there’s anything we can learn and apply up here.

Robin

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