A good message? Well, what about it...

I often try to get into the mindset of those who lived more than a thousand years ago and were what you could call, spreaders of the Word. People like the Welsh saints, Tyfodwg, Dafydd, Cynog, just a few among hundreds. What made these men (and some women also) travel away from home to embark on a perilous journey and a very unsure future? What made them do that? Obviously, parental influence will have played a big part, giving a foundation on which can be built a strong faith. In Dafydd’s case (Saint David of course) his mother was by all accounts the prime reason. Non (a saint herself) was taken advantage of by a local prince and the result was Dafydd. Non never had a relationship but seemed to have devoted her life to her son, prayer and solitude. Probably farmed as well or had to. Is this just a story to validate the sainthood of Dafydd? We might never know. There seems to be no doubt that Dafydd was a saintly man. In my personal opinion there are too many saints, I think most might have been good people but a sainthood? We must remember that basically the Church is not a saintly organisation. Like all organisations it needs a structure, that structure needs managers and some of those are definitely not saints! I have become more and more perturbed about the Church’s inability to portray the message given over 2000 years ago. That message has never changed in real terms but somehow we have managed to weaken it by nefarious actions, murder, avarice and corruption. So, who today could be equalled to Dafydd? There must be something about the message that Christians try to give to the world. About peace, about working together, reminding ourselves about the responsibility we have for the planet. It is not about harvesting or as I call it denuding, the world of its resources. It is about sharing that which we all need. But at the same time remembering that any intrusion into the natural balances can be harmful. It is about management, not just taking God’s statement, ‘You are given supremacy of all animals of the land, the sea and the air’, as a free ticket to take anything we want and destroy what we don’t want. It is going to be very difficult to balance because to be cruel and honest not many of us want to change our life styles. But the hard truth is, we have to if we want our grandchildren to have a good and healthy life as well. The Christian message is a good and fair message. The old saints knew its importance, the question is, do we? Really? Let’s hope so.