ornamental grape leaves

grape leaves in autumn

Personally I didn’t get the point of ornamental grapes until yesterday when I clicked this photograph… grapes = wine… but this little beauty is superb!

crosses in the rubble

crosses at St Stephen’s

There is not much left of the St Stephen’s Church building where I work… even the wooden cross up the front of the chancel (remains pictured above and on earlier blogs) has been removed and is currently stored in the front porch-way at our house.  Yet from the rafters today a cross hung – and around it through a combination of shadows other crosses appeared around it.
I am reminded of quote, part of which St Stephen’s has inscribed on a small plaque and was rescued from the building ahead of the demolition written by George MacLeod of Iona:

George MacLeod on Where Jesus Died

Only One Way Left (The Iona Community: 1956), p. 38.

The cross must be raised again at the centre of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am claiming that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what he died about and that is where church-people ought to be and what church-people should be about.

Tuesday demolition update

There is not much left now – the street-frontage has been left in order for the crew to salvage the cross and words on the outside and the foundation stone on the side.