![[Adam Perkins]](../by/Adam_Perkins.jpg)
by Adam Perkins
Adam Perkins is the Archivist of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
The name 'Greenwich' and the word 'time' are linked so closely in our minds today that perhaps now, as the close of the present millennium approaches, it is interesting to consider quite why.
![[Camera Stellata]](November/Camera_Stellata.jpeg)
From my daily work with historical manuscripts from the three centuries of the Greenwich Observatory, I find that time is the connecting thread. The popular image of the astronomer is that of the Francis Place engraving of the Great Room at Greenwich (pictured left) with the astronomers staring through their instruments at the stars. The idea of studying the sky to discover what the celestial bodies are is a relatively recent notion in science; in the 17th century, the important property to observe was the position of these bodies in the sky, the science of astrometry.
Greenwich Observatory was founded for practical, not philosophical purposes. A great pragmatist, Charles II was not one to found an observatory for intellectual pursuits alone. The warrant of 1675, in the RGO archives in the University Library, states clearly that John Flamsteed, the 29-year-old from Derby who was a Jesus College MA, should "forthwith apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find the so-much-desired longitude of places for the perfecting the art of navigation."
If longitude was at the heart of the purpose behind Charles' warrant, what had this to do with time? Time has always been reckoned by our world's turning about its axis, giving us the passing of the days from sunrise to sunset. If you need to know how far east or west you are on the globe, you need to know your local time and also the time at a fixed meridian. The essential idea is that a longitude may be expressed in terms of time. A live television transmission from New York on our nine o'clock news takes place at four o'clock in the afternoon in New York. Another way of expressing this is to say that New York is five hours west of Greenwich. The Earth turns through its full 360 degrees in 24 hours, or 15 degrees in one hour; so New York is 5x15 degrees, i.e. 75 degrees west (in fact, 74 degrees west).
Two of the earliest important instruments at Greenwich were clocks made by Thomas Tompion and known as year clocks since the weights needed winding up only once a year. The Tompion clocks kept time for Flamsteed during his first crucial observations - and Greenwich time was born in 1676.
It had been known for centuries that the time taken by the sun apparently to move around the sky was not entirely regular. That is, the time shown by a sundial did not always agree with the time shown by the regular movement of a clock. The difference was great enough that even primitive time-keepers such as the clepsydra, or water-clock, were sufficiently regular to show the effect. It is the regularity of man-made time-keepers that gives rise to the notion of mean time in the sense of average time, as opposed to the irregularity of the sun's apparent motion as shown by the gnomon on a sundial.
Flamsteed's observations were made from the Great Room at Greenwich, the camera stellata of Place's engraving, with the Tompions ticking off the seconds behind him. Observations between 1676 and 1677 of the culmination of Sirius, when the star gets to its highest point in the sky each day, exactly due south in the line of the first Greenwich meridian, proved conclusively that the Earth does rotate with perfect regularity.
This shown, the explanation of what we now call 'the equation of time', or in Flamsteed's elegant phrase 'the equation of natural days', followed from the angle of the Earth's rotational plane as it revolved around the Sun, the familiar 23-degree tilt of the school or library globe, and the Keplerian ellipse of the Earth's orbit. The first means that the Sun's apparent motion in relation to the celestial equator is uneven; the second means that at those times of the year when the Earth is closer to the Sun, the apparent solar motion is greater than when the Earth is at more distant parts of the ellipse. These two effects come together in the difference between sundial and mean time, as much as 17 minutes in November and 14 in February, but zero four times a year, in April, June, September and December. And of course the mean time for Flamsteed was Greenwich Mean Time, at the Greenwich meridian of those observations, the meridian of the centre of that early telescope.
![[Amy Perkins by the Meridian marker stone]](November/Amy_Perkins.jpeg)
The meridian has not been static over the centuries, much to the chagrin of, among others, cartographers. Flamsteed had a small observatory building constructed at the south-east corner of the Observatory; the centre of his instruments fixed the second of the Greenwich meridians. Edmond Halley, who predicted the return of the 1682 comet in 1757, mounted another instrument to create a third meridian. If you are interested to trace the meridian across England there is a new series of Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 maps in the Explorer series. They are beautiful maps with a green line on the meridian.
Such was the pre-eminence of Greenwich in astronomical observations, so massive were the data published on observations of the stars and so dependent were the almanacs and maps of the world on the Greenwich meridian that in 1884 an international conference in Washington DC agreed to the inevitable, that the Greenwich line should be the 'zero of longitude' for all.
The meridian runs through Cambridgeshire, passing only a few miles west of the city and running through Meldreth, Orwell, Toft, Hardwick and Swavesey. On the Comberton Road, at Toft, it is marked by a fine stone and magnificent tree, put there by a local school to celebrate the centenary of the Washington conference.
![[John Binns]](../by/John_Binns.jpg)
by the Revd Dr John Binns
What are you doing for the Millennium? This is the question which is beginning to cause anxiety. The evening of 31 December 1999 is clearly an important day, when we will leave one millennium and move into the next. We feel we ought to be doing something extra significant as the actual moment happens. So church groups are wondering whether it is possible to fit 2000 candles onto a gigantic birthday cake - and then to light them; big parties are being planned, or exotic locations identified. An alternative approach is to make a clear point of going to sleep early - and missing the moment altogether. Extra-committed Millennium-avoiders could go to another part of the globe - such as Ethiopia where the calendar is different and the millennium will not change for a few years yet. The churches of Cambridge, incidentally, will be celebrating - and celebrating it together - but the form of the event has yet to be agreed.
The churches have realised that this is an important time. A team has been working to encourage us to make a New Start. An effective part of this has been the Jubilee 2000 campaign, with huge and growing public support to remit debts owed by poor countries to rich countries and institutions. It looks as though this will make a real difference to the lives of millions. It is one way in which the millennium will be celebrated effectively and memorably.
But it is shameful that the campaign has to happen at all. How did the situation arise in the first place? And we might also wonder why we have had to wait for a new millennium to take action. The most powerful statements about debt relief come in the Old Testament - several centuries before the birth of Christ. They have always been a part of the tradition of the church.
The extraordinary efforts which the churches are making for the millennium are part of the ordinary teaching of the gospels. And this suggests the true meaning of the Millennium. 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000 are indeed special - but so is every day. Each day is a gift from God and each person is created by God. The problem is that we find it difficult to notice this truth.
If the arrival of a new era of history enables us to make a leap - or a crawl - into a more faithful way of living and a more committed form of discipleship, then the new millennium could be a new start. But the new start will consist of re-learning old truths.
A group meets every third Tuesday in the month, at 3 Pemberton Terrace, the home of Bishop Philip and Deaconess Lucy Ridsdale, from 3 to 4 pm. A tape, with written background material, on current matters concerning the Church worldwide is provided by the Church Mission Society. Discusssion is followed by tea at 4 pm. They would welcome new members. Anyone who is interested please contact Dorothy Edwards on 01223 367316.
We congratulate Chris Butler on his appointment as organist at St Andrew's, Impington. Chris has been a valued member of the congregation for many years and he plans to keep in touch.
![[Magog Trust]](November/Magog_Trust.jpeg)
The Magog Trust will be holding a Christmas Fair on Saturday 4 December, from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm, in Great Shelford Memorial Hall. For further information, or to offer help or prizes, please contact Liz Megson on 01223 844317.
![[Millennium Message]](November/Millennium_Message.jpeg)
Copies of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Millennium Message are available from the bookshop for £2.99. The bookshop also has in stock copies of the four books reviewed by Sheila Cameron on page 11 of this issue.
![[Harvest Festival]](November/Harvest_Festival.jpeg)
![[Harvest Supper]](November/Harvest_Supper.jpeg)
The Harvest Festival on Sunday 10 October was preceded by a Harvest Supper in St Michael's on Saturday 9 October.
The Month of Guided Prayer began with a Quiet Day at Girton on Saturday 6 November. This is to be followed by a series of four evenings on spirituality, on Thursdays from 11 November, as well as other opportunities for spiritual direction during the month. Please ask one of the clergy for further details.
![[Frank King]](../by/Frank_King.jpg)
Frank King offers the insights of a diallist.
Frank H. King is a Lecturer in Computer Science and a Fellow of Churchill College.
He is also University Bellringer.
The approach of the year 2000 seems to have prompted a general interest in time and a particular interest in sundials. Cambridge is a splendid place for a beginner to investigate sundials and an hour's walk can take in a wide variety of types.
College buildings turn out to be a richer source of sundials than the city churches. This is slightly curious since it is very common to find a sundial on the south porch, or at least on the south wall, of a church. In Cambridge, St Botolph's with its notable sundial pair on the south-west buttress of the tower is the only church worth visiting for its sundials.
![[Pembroke Sundial]](November/Pembroke_Sundial.jpeg)
The most spectacular sundials in Cambridge are all in colleges - Queens', Magdalene, Gonville and Caius, and Pembroke. The Pembroke sundial, shown in the photograph, is the largest in Cambridge and can easily be seen from Tennis Court Road without any need to enter the College grounds. As the diallist who undertook all the calculations for this sundial, I have a special interest in it! I did the setting-out and the Cardozo-Kindersley Workshop did the stone-cutting.
The scaffolding which covered the Pembroke sundial during its construction was removed in late October 1997. There was an immediate effect on pedestrian and cycle traffic heading north along Tennis Court Road as locals and tourists alike checked the time indicated on the dial against their watches. I quickly appreciated that late October is just about the worst time of year to unveil a sundial. "Why is it so fast?" everyone kept asking, though had they waited until Boxing Day they would have seen sundial and watch in agreement. By the middle of the Lent Term I was being asked, "Why is it so slow?", but I was now able to answer, "Wait until July and you will see the explanation cut into the stonework below the main dial."
This separate panel shows how the difference between local sun time (sundial time) and local mean time (which, in Cambridge, is about half a minute ahead of GMT) varies over the course of a year. This difference is known as 'the equation of time'. In early November, Cambridge sundials appear to be about 16 minutes fast and in early February they appear to be about 15 minutes slow.
It is something of a paradox that when clocks started to become affordable in the 19th century there was an increase in demand for sundials. Before broadcast time signals, sundials provided the only convenient way of setting a clock, but it was essential to know about the equation of time to do this. Regular inspection of the Pembroke sundial is an excellent way of gaining such understanding and this is particularly straightforward for those who follow a 10 o'clock lecture in Lensfield Road with an 11 o'clock lecture in the city centre. Such undergraduates might pass the sundial at 11 o'clock 60 times in a year and can readily see just how fast or slow the sundial is and can check their observations against the curve on the equation of time panel.
As a consequence of leap years, the curve ought really to be marked out afresh annually. Fortunately the required repositioning would be barely noticeable and a curve marked out for a particular year serves adequately for any year. It happens that the calculations for the Pembroke equation of time curve apply to the coming year, a very subtle way in which the College will commemorate the year 2000.
There are a number of other features of note on the Pembroke sundial. The shadow in the photograph clearly shows the local time to be roughly 11.15, but notice also the elliptical swelling in the shadow. This is cast by a stainless steel ball on the gnomon (the long rod that casts the straight-line shadow) and falls just above the lower of two hyperbolic arcs on the dial. The shadow of the ball follows the lower arc at the summer solstice (21 June) and the upper arc at the winter solstice (21 December). The shadow follows the sloping straight line between the two arcs at the equinoxes. It is easy to see that the photograph was taken on a date close to the summer solstice.
In theory, the horizontal line which runs across the top of the dial shows where the shadow of the ball falls at sunrise and sunset but, there are too many obstructions to the south for this to happen in practice. Nevertheless, this horizon line serves an additional purpose. It carries secondary markings which indicate selected half hours and quarter hours and, prior to 6 am, eighth hours.
The Pembroke sundial (pictured here) is well worth further study.
If you cannot easily get to Tennis Court Road you can visit the sundial via its Web site, courtesy of the local AT&T research laboratory, which has a camera permanently pointed at it.
The URL is http://www.uk.research.att.com/sundial
See also the web site ``Sundials on the Internet''.
![[Paul Cornish]](../by/Paul_Cornish.jpg)
Paul Cornish on the Hague and Geneva conventions
Dr Paul Cornish is Newton Sheehy Lecturer in International Relations in the Univeristy of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He is also a Churchwarden of GSM.
Amid all the excitement and expectation surrounding the approaching millennium, this year has seen two anniversaries which should prompt a sober appraisal of the century we are about to leave and a cautious view of the future - the golden jubilee of the four Geneva Conventions of August 1949 and the centenary of the first Hague Conventions of 1899. In broad terms, the Hague Conventions established the need for proportionality in warfare. Henceforth, war was to be constrained by "the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience". The Geneva Conventions laid down the requirement to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants.
Neither anniversary will have been much noticed outside a relatively small circle of international lawyers, officials, academics and activists. That is a pity. But what is more disturbing is that, for millions of victims of the world's armed conflicts, news of these anniversaries is sure to provoke a wry smile. And there will be others - the perpetrators of armed aggression and massacres - who could only respond with a contemptuous smirk. Because, if the 20th century has been good for establishing humanitarian norms, it has also provided ample evidence that there is a lot of the world's inhabited surface where the humanitarian writ simply does not yet run.
During World War I about 5% of casualties were civilians. That figure rose dramatically during World War II. Today, the proportion of civilian casualties during wars and armed conflicts is as high as 80%. The effect on children is particularly disturbing. Since 1987, over 2 million have been killed, 4-5 million disabled and about 12 million made homeless. Over a million children have been orphaned or separated from their parents, 10 million psychologically damaged, and many millions more have as yet had little or no experience of real peace.
What is going on? Part of the explanation for this rolling disaster is that the proportion of intra-state as against inter-state conflicts has been rising steadily since the end of the Cold War. There are more civil wars and inter-factional conflicts, and the forces involved are precisely those least likely to have any respect for (or even knowledge of) the niceties of international humanitarian law.
There are other explanations for this mounting carnage, the first of which must be the systematic use of atrocities against civilians and non-combatants. Another widespread practice is the use of child soldiers. Children as young as seven or eight are considered good raw material for the military life: they are easy to indoctrinate, fiercely loyal, cheap to feed and clothe, and just about strong enough to handle a weapon. Elsewhere, civilians and children have been used as human shields or forced to work as ammunition porters, servants, decoys in ambushes, or in brothels. Civilians are also vulnerable to modern developments in weapons technology - the proliferation of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons; the widespread use of anti-personnel mines; and the use of 'precision-guided munitions' against largely civilian targets.
This chronic brutalisation of civilians undermines modern humanitarian standards and questions the credibility of international intervention on behalf of those standards. The promises made at the Hague and Geneva were never met, nor could they ever be, and to intervene on behalf of these norms compounds our error. The sovereign state is the paramount political force, and the duty of non-intervention is set out unequivocally in the UN Charter. If we persist in trying to ensure that future conflict is less frequent, more contained and less damaging to civilians, then we persist in ignoring the fact that conflict is real, natural and cathartic in national and international politics. We persist also in imbuing our humanitarian norms with a practical dimension which they objectively do not have, and in the process probably exacerbate the very conflicts we are trying to prevent or moderate.
On the other hand, to give up now on humanitarianism in conflict would be to accept a bleak and very violent future. Furthermore, to claim that humanitarian intervention on behalf of the oppressed and victimised is to breach other norms (namely the right of sovereignty and the duty of non-intervention) is to accept an arid, legalistic view of the world and humanity. The attributes of state sovereignty are not absolute entitlements but must be considered conditional upon good behaviour, domestically and internationally. In this view, intervention in or against miscreant states can actually reinforce, rather than undermine, international standards and the norms of good behaviour.
If humanitarian norms are, after all, a good thing, it does not follow that we should devise more of them to suit the latest atrocity: most aspects of human misbehaviour and barbarity are already covered in one way or another. The credibility crisis undermining humanitarianism will not be addressed by devising new standards, but by showing that existing norms can be applied and can produce results. In other words, there must be more widespread implementation and observance of humanitarian norms. This is the goal of recent initiatives such as the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The 20th century has been long on ideas and short on performance. The challenge now is to correct the imbalance.
![[Peter Naylor]](../by/Peter_Naylor.jpg)
Peter Naylor on the legacy of the First World War
Besides being a parish priest for 37 years, Peter Naylor has served as chaplain to professional football clubs and to theatres, including the London Palladium.
On 13 May 1918, my dear father presented himself to the Recruiting Medical Board at the 40th Recruiting Office, Warrington. George Naylor had either volunteered or had been commanded to attend with the expectation of being conscripted to fight in the First World War. My father was a cripple whose left leg had been seriously damaged in two childhood accidents. The report in red ink describes him as being 21 years and 5 months of age, 5'7" in height and with fair hair. The verdict was what might have been expected, Grade 3, and so he returned to his business as a hairdresser in Widnes, Lancashire. My father would have hated the humiliation of standing naked before the eyes of the members of the Medical Board. I often try to imagine how he felt on his way home, knowing that many of his customers had gone to France and other parts of a strange world, never to return.
My childhood was close to that horrendous conflict in which approximately 9,800,000 service- men of all nations were killed, together with 2,500,000 civilians. It is thought that 100,000 officers and something like 2,000,000 other ranks from Britain and the Empire were wounded. In the village where I was nurtured we were close to this immense and terrible suffering. Mr Trigg, who lived in the School House opposite my home, could be heard coughing and retching during the night hours; he had been gassed at the Front. Mr Dunbavin, a neighbour, was considered to be remarkable because he had been in the fighting for the whole of the War and had returned safe and sound to his family and work on a farm. He would never speak of his experiences; we looked on him in awe and puzzlement. On Remembrance Day, always seemingly dank and dark, we stood at the newly erected memorial cross on the village green. The Vicar conducted the service, we sang sombre hymns and hung our heads in prayer as we remembered the men from village families who hadn't returned. We all shared in the grief as the Last Post sounded. The experience was stark and raw.
In recent years there has been renewed interest in the First World War and its effects upon the generations that followed. Pat Barker's trilogy - Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road - captures the horrific experiences of those who fought in appalling conditions and circumstances. Birdsong, a novel by Sebastian Foulks, has proved to be a best-seller. One of my sons observed a young woman reading it on a tube train with tears running down her cheeks. A new film, The Trench, tells of the last 48 hours before the big push on the Somme, a battle that claimed the lives of 420,000 British soldiers, 200,000 French and 420,000 German.
![[Song Sheet]](November/Song_Sheet.jpeg)
Those men, mostly young, who travelled by train from every corner of the land, came from rural communities as far apart as Ullapool in the Highlands and Land's End in Cornwall. Most had never travelled beyond a day's journey by foot or horse. The country they left behind was one of a confident, adventurous and creative nature, with fixed social boundaries. On 23 June 1911, King George V was crowned ruler of the world's greatest empire. In Delhi on 11 December of that same year he was enthroned as Emperor of India. The British Navy ruled the seas. Church leaders were influential; large numbers of the population attended services or were sympathetic to the Church's aims in the community. All this national vigour was expressed in the life of the music halls. Millions, both rich and poor, followed the fortunes of the stars of the day, bought their sheet-music for homely singsongs around the piano in the parlour, and sang to their hearts' content in packed stalls and galleries. Music halls told of love, calamity, success and the absurdity of life. Men worked hard and long in mills and fields, supporting large families. All believed that faith, good health and a little bit of luck could bring good fortune and some social recognition.
Has the civilised world as we know it recovered from the War of 1914-1918? Has the age of innocence gone, never to return? Is this present mood of aggression, black and sick comedy, and loss of faith a consequence of those killing fields of France? It is only in recent years that I have come to realise the sheer horror of it all, and an almost lifelong interest in the history of music hall has given me some insight into the psychic shock that threw our civilised world off balance. The Church of God has an immense responsibility in recognising the symptoms and attempting to provide the cure; maybe every church in the land should pay special attention to ministry to men.
![[Glen Cavaliero]](../by/Glen_Cavaliero.jpg)
Glen Cavaliero on the wider significance of war poetry
Glen Cavaliero is a Member of the Faculty of English and a Fellow Commoner of St Catharine's College.
In Cambridge the term 'war poet' usually brings to mind the name of Rupert Brooke. "If I should die, think only this of me / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England." ('The Soldier'). Even today Brooke's sonnet is a familiar and treasured expression of patriotic self-sacrifice; yet what the poem conveys is as much a love for the English countryside as for the nation itself, a romanticised ideal England of the spirit. Brooke himself was indeed to be buried on foreign soil, but he died not in battle but of blood poisoning on his journey to the Dardanelles.
It was the protracted slaughter on the Western Front, however, which finally put paid to the idea that warfare was romantic; and the poets who underwent the sordid horror of those years came to wage verbal war on warfare itself - the steely scorn of Siegfried Sassoon, for example, jettisoning the language of reverential idealism in favour of a satire that was to be the more cogent for his being a countryman and traditionalist, and no less a lover of rural England than was Rupert Brooke himself. In such collections as the aptly named Counter-Attack, Sassoon's military muse is directed against its own subject matter as he castigates the class to which he belonged for its stupidity, failure of imagination, and resort to moral cant.
![[Trumpington War Memorial]](November/Trumpington_War_Memorial.jpeg)
Where rage at incompetence and patriotic humbug fuels Sassoon's war poetry, compassion for his fellow soldiers inspires that of Wilfred Owen. Coming from a less socially advantaged background, his sensitivity, outraged by the ugliness and degradation of trench warfare, is filled with an almost erotic pity for those with whom he endured it, whether as killers or as slain. "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori." Elsewhere, colourful sensuous imagery only serves to make Owen's poetry the more painful: while his most celebrated lines, 'Strange Meeting', envisage an encounter between the poet and "the man you killed, my friend". The juxtaposition of those two concepts highlights one of the cruellest paradoxes of war, a paradox which an older poet, Thomas Hardy, had already voiced with characteristic irony, when writing after the Boer War: "Yes; quaint and curious war is! / You shoot a fellow down / You'd treat if met where any bar is, / Or help to half-a-crown." Both writers in their different ways respond as they do because a poet tends, by virtue of his calling, to emphasise the attitudes and experience of others. Their artistry amounts to an act of clarifying reconciliation.
While the experience of battle arouses idealism, indignation and humanitarian compassion, the first two qualities are aspects of personal conflict: the actual deployment of individual skills, self-forgetfulness and physical stamina constitute the heroic side of warfare, necessary for soldier and poet alike. But war is a process to be distinguished from battle (as has recently been demonstrated in Yugoslavia): whereas a battle involves personal strengths and weaknesses, prolonged warfare breeds that self-perpetuating resentment, bigotry and prejudice which are among the underlying causes of every war. Battles come to a specific end, wars only die out gradually. They both reflect the divisions festering in human society and prolong them in retributive bitterness.
The poet's own personal battle is with the sluggish imagination and with the abuse of language; he is the enemy of the one, and he aims at mastery over the other. The war poets who speak most forcefully to us today are those who radically question the assumptions which give rise to conflict. For most Westerners, the second half of the 20th century has seen the prospect of nationalist armed struggles diminish, to be replaced by terrorism and by random sectarian and racial violence, while a world of high technology and communications no longer regards the presence of spiritual reality as a relevant concern. But Sassoon, Owen and their companions reinvented war poetry, as something concerned not merely with battles long ago but with what are the real springs of human personality, and thus with the nature and business of poetry itself. Personal commitment, anger and compassion are but weapons in their armoury.
![[Rhiannon Jones]](../by/Rhiannon_Jones.jpg)
Rhiannon Jones on churches and the Millennium in Cambridge
Rhiannon Jones is an ordinand at Ridley Hall.
She is Churches Representative on the Greater Cambridge Millennium Association.
Being as close to the Cambridge count-down clock as Great St Mary's, I hardly need remind you how little time there now is before Millennium celebrations get under way. Like it or loathe it, generations after us are bound to ask, "Grandma, Grandpa, what did you do at the millennium?"
The odd thing is that most of us haven't a clue what it will mean for us, nor what we'll be up to on the eve to top all eves. Perhaps we're all holding out for that bigger, better invitation that lies just round the corner.
Well, to help you make up your mind, here's a brief 'What's On' guide to some of the things that Cambridge churches are involved with over the next six months. Why not get out your diaries now and pencil in some of these dates?
You've seen the posters, you've read about it in the newspapers, but you're still not sure what it is. Well, the @2000 mission is the culmination of the work of over 30 churches in and around Cambridge who have been meeting together over the last 18 months. The aim is to offer people in Cambridge an opportunity to think more about the Man Behind the Millennium and to explore, at the start of a new century, 'where they are @' with themselves, others and God. Events have been planned mainly for November, but it is hoped the fruit of the mission will be ongoing. For more details about this and how you can get involved, phone the Revd Dr Lance Birks at St Andrew St Baptist Church on 506343.
![[Making All Things New]](November/Making_All_Things_New.jpeg)
Another millennium-inspired initiative, with links to the above, is the ongoing work of @Work with You. This is an inter-church project encouraging partnership between the people and churches of Cambridge, working in the community. So far we have produced two editions of the `Directory of Christian Social Action in Cambridge' and are currently gearing up to launch a City Blitz project next spring to raise money for charity. For more information contact me on 509273 or look up our website on www.cambridge-churches.org.
Another initiative designed to help people think about the gospel comes from St Mark's, Newnham. From 3 November to 5 December St Mark's are putting on 11nights of what looks to be high quality drama, perform-ance and music to present the story and parables of the New Testament. For more information phone 356476.
The biggest celebration Cambridge has ever experienced is happening from 2 pm to 2 am on Parker's Piece on 31 December. As well as a giant fireworks display, the churches have sponsored a millennium beacon and will be showing pieces of video throughout the night. Later on in the evening we will be cutting a cake, to remind everyone whose birthday it is, and leading people in a millennium resolution, composed by Churches Together in England, which will be read up and down the country. It is also hoped that church buildings will be open for most of the night and Christians will be available for two-hour slots to help out in the Listening Ear Tent. Offers of financial or practical help to support the churches' part in the above would be most appreciated. For more information or to pledge support please contact the Revd Ian Cowley on 861511.
There will, of course, be plenty of local celebrations as well, and in some places the city churches have been working together to deliver a candle, video or gospel to all the homes in their area.
For most churches up and down the country, New Year's Day will be the first opportunity for Christians to worship and celebrate Christ's birthday together, since Churches Together in England have encouraged Christians to spend millennium eve with their friends and families -not necessarily with other Christians. Therefore, on Saturday at 12 noon there will be a national peal of bells and church services will follow. On the next day, it is likely there will also be special services. For details of these, ask John Binns.
The celebrations will not stop, however, in January, because a couple of months later the churches will meet together for a giant carnival-type walk through the streets of Cambridge, ending up in GSM, to celebrate 2000 years (well almost) of the church. For more information contact Peter Hilken or the Revd Philippa King on 315779.
The list does not end here either, for numerous organisations and churches are taking advantage of this time to promote their causes. As well, of course, as the Michaelhouse project, there will be the launch of the New Divinity Faculty building and the first Theology through the Arts International Festival. For more details of this contact Ally Barratt on 741078 or by email at amb66@cam.ac.uk.
Lastly, please pray for the ongoing work of Jubilee 2000, a sobering reminder that, while we party away, for the majority of the world, 1 January 2000 will be just another hungry day.
![[Rex Walford]](../by/Rex_Walford.jpg)
Rex Walford reminds us why we are celebrating the year 2000.
Rex Walford is a co-ordinator of the Real Reason drama season.
A recent opinion poll reported that only 12% of the population, when asked "What does the Millennium historically commemorate?", mentioned the birth of Jesus Christ. In another poll only 23% knew that A.D. meant Anno Domini, 'the year of our Lord', or knew that our method of calculating the calendar relates to Christ's birth. Yet 75% of the population say that they believe in God and in 1998 more people expressed allegiance to churches than to any other public institution.
Some Christians in Cambridge who are also active in drama in the city decided that it would be appropriate and timely to combine and use their skills in a major presentation of the 'real reason' for the Millennium. St Mark's Church, Barton Road, Newnham, has become the focus of this event and, with the support of the Vicar, PCC and congregation who are hosting and managing, there will be a staging of readings and dramatisations of the whole of the New Testament over a period of 11evenings during five weeks in November and December 1999.
![[Real Reason]](November/Real_Reason.jpeg)
Twelve of the most experienced theatre directors in the Cambridge region (Gloria Milne, Margaret Clark, Hilary Sage, Gordon Cummings and Trevor Osbourn, Mavis Perkins, Rex Walford, Wendy Walford, Jane Bower, Lesley Hendy, Nick Warburton, Frances Brownlie) have agreed to take on an evening (and a part of the New Testament) each and to accept the challenge of a 'blank canvas'. They have gathered teams to find varied, vivid and imaginative ways of communicating the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles and the Book of Revelation.
Mavis Perkins leads a Great St Mary's team of performers who will be presenting the first part of the Acts of the Apostles at St Mark's on Wednesday 18 November at 7.30 pm. Rex and Wendy Walford are co-ordinating the project overall, and Stephen Siddall, director of the annual 'town and gown' Shakespeare at the Arts Theatre, is acting as general production consultant.
There will be music (including settings of St Luke by the Cambridge Voices), mime and movement, choral speaking, a one-woman show, crowd scenes, the use of computer graphics, slides and maps, as well as the more traditional forms of dramatic presentation. One evening features well-known local and national personalities from many walks of life, each reading one of St Paul's shorter letters. Specially written 1000-word introductions by Biblical scholars who live in the city will put each New Testament book in context as a programme note with each performance. The aim is to give all kinds of people (believers, sceptics, the uncommitted, the curious) the chance to hear and ponder the New Testament narrative when presented in a sustained and coherent form.
By the time this appears in print, the project will have been launched by the Bishop of Huntingdon and St Matthew's Gospel performed on 5 November. The series continues on successive Sundays and Wednesdays, with the books of the New Testament being presented in sequence, concluding with the Book of Revelation on Sunday 5 December. Each performance will last no longer than two hours, including a break for refreshments. If you are interested in attending any of the performances, ring 356476 as soon as possible to see what tickets are still available.
Timothy Jenkins suggests a response to apocalyptic anxiety.
The full text of this article was published in Theology, May/June 1999. The following brief extracts are reprinted with the permission of the author, who is Dean of Jesus College.
How are we to think about the millennium? The notion of reckoning time by measuring from the birth of Jesus results from the general acceptance of a proposal made by a sixth-century monk, Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian living in Rome, and this system of dating was agreed in this country at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Until then, time was generally measured from the accession of an earthly ruler. It is a remarkable system of dating that reaches a first millennium (even when considerably foreshortened), and the first millennium was accompanied by signs and wonders. The Church has passed through various millenarian movements, and shed various apocalyptic texts in its first thousand years, but it had retained in the Canon the Book of Revelation, in the twentieth chapter of which the millennium is explicitly referred to: the Devil is bound for a thousand years, after which he will be loosed and, gathering with the Persians Gog and Magog leading a numberless host, will fight the Final Battle ... a prelude to the general resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement. It is not surprising therefore that the approach of the year 1000 was awaited with a certain anxiety.
We are, of course, more sophisticated than people a thousand years ago (I write ironically). We have controlled warfare better, we build better public buildings, our understanding both of God and of human nature is far more profound, we have eliminated superstition, and so forth .... Nevetheless, it is interesting to note that a number of signs and wonders are anticipated at the second millennium, among them aeroplanes falling out of the sky, a crisis in the banking system, chaos on the international stock markets, global economic depression, food stockpiling, mobilization of troops, even the displacement of populations, famine and war. All of this apocalyptic speculation is fuelled by interested parties: politicians, computer experts, bankers and journalists. But it is curiously similar in some respects to the accounts we give of the first millennium. Those fears, however, were superstitious, were they not?
Two issues need to be raised concerning these parallels. First, most obviously, the year 2000 is two thousand years from the birth of Christ: that is how we measure time. There is no other reason for the millennium, so how best do we make sense of it in terms of Christ? Second, the reason we anticipate these signs and wonders is that our time has material realizations: it is embodied time, and these embodiments have their consequences ... The challenge to the Church in this situation is surely to offer an interpretation of who we are and who God is with respect to us. It is instructive to see what happened a thousand years ago, in the context of the first millennium, when two ideas or interpretations came into view that correspond to the sort of questions that need to be asked. The first was the idea that the social order comprised three 'estates': those who pray, those who fight, and those who labour ... the perfect society, organized in a threefold or trinitarian structure. The second idea ... was Anselm's Satisfaction theory of the atonement, centred on the restitution of God's honour, besmirched by man, which appeared in 1097, in Cur Deus Homo ... coloured by a feudal notion of the honour owed to an over-lord.
The demands of the present situation are broadly similar .... We are seeking an account of social order and a matching account of God's order that together carry conviction. These accounts do not as yet exist; but I can offer two indications of the dimensions of the problem.
First, we have no public account of life in common; the commonest understanding of the work of God in Christ is essentially individualistic: the appeal of Christ to every sinner. Second, what is in danger of breaking down is the seventeenth-century settlement whereby people in Western Europe decided that, after three generations of religious wars, political agreement and peace were more important, more central to human flourishing, than making religious truth prevail. And the Church of England is a Christian consecration of that political settlement, which did not abandon criteria of difference, rights and duties, and their interdependence. The task, as I conceive it, therefore has a strongly Anglican flavour. The Prayer Book on the one hand summons us to 'make prayers, and supplications, and to give thanks, for all men'; and on the other, it suggests an outcome, to live 'in love and charity with your neighbours'; that is, it reflects on the state of the polity.
The millennium, for good reasons, has some disturbing qualities. The task is to respond to that disturbance by once again articulating a social vision of human flourishing, within a theological vision of who God is and what he has done for us.
![[Sheila Cameron]](../by/Sheila_Cameron.jpg)
Sheila Cameron surveys some Millennium reading.
Sheila Cameron is on the staff at the University Library and is a Reader in training at GSM
![[The Myth Of The Millennium]](November/Myth_Of_Millennium.jpeg)
'You got three months to live!' That's the countdown as I write, according to the latest in a series of unsolicited e-mails warning me of imminent collapse of the world economy and the end of civilisation at the turn of the year. The Myth of the Millennium by Tom Wright (Azure, 1999. £3.99), a small book with a very big theme, is a welcome antidote to such alarming prophecies; it debunks apocalyptic notions and at the same time invites a true Christian response to what is still a significant milestone in our history. Wright looks back to the start of our Christian calendar, when the misnamed Dionysius Exiguus, or 'Denis the Insignificant', proposed dating time from the birth of Jesus Christ. However, Dionysius counted from year 1 rather than year 0, and his new year began on 1 March rather than 1 January, so according to him we should be celebrating the new millennium on 1 March 2001.
There is a deep-rooted need in humans to invest the events of our world with other-worldly significance. In marking the year 2000, we need to think theologically rather than chronologically; we need to respond to the postmodern spiritual quest by offering an interpretation of Christian future hope which comprehends the needs and realities of our present age. For the postmodernist, most God stories are seen as power-games between the dominant and the oppressed; but our God's self-giving love expressed in Jesus Christ does not seek to control but rather to liberate. Wright finds in the Old Testament concept of Jubilee or cancellation of debt a fitting way to mark the Millennium and to emphasise the lordship of Christ over the agents of materialism. This engrossing little book gets to the heart of contemporary thinking.
![[Life After Death]](November/Life_After_Death.jpeg)
David L. Edwards' After Death? Past Beliefs and Real Possibilities (Cassell, 1999. £12.99) is again "a smallish book about a great human question", addressing the rapid decline in acceptance of Christian doctrine and practice surrounding death in the 20th century; it offers a survey of beliefs from the ancient world onwards and notes the continuing search for assurance, seen in popular parapsychology and interest in near-death experiences, as well as in the application of scientific method to the search for evidence of life after death. And what of the real possibilities for the Christian today? Edwards raises questions such as, "Are souls immortal?" and "Are bodies raised?" He looks at traditional notions of Hell and wonders if there can be a Heaven without another world. Eternal life for the Christian means the acceptance here and now of God's offer of love and allowing that to imbue our relationships with others; that present decision determines our present and future destiny.
![[God On The Net]](November/God_On_The_Net.jpeg)
God on the Net: a Guide to the Best Sites for Study, Inspiration and Resources: year 2000 edition, compiled by Vernon Blackmore (Marshall Pickering, 1999. £6.99) is a handy classified directory providing a short-cut to a wide range of religious material on the World Wide Web, from Bible texts to sermons and preaching, aid agencies to youth organisations, sects and denominations to worship and ritual. There are patristic texts and modern evangelical magazines, chat rooms and guides to events, even jokes and cartoons. "How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Six. One to change the bulb and five to form a society for the preservation of the old light bulb." (Comic Break) Such hilarity apart, this is a useful handbook, well worth the modest outlay.
![[A Candle Of Hope]](November/Candle_Of_Hope.jpeg)
Garth Hewitt's book, A Candle of Hope: a Journey through Advent, Christmas and the New Year (Bible Reading Fellowship, £6.99), was begun early in 1998 at a time when another Gulf War was expected and peace talks had stalled in the Middle East. "I have never known such pain or despair," the author tells us in his introduction. He invites us to accompany him on a seven-week spiritual journey through the Holy Land by means of daily readings, meditations and prayers. We meet members of the local Christian community, predominantly Palestinian, and also members of the Jewish and Muslim communities who speak of the need for dialogue and their awareness of common religious objectives. Bethlehem is the 'candle of hope', its meaning peace on earth and goodwill towards all. The book's hope is that the year 2000 will mark a transition in the attainment of peace, the dream of all the people of Palestine; it encourages us to face our Christian responsibility of reconciliation. This Advent is a special one, and this book offers a memorable journey to those adventurous enough to embark upon it.
Since this is the same from issue to issue, we have included a single copy of it on the site, as our Who's who at GSM page.
Majestas is edited by John Parkin, Sheila Cameron, Andy Martin, Philip Oswald (proofs) and John Sturdy (HTML) and published by: Great St Mary's The University Church, Cambridge CB2 3PQ, Tel (01223) 350914, Fax (01223) 426555.
Please contact the editors at the above address.
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