CLIMERICK: If You Looked Down From Space You Would See

Today, we take an idea from our companion Eco-Verses blog site and post a 'Climerick’ with a spiritual twist.

If you looked down from space you would see,

 ‘The Marble’ with blue and green scene:

it’s God’s planet Earth,

and it has to be worth

your investment to help it stay green.

Close To a Cliff-edge,

We are presently enjoying a week in our niece/s cliff-top lodge in South Devon. It is a delight to look out over the sea and have time to reflect on what the eyes chance on. In the mid morning heat of a veritable heat wave, a few days ago, the gulls, all silent for once, seemed to be revelling in gliding silently past.

 

 Free image from Pixabay

Close to a cliff-edge,

and we are treated

to a superbly silent fly-past. 

 

Gull after gull after gull

floats, it would seem,

from thermal to thermal.

 

Then, as if at a way-marked fissure

in the cliff,

they drop out of our sight

to attend their business of the day. 

 

For a few minutes,

their grace-filled peacefulness

(no squawking just now as they glide!)

is broken by the snarl 

of a small plane

which obtrudes itself

into the cloudless sky.

 

And, thankfully,

we do not have to be anxious

that it might off-load ordnance.

 

We are truly blessed!

 

 

Why Is Our Sight Drawn in The Night?

Why Is Our Sight Drawn in The Night? 

(could be sung to the tune to Star of The County Down)

 

Sol by the author (Acrylic)

Why is our sight

drawn in the night

to the planets, the moon and stars?

There’s wonder there

of God’s great dare

to create a universe.

So my soul shall sing,

O Creator king,

of the vastness that’s all around;

and the wondrous spin 

that holds us in

to our orbiting planet’s round.

 

Refrain

And way out there,

beyond our stare

are unearthly days and nights.

Wild gases burn

as the cosmos turns

with a billion, trillion lights.

 

And today we know

time began to flow

from creation’s wild big bang.

When space emerged 

at your mighty word

and with joy, your angels sang:

for all was good

and in time Earth would

form with others around the sun,

a planet fair

with sustaining air,

as our saga just begun

 

Refrain

 

In the course of time

With the earth benign

Life emerged at God’s command.

‘O human race

respect the grace

Of the sky, the sea, the land,

And nurture it through all your days,

It will give you food and joy.

Don’t tarnish it

or it won’t be fit

and too soon could be destroyed.’

 

Refrain

Morning After Twelfth Night.

 Morning After Twelfth Night.

 

 

Low sun streams its rays

into our gorgeously pine-scented Angel tree.

Glass angels catch the beams

and project them into rainbows,

which dance upon the walls,

the door, the ceiling

and the sofa.

The room rejoices.

Light’s Creator delights in its praise.

ECO THEMED SIDESHOW No 7: THE GYRE: Where the garbage goes at Sea

 

In this sideshow, you see at the top rivers flowing under a bridge. Each river has objects floating in it, on its way to the sea. In the foreground is an AI generated image from Pixabay which has been constructed to illustrate where our plastic and metal garbage finishes up. Whilst some rubbish will sink, a huge amount finds its way into a GYRE. This is a colossal trash can in the middle of the ocean. Of course, on its way to the gyre, some rubbish will disintegrate leaving micro plastic particles which are finding their way into the stomachs and digestive systems of fish, other marine life and sea-birds - and now even into our own human digestive systems.

To bring this massage home, ping pong balls are rolled across the gyre, which has a slight incline and score simply according to the width of the bridge over the river. To make the game slightly less predictable, the gyre surface is not smooth.

With this game in mind, let’s be very, very careful not to drop our litter, whatever it is in or near a watercourse. 

To better understand understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE

ECO THEMED SIDESHOW No 6: BAMBOO 2030: Green sticks, Smoky Sticks

This compact and very simply constructed sideshow consists of two flowerpots (or similar) filled with sand, with somewhere between 70 and 100 bamboo sticks (obtainable from the web) stuck in them. The sticks have either a green top,  with a white turbine blade superimposed or a red top with a dirty smoke cloud on them. The proportion is about 2 green sticks for every red stick. Green sticks have positive numbers from 1 – 7 on the buried bottom of the stick and the red sticks have negative numbers. In up to 7 pulls, players have to either make up a score of 20 or 30. 

 

The reason for these two numbers is that they are each half of the year 2030 when the first significant goals, arising from the United Nations Biodiversity Agreement made at COP 15 in Paris in 2022, will be reviewed. Bamboo is used in the sideshow as it is a very sustainable crop if well managed.

To better understand understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE

With Pentecost fast approaching....

Pixabay image

With Pentecost fast approaching, my watercolour, ’The Eternal Flame of The Holy Spirit’ moves into prominence in the right-hand column opposite and offers a click through into an A-Z Reflection on The Lordship of Christ and the ongoing work of The Holy Spirit. Praise be!

Somewhere in Deep Space

Between the writing up of the Mini Eco-Fayre practicalities, comes a moment of inspiration that literally comes in the night and I am especially grateful fr the concept of poetic licence, which ‘permits’ me to take unexpected turns! So...

Somewhere,

in deep space

there may be exoplanets,

where God’s gentle agent

evolution,

has fashioned eco-systems,

in which,

the tiny plants

that adorn all manner of 

our environments

thrive so well

that they reach gigantic loveliness!

ECO-THEMED SIDESHOW No 5: BUBBLES-TO- GO

Maybe one bubble can say a lot - but a wild stream of bubbles from the loan bubble-machine is bound to draw attention to this attraction. To hold that attention, once the young children have exhausted the fun of chasing and popping the bubbles, there is equipment for children to blow serious bubbles of various sizes, and, if someone is so disposed, a recipe and equipment to make bubbles large enough to match a child’s height. (This will take some pre-fayre practice).

Going deeper in thought about bubbles, apart from reflecting on the immediate joy they give children (and not a few adults), they are a small wonder of the sciences of physics and light, incorporating the mathematical properties of a sphere, the vital properties of surface tension, the balancing of internal and external air pressure, the iridescence which can show all the colours of the spectrum/ rainbow and at their last, the effect of gravity after each bubble’s brief flight

Children get a timed ‘slot’ to explore the bubble blowing on offer.

And in keeping with the Eco-themes of the sideshows, we can perhaps think of the fragility of each bubble as symbolic of the fragility of our home sphere, our planet, whilst dirty fuels remain.

To better understand understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE

ECO-THEMED SIDESHOW 4: OILY BEACH

Today’s sideshow derives from an experience many of us will have had, of finding a beach we love sullied by large globs of tarry oil which are quite vile, leaving thick deposits of oil on shoes or clothes or on the skin of a curious child. 

Usually we will have no idea of the source which could be a major oil-spill, the deliberate discharge of oil from a tanker, to lighten load, or from a leak from an old or damaged tanker. Whichever it is, the mess it leaves on the beach will be s nothing compared to the destruction it will have caused on its journey to the beach. Sea-birds fouled and unable to fly, fish poisoned in the filth of the spill and who knows what damage done in the unseen parts of the sea bed. Yet another by-product of the dirty-fuel industry.

So, we reflect on this with numbered, scoring stones scattered, numbers down amidst large black-painted stones in a sand-tray, representing the disgusting disfiguring globs of useless oil. 

Wait - No! Worse than useless - for who will clear them up? Not the fat-cat shareholders of the extractors of the poisonous lumps, but a local sea-side corporation, obliged to clear up the mess and spend taxpayers’ money to make the beaches we love, safe.

To better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE 

 

ECO- THEMED SIDESHOW 3: THE GOOD, THE BAD and THE SMOG-BOUND

So here is the third of the sideshows which will shortly be available to churches and schools in the Cambridge area to borrow. The picture is a prototype, and the images on the wine boxes will be renumbered to give a clearer message. The sideshow is called 'The Good, The Bad and the Smoggy’. Playing is very simple: players toss or lob a beanbag at the array of wine boxes (an interesting way of re-using them) which are numbered to reflect that clean air technology is way more superior to dangerous, dirty fuel energy generation.Smog  was that dense and life-threatening form of air pollution that the UK experienced way back in late forties and early fifties, until the introduction of The Clean Air Act in 1956.

Thus, the (revised) highest score of 10, needless to say, furthest from the player, features a Tokamak. A Tokamak is a nuclear Fusion energy generator. It operates at colossal temperatures and pressure, in effect emulating the method by which the stars produce heat and light. Tokamak processing, which leaves no nuclear waste, unlike the present fission power stations, has been under development for decades. The development costs have been so vast that only international collaborative funding has been able to put up the huge amounts that have been necessary for progress to be made. Then, in May 2025, CNN reported that a commercial enterprise was building a Tokamak just outside Boston USA. Amazingly, and encouragingly, funding of US$2billion is backing this enterprise. Clearly, even usually hard-nosed investors believe Tokamak will deliver, and a date of 2030 is slated. It is hard to envision just what this will mean, but with a projected target of producing four times the power input, the enterprise will undoubtedly be a game changer in the energy market. So the incorporation of the Tokamak at the top end of the sideshow scoring is intended to give a message of HOPE to children playing the sideshow. Not that many of them will want to be bothered with such detail, but on the basis that every child is likely to be accompanied by a responsible adult, this message maybe part of a drip-feed of encouragement to be optimistic that Clean Air Technologies will sweep away their dirty and dangerous predecessors in the not-too-distant future.

Scores of 5 - 9 (inclusive) are allocated to various established clean air technologies, wind turbines, solar panels, sub-sea (near surface generators, which operate in races of water and produce three times the energy density of wind turbines) sea-borne booms and tidal lagoons. There are no scores of 2, 3, or 4: the scoring drops to 1 represented by Coal, Oil, Gas and Shale - all dirty and dangerous fuels which also leave scars on the landscape when they are abandoned.

'Should these score at all?' one asks - but then, this is only a sideshow game!

The concepts behind the sideshows will all be explained in a small pamphlet entitled ‘Our Sideshows: what they mean’, available to borrowers of the equipment. At the time of writing this post, the pamphlet is in embryo form.

For now, to better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE  

ECO- THEMED SIDESHOW 2: KNOCK THE DIRTY FUELS DOWN

Following my last post, here’s another of the Eco-themed sideshows at our Children’s Science and Climate Change afternoon. It’s called ‘Knock The Dirty Fuels Down'. The targets are empty  415gm  cans, with a wrap-around showing dirty fuel installations. They have to be knocked off their shelf with beanbags. Clearing 7 or more off the shelf earned winners’ tokens.

The sideshow had an associated placard (not seen in the picture of the sideshow) - but reproduced below the sideshow image.

Simple knock about fun - with a profound message

To better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE 

ECO- THEMED SIDESHOW 1: DO YOU GIVE A TOSS?

Last Saturday afternoon, 17th May proved a warm, delightful few hours for our experimental Science, Faith and Climate Change event at St Mary’s, Fen Ditton, on the Eastern edge of Cambridge. The Faraday Institute, Schools and education team, provided fascinating insights into Fossils and faith, Our bodies in all their Godly complexity (children could make DNA bracelets and the fascinating nature of non-Newtonian liquids intriguingly demonstrated. The explanations of various sciency things were much appreciated by those who visited.

Meanwhile, outside in the churchyard, a sequence of Eco-themed sideshows provided entertainment and hopefully some education and HOPE for the young people present (and, later, for the older helpers, too)

Here is one of the sideshows entitled post-event, ‘Do You give a Toss?. You can see a beanbag which, having been tossed, didn’t quite make it to score on the right-hand side.

If you look closely, you will see the clean air section at the top earns high points, whereas the dirty fuel disaster section, featuring wildfires, floods and hurricane score consistently low. This message is spelled out more explicitly in a note to accompany the sideshows which is set out here.

Fen Ditton Children’s Science, Faith and Climate Change Afternoon .

The Outcomes by Trevor Thorn

 

Saturday May 17^th was kind to us in weather terms as those who came were able to enjoy an imaginative collection of Eco-themed outdoor sideshows. In the church. Indoors, the Schools and Education team from The Faraday Institute provided a fascinating array of ‘stations’ which included a spectacular collection of fossils, an opportunity to make a DNA bracelet and the wherewithal to make a suet-ball birdfeeder as a tangible expression of encouraging the bird-life in our gardens.

 

It would be dishonest to say that we were besieged by children from the three schools in which we promoted the event but there has been a promising development around the sideshow collection. The picture of the most popular of these, which will now be renamed ‘Do You Care a Toss’ will give a sense of what we might now regard as a prototype for a Mini Eco Fayre which we can offer to schools and other churches as a package. We will put the stalls into a nearby storage facility, so they are readily accessible and seek further support from the Cambridge Schools Trust to finance this second step of our Eco-venture.

 

One of the important elements of the display was to give children HOPE that Climate change need not be the disaster story that is all too constantly in the media. In order to make this message clear, a two sided slip was prepared, one side addressed to children and the other to their parents or carers. Here, for your interest are the two texts

 

Parents & Carers

OUR SIDESHOWS

 

The aim of our sideshows is to give children a sense that Climate Change is not the threat it is sometimes made out to be.

 

New clean technologies are developing all the time and are now attracting big investments, notably the TOKAMAK, a nuclear fusion generator which can generate huge energy output without nuclear waste, and is due to come on-line early 2030s. A TOKAMAK has attracted $2billion in investment (Source CNN) which might otherwise have gone into dirty energy production.

 

It does not take a lot of thinking to realise that investors will soon wake up to the idea that the future has to be one of clean, green,  technologies and that money will move from dirty fuel generation into these far more attractive investment areas.  The sideshows imply this message and are, thus, designed to give your children and teenagers HOPE – a vital message for their generation

 

And HOPE is also the greatest message of the Christian church.

 

Thank you for reading this

* * * * *

 

Message for Children about our SIDESHOWS

 

Please have fun on our sideshows.

 

As you try to win tokens for prizes you will be helping to raise money for remote villages in Africa who will be helped to build solar lighting to avoid using dangerous fuels, like kerosene.

 

If you look at the sideshows carefully, you will see that clean, green ways of generating energy score much better than the dangerous dirty fuels that have been part of your mum, dad and grandparent’s history.

 

Clean, green ways of making power are getting better all the time and the world is waking up to that fact.

 

In the not too distant future, lots of people will want to put money into supporting these clean methods rather than the old ways – and then Climate change will not be as bad as some people say.

 

So why not talk to the older people of your family and ask them to consider Solar panels, Heat pumps and electric cars if they haven’t already. That could be YOUR way of helping this change happen

 

Let’s hope this next step proves to be a positive one in our efforts to link the church to concern for the issues of climate change and the effects this is having on some children.

Another sideshow will feature in our next post.

IT IS NOW THE INTENTION THAT THE SIDESHOW EQUIPMENT IS PUT INTO STORAGE IN THE CAMBRIDGE AREA AND CAN BE MADE AVAILABLE TO ANY CHURCH OR SCHOOL THAT WOULD LIKE TO RUN A MINI ECO FAYRE OR INCORPORATE THEM INTO A LARGER EVENT (SUCH AS A VILLAGE FEAST).

WE ALREADY HAVE 2 PROSPECTIVE USERS!

IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THIS POSSIBILITY AND WOULD BE ABLE TO COLLECT AND RETURN UP TO 5 STALLS (BEING SUPPLEMENTED PRESENTLY AND SHORTLY 10 WILL BE AVAILABLE), Email crossandcosmos@gmail.com  Head your enquiry ’Side Show information and start ‘Hello Trevor Thorn’

I hope this might be of interest in raising the profile of the anxiety some young people are experiencing, and help them to find someone to talk to, who will allay their fears with a confident message that dirty dangerous fuels must be abandoned - for the world’s sake. And that they can play a part in bringing this change about.

 

 

A Thought Experiment (Work in Progress April 2025): The Use of Buildings Where Communities have Worshipped in the Past

I pondered...

Could a Change of Language spark a change-of-mindset for many beautiful and long-cherished buildings whose future might, just now, seem uncertain?

So I fell to thinking: about people falling in love with places. This is seldom a rational process, for people simply’ fall for’ a place and perhaps occasionally, bizarrely, people fall in love with redundant churches! Why?

The language is dated, the very title seems to smack of decay to those who cannot feel the history of the generations that invested love, spiritual homeliness and, of the time, vast funds, to create these havens from the storms of life. They have had good carers, they have had indifferent carers and occasionally unimaginative carers - and those places have fallen into disrepair, often beyond being restored.

But many, many have thankfully survived, but a lack of imagination within an introspective Anglican Church has possessively clung to the notion they have to be called a something church: and the musty word redundant has been pressed into reluctant service. 

So, let’s stands back a tiny distance and see if we can do better with our description for these, O so often, beautiful Oases. Let us simply recall who they were built to honour. They were built to honour The Creator of The Cosmos, clothed in the human frame of Jesus Christ.

Being a generous God, The Creator saw fit to endow we mere humans with an amazing vestige of his own function borne out of Love, creativity.

Would it not be entirely fitting for these often incredible edifices, which have had love, often of generations of women, lavished on them through good tunes, bad times, times of peace, times of war to be given a changed persona. in the lingo of today, could they collectively become Creativity Hubs?

This is an age in which such an idea could’ fly’, at least partially because fundraising for imaginative projects can be more easily generated than perhaps at any time before in history. Crowd funding has reached a mature stage. So, for example, American money, wondering where to find a sound home just now, could well think that a small plot of land, with a wonderful serenity about it, and being home to the remains of an ancestor, could be a good place to be rooted into/ invested in.

Patron of the Arts has long been a noble title, for generations the province of the wealthy. But today, it could become a far more broad-based accolade. Any takers among the generation that has been made wealthy by windfall profits on even a modest home willing to make a modest stake in that beautiful little chapel that lies in a close-by woodland, attended by a faithful locals?

Maybe this is too simplistic, but surely it deserves some further consideration!

The Church Estate might well be be able to work with some major philanthropists to make a core fund available to give the notion a kickstart - by making grants available on a ‘matched’ basis to, in turn, encourage local funds generation

Dioceses could surely find ways of transferring the land and buildings into community wide trusts - couldn’t they? Might they even make modest handover grants to do essential weatherproofing? After all, they would be shedding a present liability

It would be surprising if local creatives didn’t welcome nearby spaces to make their work more widely appreciated.

Creativity-Hub Trails could be attractive ways of a wider public being invited to enjoy the peace and tranquillity of these often ancient refuges. Places where people have brought their joys, their celebrations and their sadness could be repurposed, without the overlay of the too often dead-hands of formal religion. Many places could burgeon yet another imaginative location for a coffee shop. It’s already been done in many places, so maybe this is the time for a trickle to become a tide.

Given a modest core fund to help build a community, many places might find eager gardeners and allotment enthusiasts to help such a dream to come alive with wildflowers and herbs.

Local clergy would be relieved of the guilt of having a redundant ecclesiastical asset in their often massive parochial portfolios - and just to emphasise this separation, perhaps the location, rather than a seldom remembered patron saint, could become the main feature of the name. That would, sometimes, require an act of generosity by a local ‘guardian’ parish - but isn’t generosity at the heart of the Christian Gospel?

Surely it’s worth an exploration!

Maybe we could say ‘Goodbye' to ‘redundant churches'

And welcome Creativity Hubs across our lands. It could just be a twenty first century resolution of a centuries old problem.

Trevor Thorn, Durham and The Cambridgeshire Fenlands, April 2025

Subsequently posted to Facebook on 3rd May 2025

My thought experiment on the use of former places of worship at http://crossandcosmos.blogspot.com politely refused by The Church Times - 'I’m afraid it doesn’t quite work for us’.

Pity really! Naively I thought it might be germane to quite a lot of CT readers - but then again, I hear that CT often focus on internecine battles in the CofE these days. So why should a bit of speculative futurising about formerly much-loved buildings, interest a readership that is tearing itself apart at the seams and perplexing any non-church person who would still like to believe the CofE might be about love and inclusivity.

Reply - Sad to me (of course), though I wonder if it could be anything to do with a bias towards being preoccupied by factionism? Well, it’s a thought!

A NATIVITY TREE - THE TREE TELLS THE STORY

Throughout last year, I was encouraging churches to decorate their Christmas Trees in such a way that they became part of the Christmas story thus changing them from a prettified pagan emblem at the front (usually) of the church into a symbol of the angel host that hovered over Bethlehem and invited the edge-of-society Shepherds to be the first people to witness the coming of the Saviour of the World, the Messiah.

However, as the year has passed and our companion site (a more secularly based site than this), has developed the ideas of CLIMERICKS and CLIMCUBES, these two potent symbols of Climate change, Climate Justice and servanthood in their own right, offer an opportunity to turn a Christmas Tree into an even more graphic symbol than that of the Angel Tree. In this, they also need the help of some of those lovely Palestine Olive wood tree hangings. I hope you are beginning to get the picture.

That picture is, overall, almost breathtaking in its simplicity and explicit messages. Just look!

FROM THE TOP - down to just above eye level are your LOCAL ANGEL THRONG. As there is now plenty of time to prepare, why not ask local craftspeople to make angels for the tree in their own medium. You will then have a beautifully diverse fellowship of angels AND an opportunity to invite the crafters in for their own pre Christmas celebration and dedication of their work hanging in the church, which at its best is the beating heart of any community.

FROM EYE LEVEL to about 1metre off the ground - CLIMERICKS speaking of Climate Justice and Stewardship. So about OUR responsibility and opportunities to bring about the failing of the COGS industries.

BOTTOM QUARTER OF TREE - Palestine Olive wood tree hangings recalling the very land where Christ was born

AROUND THE TREE - CLIMCUBES to be given away at an Epiphany service - symbolic of our sending Your message of love and truth into our communities.

So the pretty but irrelevant Christmas Tree becomes a NATIVITY TREE -a  multi-faceted symbol of HOPE and OUTREACH: a glorious transformation.

Please pass this idea on far and wide if you think it has merit