Christian graves to face Mecca

9 Responses and Counting...

  • Eliz­a­beth 09.23.2006

    It‘s truly fright­en­ing, isn‘t it ?
    Sadly, Britain has lost so many of its Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions. At the ceme­tery where DH and I have already bought our grave plots, our graves *are* fac­ing East.

  • Grace

    Good for you! And I shouldn’t be so cocky — I don’t know if I would’ve known about that tra­di­tion or not, so shame on me as well.

    I think that as fright­en­ing as it is for Great Britain (and a lot of Europe, methinks) to rou­tinely refer to itself as post-Christian, it’s every bit as fright­en­ing for us New Worlders to real­ize that we’re usu­ally only about 50 years or so behind Europe for cul­tural shifts.

    You’d never know it to look around the Amer­i­can land­scape and see Titanic-sized megachurches, but really solid Chris­t­ian teach­ing and praxis is pretty rare. Unfor­tu­nately for us, hav­ing a bumper sticker is not the same as hav­ing some­thing carved on your heart.

  • Robert Mahoney

    I don’t see why Eng­land doesn’t just hand the keys to the king­dom over to Saudi Ara­bia now and save the mus­lums the trou­ble of tak­ing it over, Lord knows Eng­land is doing every­thing they can to make them feel right at home.

  • Grace

    I’d be curi­ous to know what the view is out Elizabeth’s Gar­den Win­dow, since she lived in the UK. It seems like on both sides of the ocean, we’re think­ing the other one has gone mad. Their for­eign pol­icy looks to us like telling the Mus­lim extrem­ists, “Help your­self to the brandy and cig­ars, but please don’t break any­thing.” Ours looks to them like, “We’re going to open up the can of whoopass on y’all, and after that we can be friends.”

    Every­body might like to choose “none of the above” but that doesn’t seem to be an option.

  • BJohnD

    Hav­ing just returned from two weeks in the UK (mostly Scot­land), allow me to offer my assess­ment of your assess­ment: Bingo.

    While we had a lovely time over there (as we always do), I found I no longer wanted to go inside the beau­ti­ful old churches for a look-round. They’re just tourist sites now, which made me sad. I kept think­ing of a story I’d read about St. John Max­i­movitch. It seems that some­time in the 1950s he walked into West­min­ster Abbey, but after just a few min­utes he turned to the priest accom­pa­ny­ing him and said, “Let us leave. There is no grace here.”

  • Grace

    Boy, that’s incred­i­bly sad. Greg and I just went to Scot­land for the first time about a year ago, and I just thought it was too beau­ti­ful for words. But see­ing the ruins of abbeys and the churches and cathe­drals turned into tourist traps just gets to you.

  • BJohnD

    A friend at my OCA parish, an older fel­low who grew up a Catholic in France, said much the same thing when he returned from a trip to his home­land ear­lier this year.

    Accord­ing to one of our guide­books, there is exactly one func­tion­ing monastery in Scot­land, a Bene­dic­tine abbey. I’m not sure where it is. Yes, it is sad, but the peo­ple, the restau­rants (hon­est), the sights, the ale, and even the Scot­tish weather were great.

  • Grace

    The restau­rants?!! Well, that is a plus. The coun­try that brought us hag­gis and Scot­tish eggs usu­ally doesn’t take many prizes for good eats.

  • BJohnD

    There are many excel­lent eth­nic restau­rants, espe­cially Indian, plus those serv­ing “New Scot­tish” cui­sine, empha­siz­ing the best locally grown ingre­di­ents pre­pared in new ways. And any veg­e­tar­i­ans out there MUST try David Bann in Edin­burgh. Brilliant!

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