Here goes...

On the hill opposite Bethlehem stands this rather ominous looking Israeli settlement. It lies of course in the West Bank, and is remarkable not just for its location but also its size. It bristles like a well-armed fortress, square and aggressive, a metaphor for Israel's Goliath opposite the David of the Palestinian Bethlehem (appropriate, I suppose as David is said to have been born there, even if the nationalities are reversed). It is perched on a hill, a monument to Israel's desire for security and determination to keep the Palestinians firmly in their place behind the security wall that has turned Bethlehem and its surrounding villages into what is effectively an open prison. It reminded me of something, and when I got home I remembered what it was - Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting of the Tower of Babel. It is both a pictorial and symbolic likeness. Babel was a human attempt to establish security, presence and a future without God. The settlements are attempt...

As I write this I am in Israel, leading a group of friends around the Holy Land with my (now) good friend, Dahoud, our Egyptian Coptic Christian guide. The other day, on a visit to the City of David, the site of the small Jebusite fortress that David captured around 1000 BC, we stopped by the Gihon Spring, the water source that fed the fortress and subsequently the city that David built. Presumably one day, some prehistoric farmer drank from the well, and thought it would be a good idea to build a settlement on the hill above it, as it both had accessible water and was easily defendable with three steep valleys around it. It got me thinking about the significance of this small stream of water emerging from deep underground. It seems so small, so insignificant. Yet without this spring, there would have been no fortress, without the fortress, David would not have tried to capture it. Without David's raid, there would have been no Jerusalem. Without Jerusalem, no Solomon's temple....

It may be a little in the distance, but Lent is not too far away. I am beginning to think about what I might do this year. I heard recently of a campaign run by an organisation called Stewardship, which is called “40 Acts, Give Out – Not Up”. The idea is that rather than giving up something for Lent, you do something positive instead, and in particular do something generous on a regular basis. The idea is that on each of the 40 days of Lent you do something out of the ordinary, something generous - giving something away to others, whether it is time, money, gifts etc. It struck me that this was a good idea for a number of reasons. First, the great tradition of building character through virtue rooted in Aristotle and given strong Christian colouring by Aquinas and in recent times Stanley Hauerwas and others, suggests with reason that good character is built up by regularly practising certain acts. So for example, becoming a generous person requires repeated acts of generosity, so ...