My walks through Kennington Park have shown me that dogs are excellent conversation starters. It is made easy because the dogs are inclined, usually in affectionate terms, to engage with each other. Even when the encounter is not positive it enables the owners involved to begin a conversation and opens up a whole realm of human enrichment.

The same seems to apply to those with prams. Although the child in the pram does not engage they facilitate communication between the adults pushing the pram or buggy.

When I recently started using a walking stick I discovered that sticks offer the same possibilities. Making my slow journey through Kennings Way recently a stranger commented on the sturdy nature of my walking stick to which I was able to respond by admiring hers which was very elegant.

‘But of course it is,’ she said, ‘Because I am a lady!’  And she laughed.

We then went on to discuss mobility issues, the weather, and the merits and demerits of Southwark Council. A pleasant encounter from which we both benefitted – I most certainly did.

Conversation starters and conversation stoppers are hugely important. How sad it is when individuals, families, societies or nations stop speaking to one another. They are  left diminished and deprived.

When I compare myself with some of my family and friends I can see myself as poor. When I compare myself with friends, some here in London but certainly some in India and Thailand, I am very rich indeed. Comparisons can be very tricky and context is very important. Poverty in the United Kingdom or New Zealand can look quite different to that in India or Africa.

C S Lewis said that pride was the greatest sin of all. The opposite virtue is humility. During the Second World War, Lewis was invited by the BBC to broadcast a series of talks. The talks became the book Mere Christianity. He devoted a whole talk to ‘The Great Sin.’ Pride, he said, leads to every other vice and that is because it is basically comparative and competitive.

‘Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.’

It is the superior, ‘I’m not as bad as…’ and, ‘At least I am more generous than…’ or more polite, or kind or anything at all, wherein lies the problem. 

C S Lewis, ‘It is the comparison that makes you proud.’

When I was chaplain to my old school in Christchurch New Zealand we had School Assembly in the Hall on Thursday mornings. The whole school assembled. The Headmaster lead half the staff, gowned, down one aisle to the stage. The chaplain, cassocked, lead the other half. On the stage the chaplain and the headmaster faced each other, acknowledged each other with a head bow and turned to face the school. The chaplain said, ‘Sit,’ which everyone did, and then gave a brief ‘Thought for the day.’

One Thursday I spoke about the sin of pride when it is comparative and I quoted C S Lewis. Then I sat and the Headmaster stood to give his address to the school. He said,

‘The chaplain has spoken about the wrong sort of pride. I will speak to you about the right sort. There’s litter around the quad! And around upper! Anyone would think we were some local high school! Take some pride in the place!’

As we were processing out I heard the voice of a senior colleague behind me,

‘Chaplain, I think the headmaster missed your point!’

It s trikes me that the Christmas Spirit is alive and well in the United Kingdom given the increase in the number of advertisements in the media by charities asking for donations. Christmas is still seen as a time for giving. There are appeals for the homeless and refugees together with usual animal charities seeking support. All are appropriate. The holy family found ‘no room at the inn’ at Bethlehem and became refugees with their flight into Egypt, and ox and ass, cattle sheep and a donkey feature as well.

Contrasting Observances of Remembrance moved me equally.

First the great Festival packed with people broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday evening. Then the thousands led by the King at the Cenotaph at Whitehall on Sunday and watched by millions on television.

The last was the simple act of remembrance on Monday. The Vicar of St Agnes took the initiative and in time for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month went, with a few parishioners, to the War Memorial in Kennington Park.

Seeing a priest in a cassock and cloak at the War Memorial a handful of passers-by joined us. There was a pause, a silence, a commemoration, and prayers. We remembered them. Eleven of us.

The large numbers are important but it is not the numbers that count.

It was when Father Vaughan was the parish priest at the church of the Immaculate Conception in Geraldine, New Zealand. On All Saints’ Day his homily at the mass was brief as he had been up all night watching the cricket on television. He had only one thing to say.

‘You can sit there thinking I’m not good enough to be a saint. I am telling you that there is nothing bad that you have done or could do that hasn’t been done by one of the saints. So you have no excuse.’

Or as St Augustine put it more than 1500 years ago,

’There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.’