I think they had used its tower as a machine gun post. I do so partly because of a sermon preached in St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow, at Christmas 1991. This Victorian brick church had been stolen by the Communist authorities during the 1917 Bolshevik coup d’etat. Then they had despoiled it in the usual Communist way, eventually turning it into a recording studio. Our cities now give off so much brilliance that millions of people spend much of their lives without ever seeing the stars.
I am as glad to be warm as anyone else is, though I do think we could manage perfectly well without so much artificial light. In the event you adored this information in addition to you desire to acquire more details regarding ร้านไวน์สาทร generously visit the web site. The sharpness and blackness of winter have been brightened and softened by artificial light and central heating. It shows two proper helmeted police officers admiring the Christmas tree sent each year by Norway as thanks for British help and support during the Second World War. Last week I saw on social media a profoundly moving photograph of London in early December 1948.
The cold, the darkness, the fasting (if you can face it, Advent is a fast, just as Lent is) help us to understand that our Christianity is a great national possession, a light shining in darkness which only increases in power and meaning when that darkness thickens. It does not do so for very long, but it does. These are all very well. But in fact this, the supreme festival of our half-forgotten faith and culture, is the key to understanding why we are as we are and behave as we do.
And the preacher said that at this time of the year, ‚Normal time falls into step with eternity‘. And this realisation that frozen Russian night, has made me understand that it is not feasting, or wine, or gifts that we are anticipating at Christmas. Once, on the panel of the Australian equivalent of BBC’s Question Time, broadcast from Sydney Opera House, I was asked to name a dangerous idea, in front of a huge and largely hostile Left-wing audience.
But I did not then really grasp what it was. In the weeks before Christmas, as the days shortened and the nights deepened and the cold intensified, I had a sense of something momentous happening. In my childhood we were not rationed, but there was no plenty either. I can just remember when much of our country looked like this. The towering spruce in the picture was only the second such tree in what has since become a tradition (and is now apparently threatened by supposed concern for the environment).
But in that time of peril, fret, austerity and shortage, and in the sooty-black bomb-ravaged London of that time, it shone out like a good deed in a wicked world. The tree is pretty scrawny by today’s standards, and its lights are sparse.