FROM THE VICAR

Dear Friends,

'How lonely sits the city that was full of people. How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations'.  So wrote the prophet Jeremiah long ago.

His words came to mind as recently I watched a TV programme about the drastic decline of the great American city of Detroit. It was once the centre of the huge car industry in the States, but with the huge drop in sales of cars, the firms that created the city of Detroit have either left the city completely, or scaled back their operations enormously.

The result is like something out of a science fiction film. The population of Detroit has more than halved since its heyday twenty years ago. Vast factories now lie empty, gradually being dismantled by thieves looking for scrap metal. City-centre office buildings, hotels, luxury mansions and schools have simply been abandoned. In certain suburbs thousands of houses have either been demolished or left to fall down. Nature has moved back into areas where once there were streets, houses and gardens. Other areas, once respectable, well-to-do neighbourhoods, have been taken over by gangs of unemployed people trying to eke out a living in any way - legal or illegal - that they can find.

The TV programme did not claim to be balance account of the present state of Detroit. It didn't show all the areas where industry and 'normal' life are, no doubt, continuing as before. But although these do exist, the tax revenues coming into the city coffers are now so low that the city can barely afford the basic services that are needed.  It was only two or three decades ago that everyone thought the dream of growth and prosperity would go on for ever, bringing increasing wealth and quality of life to more and more people in America and all over the world.

We're just not used to seeing images like this. We expect to see cities grow, not shrink and die. All in all, it was a frightening picture, especially when some of the people interviewed suggested that what has happened in Detroit might well be repeated in other parts of the industrialised world.

And yet the programme was not just a story of unalloyed gloom and doom. For out of the ashes of the ruins new ways of life are emerging. Many people are too poor to buy much food, and in certain parts of the city there are few shops. So people are turning back to growing their own food, on land where there used to be houses. Small industries are arising as people co-operate in programmes to demolish abandoned buildings and sell the scrap. In fact, though it sounds incredible, many people are actually moving to Detroit to join in the new sorts of life-style emerging.  And all sides there is celebration of values other than the power of material possessions.

It seems an appropriate theme for Easter time, with its message of resurrection from death. However horrible and powerful death is, the power of life and of God is stronger. In Detroit, as the TV film portrayed it, there's plenty of decay and death. But also surprising signs of  life and new hope.

It would be easy to see this as a fairy story kind of  happy ending, and we all like happy endings. But the pain to so many people of the death of a large part of Detroit, and the strange nature of the new life that is emerging there, made for an uncomfortable story.

Perhaps the first Easter story was like that to those who were there.

With best wishes for a happy Easter,

Robin Cardwell