As the UK sweltered under a ferocious autumn sun this week, Christians took part in 13 climate pilgrimages around the UK, from Glasgow to Brighton, to highlight public concern regarding the climate crisis, and to call on the Government to end new oil and gas expansion.

The Met Office announced that the heatwave in England and Wales this week was the first time since records began that temperatures have been higher than 30ºC for six days in a row in September.

The Revd Vanessa Elston, a pioneer priest in Southwark diocese, took part in a pilgrimage in Battersea. She said: “The public are really concerned about the climate issue. We don’t want to be paying sky-high energy bills to fossil-fuel companies in a cost-of-living crisis. Renewables are cheaper; so it’s high time our leaders made them a viable option on a large scale.”

As temperatures rose, leaders of the G20 group of nations met in Delhi, where they called for peace in Ukraine, agreed that the world needed $4 trillion to fund the energy transition away from fossil fuels, and called for accelerating efforts towards a “phasedown of unabated coal power”; they said that poorer nations needed financial support to ensure a “just transition”.

Before the summit, church leaders representing more than 600 million Christians, had called on the G20 leaders to implement progressive carbon taxes and to end subsidies for fossil fuels, which could raise $3.2 trillion for the needed energy transition.

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Christians held a prayer vigil outside World Vision this week, calling on them to stop banking with @Barclays – the largest funder of fossil fuels in Europe.

My latest piece for the @ChurchTimes on growing pressure for charities to clean up their banking.https://t.co/EtrzeomRfm

— Joe Ware (@wareisjoe) September 14, 2023

Christianity is a very strange and a very difficult faith. It is difficult to believe, and it is even more difficult to do what we were asked to do last Sunday — take up the cross of Christ and follow. Yet, in spite of the gainsayers, I do rather wonder whether Britain is as secular as the sociologists of religion maintain. In churches that take the trouble to present a well-conducted liturgy, to preach the difficult and challenging faith of Christ, people still respond.

The evangelicals in the Church of England manage to fill churches. The splendid liturgy of the Western Rite attracts thousands every Sunday to the great oratory churches in Knightsbridge and Birmingham. Even the oft-repeated claim that there are no more vocations to religious orders is not completely true — the Blackfriars in Oxford have a flourishing novitiate.

There has never been a time when it was easy to believe that a loving creator allows the innocent to die in earthquakes or children to suffer from cancer. Since the feminist revolution, and the change in societal attitudes to sexuality, the churches undoubtedly face some problems. But I do not believe that either the sheer difficulty in believing at all, or the sexual revolution, is what keeps people away from church.

Christianity is not destroyed by rival ideologies, such as Darwinism. It is just slowly gnawed at by secularism, consumerism, the “strange disease of modern life”. To visit a church where they still offer business as usual is to be stimulated, as no secular equivalent can stimulate: disturbed as no drama or work of art could disturb.

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Excellent article by A N Wilson in today's Times. Well deserved praise for #frgraemerowlands, and a mention for the choir (or Latin Chorus!) aswell. pic.twitter.com/yTShNu2jyA

— ssktmusic (@ssktmusic) September 14, 2023

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (‘Holyrood day in harvest’, as it was sometimes called in the Middle Ages), so here’s a fourteenth-century translation of the Crux Fidelis, a verse of the sixth-century hymn Pange Lingua:

…Steadfast cross, among all others
Thou art a tree great of price;
In branch and flower such another
I know not of, in wood nor copse.
Sweet be the nails, and sweet be the tree,
And sweeter be the burden that hangs upon thee.

…This verse is used in the liturgy several times through the course of the year, and at different seasons its poetry will resonate in subtly different ways. This tree is like no other, and it bears at once both flower and fruit; what kind of tree you picture as you sing this verse will depend on what your eyes are seeing in the world around you. The hymn is sung in the spring, on Good Friday and at the cross’ first feast in May, and at that time of year the image of a flowering tree evokes blossom and the spring of new life; and it’s sung again at this feast in the autumn, when trees are laden with fruit (their own ‘burden’), and the image instead speaks of fruitfulness, sustenance, the abundance of divine gift. Imagery of Christ as the ‘fruit’ of the cross is common in the liturgy of Holy Cross Day, perhaps in part because of the time of year when it falls. One purpose for the image is to draw a contrast with the fruit of the tree in Eden, to link the sin and the redemption, the sickness and the remedy: as one medieval antiphon puts it, ‘Through the tree we were made slaves, and through the Holy Cross we are made free. The fruit of the tree seduced us; the Son of God redeemed us.’

The manuscript in which this little English translation of Crux Fidelis is preserved belongs to Merton College, Oxford….

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14 September is 'Holyrood Day in harvest', the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. A medieval poem to the Holy Cross, steadfast at the still point of the turning world: https://t.co/4GPLwUH3hE pic.twitter.com/DxIRZ3kjxj

— Eleanor Parker (@ClerkofOxford) September 14, 2022

“Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.”

– T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” IV

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is an ancient devotion that dates back to the earliest days of the Church. The Cross is the great sign of our hope as Christians. pic.twitter.com/p43OcWoPHE

— Abp. José H. Gomez (@ArchbishopGomez) September 14, 2023

O God, who by the passion of thy blessed Son didst make an instrument of shameful death to be unto us the means of life and peace: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Wishing everyone a joyful Holy Cross Day from St Saviour’s, Pimlico pic.twitter.com/oTbSYX7AFs

— Fr Matthew Catterick (@vicar_stsp) September 14, 2023

Almighty God our heavenly Father, who hast bidden us to give thanks for all things and to forget not all thy benefits: Accept our praise for the great mercies we have received at thy hands; ever give us grateful hearts; and help us to magnify thee in our daily life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

I managed to catch some #orange during the #sunrise over the Palace Pier #Brighton @ThePhotoHour @StormHour pic.twitter.com/2LyojWa7MK

— Stephen Royle (@Steveontour1) September 14, 2023

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.

–Philippians 2:12-18

Délicieux moment au bord de l’eau, Les Îles, Sion 💙🧡💛🇨🇭#suisse #switzerland #schweiz #landscape #photography #paysage #nature #lake #mountains @MySwitzerland_e @valaiswallis pic.twitter.com/SCUYwJYgzL

— Délèze Dominique (@DelezeD) September 14, 2023