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From Leslie Griffiths, Methodist Minister:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý

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My wife Margaret and I spent Bank Holiday Monday evening with an iced lolly and a glass of wine, feet up, watching the military tattoo on the telly, the culminating event of the Edinburgh Festival. It’s the sixty seventh sell-out season and all the expected glamour was on display – precision marching, colourful uniforms, swirling bagpipes, a lovely children’s choir – all framed in one of the most spectacular settings imaginable. It was comfort television. We’d seen it all before. Or so we thought.Ìý Suddenly the show moved into a different gear with a tribute to David Bowie. A stringed orchestra played Life on Mars. It was accompanied by a sky full of bursting fireworks and huge images of the singer projected onto the castle walls. It was eye-popping stuff, all the more so when, just minutes later it was followed by another tribute, this time to the Queen in honour of her ninetieth birthday. I was struck by the way this most traditional of ceremonial occasions could absorb and honour elements from popular culture. Just as David Bowie kept his message alive by constantly re-inventing himself, so too does the programme of this annual event and it’s my guess that the secret of its continuing attractiveness lies precisely in that fact.

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Religion, especially the Christian religion, might do well to learn from all this. Too often we religious people pickle our tradition in aspic; we encase it in unyielding concrete; we don’t let it breathe. Yet Christians, of all people, should surely remember their belief in a God who embraced and honoured humanity by entering it and sharing its conditions. Such a God wouldn’t, I suspect, think too well of his followers who are too often hidebound by the past and resistant to the culture of our own day.

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So it wasn’t comfort telly in the end. It made me think about comfort spirituality – a faith that keeps itself to itself, more concerned about nice feelings with fellow-believers than getting stuck into the more invigorating business of facing the world with all its pain and pleasures.