CLUBS AND ASSOCIATIONS AGE CONCERN MENORCA NEWS

Our news:

The Shop is still very busy and well-stocked. Thank you for your donations and custom! A very big thank you also to all our volunteers who work hard to make the shop such a welcoming centre to visit. We are still in need of more volunteers. Even if you are only available one morning a month, or during only a few weeks every year, we’d love to hear from you.

Watch out for Lee, our Shop Manager, putting his regular Shop Video Tour on Facebook: Age Concern Menorca 2015

Age Concern Lunch and Coach Trip to Ciutadella

On Thursday 8th June, Age Concern ran a coach trip to Ciutadella. Over 30 friends and members had a great day out. We stopped off in Ciutadella for a morning´s shopping and a walk about, followed by a superb three course lunch at Cala Blanca. On our way back we stopped at Truvi Garden Centre to top up on our summer garden plants.

Our Lifeline service offers confidential help to those in need. The team of volunteers led by Carol is very busy supporting individuals in different ways. We help people of all nationalities and often act as a vital bridge between them and the local social services.

If anyone you know needs our help, please get in touch. If you would like to join our Lifeline team, please contact Carol.

The medical equipment short-term loan service is also still busy. Please make an appointment with Jan (essential!) if you need a wheelchair, crutches, walking frame etc. (Deposit required. No rental fee but we do ask for a donation when the equipment is returned, and you get your deposit back. You can collect from us, or we can deliver anywhere on the island. Loans for up to 3 months.)

It’s been wonderful to have our social activities up and running again. However, we are taking a holiday break from our regular lunches during July and August. We will be back with lunches and a Day Out in September.

Both our weekly ‘drop-in’ sessions are up and running. Every Monday from 11-12.30 at the Jubilado Centre on the Esplanada in Es Castell and every Tuesday from 10-12 at Bar Pons, Cala en Porter. Please come along and make new friends or meet current ones. The Tuesday ‘drop-in’ has been running for many years and is well supported. The Monday club, at Es Castell, is going from strength to strength thanks to Roy and Elaine Keep your eyes open for more news, visit our website or Facebook page, email us for the latest information or just ‘drop-in’ on a Monday or Tuesday.

Our membership numbers are very healthy. Membership not only means you are supporting us but also entitles you to discounts at all our social events. Please contact our Membership Secretary, Shelley, if you would like to support our work by donating 12 € a year and becoming a Friend of Age Concern. You can pay at the shop, at our lunches or by bank transfer.

Thank you all for your continued support through donations, purchases, membership or as a volunteer. We couldn’t do any of this without you!

KEY INFORMATION:

Opening Hours: Monday – Saturday, 09.45 – 13.15. (Closed Afternoons)

For the latest information and current offers follow us on facebook or visit our website.

General Email: Menorca@Ageconcern.org.es

Visit Our Website: Www.ageconcernmenorca.com

Follow Us On Facebook: Age Concern Menorca 2015

Social Secretary: Menorca@Ageconcern.org.es

Sandy: 699 901 777 or 650 729 439

Chris: 669 949 370

Membership Secretary:menorca@Ageconcern.org.es

620 017 437

Lifeline: Lifelineminac@Gmail.com

676 904 487

Medical & Mobility Equipment Loan

By Appointment Only: Acmenorcamedequip@Gmail.com

629 016 307

Shop: Menorca@Ageconcern.org.es

971 156 110

Shop Manager: Menorca@Ageconcern.org.es

636 347 286

THANK YOU AGAIN FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

As we have moved into summer, the Arts Society Menorca will be taking a couple of months off. So far, we have enjoyed three speakers this season and there will be two more in September and October.

We began in April with Toby Faber, of Faber and Faber, who have built a reputation as one of London’s most important literary publishing houses. T.S. Eliot was famously an early recruit on their editorial team. Toby traced the history of Faber and Faber through its illustrations, covers and designs. Toby has written several non-fiction books on a plethora of subjects and in 2019 wrote his first novel, called “Close to the Edge” a real thriller.

In May, our lecturer was Julia Korner a leading specialist in fine arts conservation. She made the point that conservation is not the same as restoration. “The Conservation of Painting” was a fascinating journey, illustrating how much dedication is needed to bring a painting back to life in order for it to continue to tell its story. Provenance of a painting can also be confirmed by this process, which takes an enormous amount of knowledge and forensic detective work.

In June we enjoyed a lecture on “Joaquin Sorolla: Painter of Sunlight.” Dr. Kathy McLauchlan brought Sorolla’s paintings to life through her knowledge and expertise. Sorolla was a highly successful artist of international renown in his lifetime, but outside Spain and the United States he has largely been forgotten today. His paintings are full of sunlight and optimism, featuring women and children at the seaside, landscapes, and areas of Spain.

Coming up in September, the return of Simon Rees. A freelance writer and lecturer, Simon will be lecturing on Bizet’s opera, Carmen. The opera is based on a novella by Prosper Mérimee. You may recall the lavish production (pre-covid) of Carmen at Maó Teatro Principal.

Concluding the season in October, Tony Rawlings will be back. This time lecturing on “Mad Men and Artists: How the Advertising Industry Exploited Fine Art”.

Another great season of the Arts Society Menorca. You can still become a member, as membership is for a full year, not just a season. Contact Malcolm for individual ticket information as well: menorca@theartssocietymenorca

We are grateful to our friends at Blevins Franks for their support and sponsorship. The AeroClub San Lluís, The Anglican Church Menorca, and Ses Bruixes for their generosity. Thanks to Jorge Fernández Alday for the use of his painting in our graphic design.

See you at the lecture!

Your Committee

SPIRITUALITY FOR A NEW DARK AGE?

There’s a retired bishop of the Church of England, whose sister lives in Menorca. While I was chatting to him during a recent visit, he mentioned that it has been suggested that he should write a book (he is a well-published author) on the subject of ‘Spirituality for a New Dark Age.’ It’s an intriguing idea - and it raises a lot of questions. It has its roots in the idea that the Church played a role in moderating the darkness of the dark ages.

What has historically been known as the Dark Ages usually refers to the period after the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe, the ‘early Middle Ages,’ when the order of Empire collapsed in the face of invading forces from (mostly) the east. The term originated with the Tuscan scholar Petrarch in the 1330s, who wrote: ‘Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.’ Given the tendency of Christian thinking to use the imagery of light and dark as a metaphor for good and evil, the impression given is that these were difficult times, and they certainly had their moments: this was a time of poor communication, lack of education, deteriorating public health, misinformation and superstition (but what had the Romans ever done for us?!). By the time the Black Death (bubonic plague) devastated large parts of Europe in the fourteenth century, the kind of superstition that regarded cats as mysterious carriers of bad luck contributed to the spread of the disease: killing cats is a rather silly idea, since they prey upon rats, which carry the fleas that in turn carry plague bacteria.

One thing about the Dark Ages is that they were not necessarily completely dark. Even Petrarch himself alluded to the light that shone in the darkness. Many historians object to the use of the term, which has in fact been ambiguously used to describe either the early Middle Ages, or later parts of the Middle Ages, or the entire 900 years from the fifth to the fourteenth century. It was during the age of Enlightenment that philosophers helped the myth of the Dark Ages to take hold, with the rise of scientific discovery and technological developments. I suspect that there is a certain degree of intellectual snobbery involved here: assigning the adjective ‘dark’ to any time that is not one’s own! Certainly, during this time there were advances in all areas: science and education (universities), power generation (water and wind mills), architecture (gothic cathedrals), agriculture (crop-rotation, heavy plough, horse-collar), warfare (cannons, heavy-armoured cavalry), music (musical notation) and much more.

All of this partly owes its origins to a reactionary movement against organised religion that emerged during the Enlightenment. When the Roman Empire collapsed, one thing that was left in place was the Church, which had become the official religion of the Empire in the early fourth century. With its headquarters in Rome, or Constantinople (competing factions existed even then), the Church emerged as an influential force where there was a vacuum of civil order. Was this, ultimately, a good idea? By the time Martin Luther emerged on the scene in the 1500s, he perceived the Roman Catholic Church to have become a sort of Empire in its own right, with a privileged hierarchy that subjugated the poorer classes as much as any civil government did, exploiting ignorance. He protested against this, which is why we now have Protestant churches that broke away from Rome. So the Church may have ameliorated some of the darkness, but not without acquiring some dark habits of its own.

Anyway, what about the idea that, first, we are witnessing a new dark age, and secondly, that Christianity has something to say?

One of the characteristics of the dark ages was poor communication, resulting in misinformation and superstition. Today we certainly don’t have poor communication - at least not in a technological sense. Information in the form of multimedia can be passed around the world at the speed of light. Ironically, rather than suppressing misinformation, this has had the effect of making the sort of ill-informed opinion and plain fantasy that promote superstition, fear and anger all too readily available to the point where it is sometimes difficult to tell where the truth lies. This is indeed reminiscent of the dark ages. How do we distinguish between the rule of law and witch hunting, for example?

What might Christianity have to say about all of this? Perhaps one counterintuitive advantage of the decline of churches in the past few decades is that organised religion in many states cannot claim to have any kind of ‘official’ status. Many believe that the Church of England will, in the foreseeable future, become disestablished (i.e. not the religion of the state). In this regard, the Church will have to look back to a time when it was a minority institution, during the first three centuries of its existence, although we might hope that the persecutions that flared up during those centuries could be avoided. This would be a good start, but we live in a different era from that time, and while we might hanker after a purer form of spirituality, we must be realistic about the world in which we live.

Personally, I believe that the Church made a strategic error during the early years of Enlightenment, as humanity came to know and understand more about the nature of the world and the universe in which we live. Instead of engaging in a dialogue with scientists and philosophers, the religious establishment decided to oppose it - Galileo was accused of being a heretic, for example, for daring to suggest that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than vice versa. The Greeks had in fact decided this centuries before; all too often we congratulate ourselves on gaining knowledge and information which was already known. The role of science, broadly speaking, is to explain how things work. The role of religion, in equally broad terms, is to try to understand why.

A good example to illustrate this might be the way we understand the word ‘myth.’ Nowadays, we tend to treat ‘myth’ in the same way as ‘legend:’ fanciful ideas or stories that don’t necessarily have any grounding in truth. But there is truth in the mythology of humanity: the truth of a myth is in its meaning. We make sense of the world in which we live by telling stories about it. Most cultures have some sort of creation story or myth. The Judeo-Christian creation story does not have to be taken literally to unearth the truth that there is order and purpose in the created universe, that there is a spiritual dimension within it, that there is divine inspiration in creation, that humanity has a responsibility to exercise good stewardship of our world, and so on.

If human beings are intrinsically spiritual, which I believe they are, then the darker aspects of the age in which we live can be lightened by tending to that spirituality. And doing so can provide a framework with some guiding principles about how to live in the face of rampant anger, fear and superstition. Practices that feed us spiritually, such as prayer and meditation can offer inner peace.

And guidance for living? When Kate was about to be discharged from hospital in California recently after an appendectomy, the nurse who was caring for her asked me about my favourite verse from the Bible. That might be a moving target, depending upon context and mood! But most commonly I return to a verse from the prophet Micah. ‘What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ How might our world be different if those were prevailing principles that we all followed? Would darkness be lifted?

Church News

Worship in the church of Santa Margarita takes place on Sunday mornings at 9am and 11am, as well as at 11am every Wednesday and morning prayer with a focus on healing at 11am on Friday (also on Zoom). Santa Margarita continues to offer worship online, to respect the needs of those unable to worship in person at the church.

During the weekend of 22/23 July, our Bishop, David Hamid, will be visiting Menorca, to celebrate the mini-fiesta of Santa Margarita on the evening of 22 July, and to worship with us and preach on 23 July.

The church web site will continue to be the place to seek up-to-date news and information about online worship: anglicanchurchmenorca.com.

The phone number for the chaplain, Paul, is +34 617222382 and his e-mail is chaplain@anglicanchurchmenorca.com