Just in time for Christmas, there was an uplifting story this week from an old acquaintance bravely hanging on in Zimbabwe, who wrote of a "cleansing ceremony" that was held in Harare's main cathedral on Sunday.

That sounded somewhat pagan, like a ritual requiring buckets of blood drained from a conquered enemy's virgins. And God knows how much cleansing the Anglican Cathedral of St Mary and All Saints may need, so defiled has it been over the years. Had the British empire's retreat from Hong Kong been more like its departure from Rhodesia, St John's in Central would have been turned into a wet market.

But the ceremony of which my old colleague wrote was a Christian one, to rededicate the cathedral to its original purposes. Bishop Chad Gandiya, according to Angus Shaw's report for Associated Press, "struck the main doors three times with a pastoral staff to have them opened. He blessed what he called the 'defiled' interior with signs of the cross ahead of the first Eucharist service by mainstream Anglicans since they were often violently banished from churches and missions seized nationwide."