OBITUARIES Intro text?
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MIRANDA HARRIS
ANNUAL REVIEW IN MEMORIAM
CertEd 1972
Miranda Harris trained as a teacher at Homerton from 1972–1975. She was killed in a terrible road accident in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on October 28th, 2019. After graduating she taught at Tanbridge House school in Horsham, before moving with her young family to Bristol in 1978, where her husband Peter trained for the Anglican ministry. In 1983 they moved to Portugal where they bought, established and led a field study centre and bird observatory. This was the first expression of the environmental charity A Rocha, which they founded. Over the years, A Rocha (www.arocha.org) has become a global Christian conservation movement, dedicated to communicating the relationship between the Christian faith and commitment to the environment and the planet. In the years that followed they oversaw the establishment of two other centres in France and travelled extensively to resource the rapidly growing number of Christians active in nature
conservation, which now has teams in 21 countries, and centres in many of those. In 2010, Peter and Miranda moved back to the UK for family reasons but continued their work of sharing A Rocha’s Christian approach to conservation with many across a wide range of backgrounds around the world. Miranda was raised in a cultured family and carried her fine sense of beauty and poetry into everything that she became involved in. She was musical, artistic and deeply creative in everything she undertook. But of her many gifts, probably the greatest was her capacity to make the other feel listened to and loved, whether she was interacting with someone very familiar or a complete stranger. That A Rocha has succeeded in becoming a relational and family orientated movement, despite the constraints imposed by its global nature, is in large measure due to Miranda’s ceaseless investment in all those who belong to it. Her enormous creative capacity bore its greatest work in the lives of many, both in and beyond A Rochafruits which of course cannot be measured, unlike the book she longed to write but was never able to. She was an outstanding communicator, in both spoken and written word, often lecturing with Peter at Regent College Vancouver among other places, and writing literally thousands of cards and letters to those she loved and cared about. The premature death of a person so vibrantly alive is a lasting loss. Miranda is survived by Peter, her four children and eight grandchildren. Supplied by Anita Cleverly
