All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

It is a strange thing that sometimes groups which begin by representing the interests of others often end up by alientating the very people they set out to represent. This is partly due to some self-opinionated members taking the lead, and riding their own ‘hobby horses’, and partly because of a failure to listen to what is being said. At best the group loses its impetus and purpose, often disbanding, and at most does a great deal of harm lambasting those individuals and ‘bodies’ it considers who are failing the community.

Jesus was often criticised by the Pharisees who took it upon themselves to represent the interests of the community. No doubt they did represent the interests of some, although their zealousness made their protestations and their whole approach probably unacceptable to the majority.

In the town in which I live, there are those who write articulate letters to the newspaper, complaining about Council policy, the state of cleanliness of the local hospital, issues about parking, problems with this and problems with that. I wonder whether, and to what extent, the act of complaining really gets things done? It certainly makes people unpopular !

The church has never tried to be a community of perfect people(you only need read the Letters of St. Paul to work that one out!), although there are those who blame Christians for the failures in society and for their indifference to the needs of individuals and communities. The other day I read an article in which the writer tried to claim that the church had lost its’ place at the centre of the community. Well, it didn’t upset me because the statement is true in a way and not in another – the church is a community of believers drawn from a community of people, simply that, and inevitably many of the benevolent and charitable works it exercised have been taken over long ago by other agencies.

The therapist Virginia Satir identifies types of behaviour in people and ‘the blamer’ is the one who is always accusing someone.The curious thing is, that ‘blamers’ don’t usually want answers, even if they are offered, they are more concerned with their own feelings of superiority and ‘throwing their weight around’. Admittedly, we can all adopt this stance from time to time, but their are those who seem to want to make a career of making other people miserable through their accusations.

Perhaps those who are ready to apportion blame should take care that the good they attempt to do isn’t eclipsed by the harm which may result in being overly critical. As a friend pointed out to me, the roots of communities go very deep, and all too often those who rise to defend those interests have been around for too short a time to understand the implications or the complexity of the social history which belies them.

I don’t know which is more shameful, the actions of a bully or the actions of those who stand by and allow the brutality and intimidation to happen. 

China is using the ‘smokescreen’ of the Olympic Games to mask their appalling record of human rights abuse and, I think that, everyone who watches the opening ceremony or any of the Games is doing nothing less than giving their consent to oppressive rule, intimidation, torture and murder.  The Chinese Government is no respecter of an individual’s freedom, whether it involves the right of its’ citizens to determine the size of their family, to practice their religion, the right to unregulated education or even what a farmer may grow in his fields – let alone the right to experience another culture or even the control of the words which come out of your own mouth.

The usual ‘smokescreen’ of almost impenetrable smog which normally hangs over the city of Beijing, has been temporarily dissipated, through the closure of industrial plants and power stations and reducing the amount of traffic, in a pathetic gesture to create an atmosphere where the Games may flourish.  Olympic athletes will compete in an impressive Stadium which stands on the rubble of people’s houses, demolished without compensation, and live in accommodation, all of  which has cost a staggering  42 billion dollars – no doubt some of which has been accrued from the sale of Arms to the rebel forces in Darfur.

I cannot understand the stupidity of those who feel that the success of the Olympics is of more importance the valuing of human dignity and human rights.  Every person who attends the games, everyone who views the games on television, every person who supports the games, is supporting Chinese oppression.  Ignoring what China does in the world, is giving one’s assent to any regime which treats people as things, un-important and disposable.

Whilst the Olympic Games may stand ostensibly  for the ‘spirit of competition’, they are being staged in a country which severely punishes any dissent or possible competition or challenge to its authority.  It beggars belief that those who support these games can continue to believe that, in fact,  any athletic competition on a national or global scale makes any contribution to decent living, the pursuit of justice or the establishment of peace in our world.  Let’s face it, even some of those who compete are prepared to take drugs in order to enhance their performance, which is in itself an a form of aggressive competitive behaviour, with their determination to succeed propelling them from potential failure to success at any cost.

The Olympic Games are about being the best in the world and any means will be employed in the achievement of this goal, whilst the power of the intellect will deny that poverty and disease in most, if not all of the world could be eliminated if only a proportion of the money wasted by the hosting countries and competing nations was spent on alleviating the suffering of our brothers and sisters who genuinely have no voice, no power, no influence, and yet have more dignity in their suffering than any individual winning athlete or any proud Chinese official at achieving success in these Games.    

My thought for this week is that everyone should think – China has little or nothing to thank the West for, so they say, except perhaps one thing – our ability to revel in technological achievement and the generation of wealth.  Not one gold medal will save a Tibetan Monk from a beating, a woman from a forced abortion, a Christian minister from imprisonment or a human rights activist from torture – all of which went on before the Games and, I have no doubt,  will continue after the Games.

Six months ago, I sat a dinner with a gentleman who asked me to reconsider my whole opinion of China, as being a credible force in the world with a fast developing economy and the potential to be the world leader in ten years.  Yet, at what cost; a powerful nation without compassion and any inclination to afford human beings a full measure of dignity and respect, is like a bus without brakes.  The problem for us in the West, is that we fail to understand that the terror of that journey is a daily experience for millions of people in China, whilst others watch the drama unfolding, yet seem disinclined and ‘powerless’ to prevent it.  Make no mistake, ‘we see what we want to see, always’, and I will not be persuaded by an argument that my Chinese ‘vision’ is a bit ‘cloudy’.  There is no smog in Beijing, the Chinese have told us there isn’t – if we believe that, then we will believe everything else too.

I wrote the following piece for my ‘thought for the week’, and present it here for any comments you may wish to make ….

A letter arrived on Sunday afternoon, posted through the letterbox when I was out.  It wasn’t a bill or an invitation to dinner.  It was a rather hurtful critique of me, as a priest, which completely took me by surprise.  I suppose no-one likes to be criticised and especially not by a friend. 

The problem with ‘paper complaints’ is that they fail to express the tone of delivery.  The reader is always left wondering and, probably, tends to read more into what is ‘said’, without any comfort of any correction being available.   It was a very sad receipt of someone’s unhappiness and upset. 

After twenty years in ministry, in my experience,  people seem to spend more time being upset than being happy.  Why are we determined to be upset – because someone has offended or insulted us; impugned our integrity; deceived and lied to us; failed to acknowledge our generosity or just simply ignored us ?  The Gospels are full of stories about people who feel ‘hard done to’ and ‘left out’, spurned and wronged.  

The truth is, we cannot be denigrated or abused, through the actions of others, unless we choose to be so!  If we are offended or upset, it is because we think we deserve better and, quite frankly, that flies in the face of Gospel teaching.   Jesus tells us that if we are struck on one cheek by someone, which could be seen as a physical or verbal action, we should not retaliate, but  ‘turn the other cheek’, turning our face not once, but repeatedly until,  in effect, we take their anger away.    

Jesus always stood against those who maintained their right to respect and, of whom he was highly critical, as his arguments with the Pharisees clearly show.  He condemns their precise, ‘unflawed behaviour’, as they see it, particularly in their readiness to take offence at what he preached. Their failure was that they were too concerned about who they were, an ‘activity’ which consumed them so much that they failed to understand who he was. 

In 1989, the American photographer, Andres Serrano was paid for, and exhibited an extremely controversial work.  His subject was a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of his own urine, controversially known as Piss Christ.  Whilst it is hardly a tasteful subject, the significance of what he was attempting to portray was misunderstood by many, and condemned by many Christians as blasphemous.  However, it was understood by one person, the Religious and art critic, Sister Mary Beckett, who said that it was not blasphemous but  a statement of ‘what we have done to Christ’.   In essence, it took the incisive and spiritual mind of a humble religious sister, dispossessed of worldly things, to see the truth. 

Far from being blasphemous, it is an irrevocable statement of how sometimes we fail to surrender our sense of importance and our dignity, and all that we feel is due to us,  in exchange for the deeply beautiful moving expression of Christ’s sacrifice as the profoundest expression of love, honour and respect in our lives as Christians towards others.  For all that may happen to us, it is nothing in comparison to what happened to Him, who gave His love and His life in exchange for His dignity and self-respect.            

In the Bible, there is a reference to how God will ‘cast down the mighty and exalt the lowly‘. What it does not say, is how he will achieve it. In the past few days He appears to have managed it, through the action of the Hollywood film-maker Steven Speilberg who has withdrawn as the Artistic Director of the Beijing Olympics in protest at the Chinese Government’s involvement in the conflict in the Sudan.

 In a bold statement, Mr. Speilberg said his conscience would not allow him to continue, stating that, “At this point, my time and energy must be spent not on Olympic ceremonies but doing all I can to help bring an end to the unspeakable crimes against humanity that continue to be committed in Darfur”. His reference is to the fact that more than 200,000 people have been murdered and a further 2.5 million have fled because of the conflict between Government forces and the African rebels in the Darfur region of Sudan. China has economic, military and diplomatic links with the Sudanese government and is the main supplier of weapons in the conflict.

Every little helps – is the slogan of the Tesco Supermarket chain, designed to make us believe that they have our best interests at heart -helping us to have a better quality of life.  The truth is that, during the past year, Tesco has been involved in:

• supplying customers with ’contaminated’ petrol, which caused extreme damage to some car engines
• refusing to pay dairy and other farmers a decent and fair amount for their produce, forcing some out of business 
• forced the closure of smaller shops through building more stores and monopolising the local economy – King’s Lynn has two large stores and a petrol station store
• used Radio Frequency Identification Technology to spy on customers shopping traits, as part of a plan to ‘track’ every product they sell 

Yet, inspite of all the protests, boycotts and lobbying against such practices, the company still managed to declare an excess of £2.5 billion pounds in profits and a 30% share of the retail market.

Some might say, what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, is a true enough saying, but unfortunately for Tesco at Gaywood in King’s Lynn, some people did see.  On Christmas Eve, staff were seen throwing food into black plastic bin bags.  Personally, I think that it is sad that the management didn’t contact the local churches, Hospice or Homes, either directly or through the local press, and enquire as to whether their ‘waste’ might have benefitted someone for whom every little might indeed have helped. 

The truth is, I suppose, that the produce that they buy and the manufactured products don’t cost them a lot.  Yet, was it better to throw it away, than to give it away to someone who might have truly benefitted from such a benevolent gesture?  The problem is that those who offer and sell an economy range of products simply tend to forget that there are still those who struggle on low incomes, for whom cheap is still expensive and, for whom, Christmas is as expensive a time as for those who are rich.

Every little helps - but who does it help? To my mind it is no more than a ‘cheap slogan’ for a company with a cheap moral and ethical policy – or could I be terribly wrong?  Oh, and make no mistake, Tesco’s computors for schools and free sports equipment – who do you think pays for that?  In truth, the one who is not even deserving of a free hand-out on Christmas Eve – the consumer, who saves the tokens given free (?) by a company which never stops thinking about the ways it can help us ….. because every little helps … them!

‘I would rather have a thief than a liar, because at least you know where you stand with a thief’.  My brother and I grew up with this phrase ringing in our ears – it was one that our mother used.  As small children, it was difficult to grasp the truth of it, particularly when the occupation of thieving, which was so prevalant at the time, seemed to have been ‘elevated’ in mother’s mind above that of someone who just ’stretched the truth’, which some children were wont to do!  In later years I realised that what mother was trying to instill in us was, that neither was acceptable – although the liar was the more unpredictable and dangerous of the two and, according to mother, required a good memory! 

Strangely, the ability to lie, or should I say ‘be economical with the truth, seems to have become fashionable amongst some politicians.   It is an interesting point that they cannot accuse each other of lying or name one another as liars, in the House of Commons, because it is considered to be ‘un-parliamentary language’.  British politician Winston Churchill actually found a route around the rule by referring to an ‘outright lie’ as ‘terminological inexactitude’!  For the current British prime-minister, commonly referred to as ‘a child of the Manse’, (implying ‘Christian’ and honest), any suggestion that he has lied or has ‘mis-led’ the Commons, over the latest ‘Labour Party funding crisis’, could prove to be very damaging.

Lying itself, in a strange way, is ’stealing the truth’; also, it robs us of our dignity and self-respect and robs others of their trust in us.  People who lose these things, particularly those in public office, whose reputation often is the one thing which ensures their personal success, have a long way to fall and. those who are ‘truthful’, perhaps motivated by envy, will engineer their destruction.

In the Gospels, those who spoke or ‘revealed’ the truth of their lives to Jesus received healing -Zachaeus the tax collector; the Roman Centurion pleading for the life of his servant … ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof’ ….. . Mary of Magdala and the thief on the cross.

Sadly, lies and deceit paralyze and destroy  us as people.  I have lost count of those who have spoken to me formally, in Confession, or casually about the lies they have told or the deception in which they have been involved.  These are not creative, nor beautiful acts, they are the things that steal and destroy something of ourselves and something of others.  Lies rip the smiles from our faces and mar the beauty which is within us.

The Church has just entered the season of Advent.  A time to prepare for the birth of Jesus  – and to face our relatives across the dinner table!  For many it is a time to forget the wrongs of the past, the lies and deceit, the mis-understandings, the animosity, and to try and manage some kind of reconciliation.  Let us hope and pray that the great and the good, the rich and the poor may all know true reconciliation, as they begin to move towards the solemnity of Christmas, when we shall all ‘touch the truth’, brought to us by a God who did not grasp at greatness or popularity, at power or status.

After fifty years, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by anything really.  I think I am at the stage where part of me thinks that I have seen it all somewhere before, and another part is regretting throwing away all those things which are now back in fashion – including the platform shoes!

However, there is one thing I don’t remember – I don’t think we had a plastic Jesus.  This twelve inch high ‘action man’ of the religious world, complete with a seven and a half inch chest, is the latest gimmick to seduce the ‘American Bible Belt’.  At the push of a button, ‘Jesus’ will speak a number of quotations and tell you the story of the ‘feeding of the five thousand’ in 59 seconds!  Amazingly, it tells its’ American hearers to ‘love your neighbour’, rather empty words to a nation which has spent more time, money, effort and will destroying the lives of those who oppose it.

As with the plastic flowers, which encouraged people to buy Daz in the 1960’s, the plastic Jesus makes no sense, whether speaking or not.  The only sound I can hear is the sound of the cash register.  The day that we start truly listening to the words of Jesus, is the day when our plastic, artificial concern gives way to an understanding of what true love, true service and true faith really is in relation to the oppressed, starving and suffering people of the world. 

I have been sitting here thinking, which is not rare for me; sometimes I wonder whether I think too much. I wonder if that is possible, thinking too much?

It’s November 5^th, I can hear the fireworks exploding in the distance.  It is a strange custom; I doubt that many people ever think about the origins of it all, well, at least until their money has gone up in smoke! As a teenager I wouldn’t go to bonfire parties, because I disagreed with the sentiments of the day.

Each time I hear an explosion, all I can think of is the English Catholics who died horrible deaths – for what?  Simply, because a nation denied them the right to believe and think as they did.  Mind you, sitting here, listening to the sound of ‘burning money’, I suppose it could be worse, I could live in Lewes, in Sussex, where for centuries a whole community has, thoughtlessly or thoughtfully, celebrated ‘Bonfire Night’. 

I wonder, “Is there a limit to people’s freedom of thought – their right to express their thoughts, whether we agree with them or not?”  November 5th seems, to me, like an eternal comment upon this question – and really, it is nothing more than a thoughtless remembrance – a past memory of the ‘rights’ of some to curtail  and contain the freedom of others – all in God’s name, of course.  The truth is, even if people stopped to think … it wouldn’t change anything …

The evening television news revealed a story which is so shocking, I feel almost ashamed to reproduce it here. 

Apparently, a ’serving British soldier’ was jailed today, for three years, for urinating on a disabled woman, who lay dying in the street.

In the fifty years, or so, of my life, I would like to say that this would never have happened in the past.  That would be a lie – the lack of respect shown to the Irish, black people and ethnic minorities, particularly in the sixties and seventies, and the practice of ’queer(gay)-bashing’  – all are equally as disturbing as the event reported in todays media.  A basic lack of respect for the individual – a lack of respect for our ‘humanity’.

We are in ’striking distance’ of All Saints’ Day, which celebrates the lives of those who gave clear examples of the way in which humanity is honoured and respected.  A day which exalts all that is good and honourable.  A holy day which is undergirded by the message of the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ – which sanctifies and honours all human nature, both in its’ frailty and in its’ strength. 

Sadly, all too often, human beings align themselves with acheivement and might – weakness and humility appear to have little or nothing to offer.  The Solemnity of All Saints reminds us – not of greatness or holiness – but of the grace which God gives to the weak and ordinary, the humble and the vulnerable, and of the way in which they respond to the ‘Jesus’ who is ‘incarnated’ before them, in human nature.

What did Jesus say?  “In as much as you did it to one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it to me … ”. Perhaps one of the prison Chaplains might help the ‘young soldier’ to understand the meaning of the words’.