All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

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.

‘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 …