All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

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 …