Catlicks and Proddy Dogs

Well those nasty Roman Catholics have been at it again I see. Sneakily offering to take on board, re-train and re-ordain, some of our nice Anglican clergy. They’re going to jump ship in their thousands, the Church of England will be brought to its knees, all our churches will return to Catholic safe hands and Christendom as we know it will cease to exist. We’ll all be genuflecting in the streets and it will all become like those awful foreign countries with their tacky plastic madonnas and disgusting relics-nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Hold on, wait a minute, no it’s not the awful ‘Latin Mission’ at all: its the fuddy duddy, trendy wendy, beardy wierdy, trying to hard, wishy washy, Church of England that’s to blame. Yes, its them: wilfully ordaining women as priests, knowing that some people just won’t like it and then compounding the problem by marching gamefully towards women bishops and all the while diluting the strong meat of the Gospel, appointing athiest bishops, allowing men with silly haircuts to become vicars, colluding with the secular State that wants to get rid of Christmas, capitulating to the Muslims and just- well just not being like I want it to be.

Just a minute, its not the Catholics or the Anglicans at all, its the athiests: crudely arguing, religion hating alternative bigots who are just being really nasty to us lovely Christians and, well, haven’t got the point. They’re the ones to blame. I know what I’d do, I’d hang them and flog them and then kill them! Oh, no, that’s been tried before. No, I’d argue reasonably with them whilst smugly claiming that my truth is indeed better  theirs and we’re right really, and always have been.

If I might make a plea for authentic Anglicanism over and above the caterwauling of the media and the anguished cries of those who don’t really  care anyway, I would suggest that we are all adults here and that we enjoy an unprecedented and cherished religious freedom and toleration. The (highly intelligent, faithful and concerned)  leaders of the Church of England, including its bishops, are confronting real and hard issues: the justice of equal rights for women , for understanding and acceptance of those whose sexuality is different from that of the majority, the problem of faithfully and creatively demonstrating a robust, credible and meaningful Gospel to a world awash with self-interest and greed and with the human outcasts these priorities create. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church also struggles with these concerns as well, but chooses the route of strong, centralised authority to address them.

And this is the real issue that faces us: that of authority. There are those in life who like things clear cut, determined and under-girded by an over-arching authoritative figure or body. For those who like their understanding of the meaning of life-their faith-enshrined in this way the Catholic Church is the natural home at this moment in history, and the Papal hand is held out to them. There are those others who feel that the whole of life is just that little bit too complex for strong answers and for clear cut directives: those who struggle to find an intelligent and sensible but real way through the difficult intellectual and spiritual mazes of life, content that most people share that sense of complexity and spiritual mystery and are happy to have companions of faith on the pilgrimage through life. The Anglican Church at the moment is the natural home of these people, but will be a difficult berth for those who crave order and security. 

Along the way, there will be some switching of berths, some re-adjustments of the tiller and lots of revision and re-revision in our thinking and our attitudes as we react to the ever-changing circumstances of life. Pope Benedict has merely offered an opening to those who already find Anglicanism difficult anyway, and a compassionate way forward. Meanwhile, the hard slog and joyful encounter of the Church of England’s work in the parishes: amongst the tired, the lonely, the new-born, the soon-to-be-weds, the bereaved, the nurseries, the old people’s homes, the schools, the universities, hospitals and the ordinary homes and lives of ordinary people and much, much more will continue. It will be different and possibly diminished if some of the catholic voices and experience leave for warmer climes, but it will not cease to be and it will continue to explore the mystery which is life through the lens of Jesus Christ.

That’s why I am, and will continue to be, an Anglican.

A Roman holiday?

In the parlance of my native Sheffield: ‘I can’t get my breath!’ For the past twenty or so years, the Church, amongst other major institutions, has been working overtime to introduce measures into our corporate life that will safeguard young children and vulnerable adults. We have been largely successful in this, and, I think, can be justifiably gratified that most church communities now have a Policy for child protection and the national Church itself has highly developed methods for filtering out potential priests and employees who might misuse their position. Mindful of the immense amount of distress and suffering the Irish Roman Catholic Church has uncovered in relation to this issue, our present day arrangements to safeguard victims are not before time and are to be deeply welcomed.

Imagine then my distaste to find that there are those who believe that Roman Polanski, the famous film producer who perpetrated a pre-meditated sexual attack of the most dreadful kind on a thirteen year old girl in the late 1970s, should be saved from any prosecution. Their arguments range from: ‘it was over thirty years ago’ and ‘he’s a man of great artistic ability and genius: prosecution would be demeaning for him’ to ‘he’s suffered enough in his life’ (his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was cruelly murdered by Charles Manson).

The arguments demand an answer. It is true that ‘genius’ and bizarre and cruel behaviour often go together: one has in one’s mind the picture of Van Gogh with his ear sliced away or the ’discipline’  Thomas More is now said to have inflicted on his family, but are we really saying that the protection of the weak and vulnerable, and the moral code that goes with it, should be compromised because someone has made a major contribution to our cultural life?

Equally, is it right to punish someone so long after the crime they have committed? Those Nazis who sentenced others to death and suffering have been pursued until their own deaths because society needs to send the signal to itself that such heinous crimes and behaviour are anathema and beyond toleration. For Polanski’s victim, despite her open-hearted assertion that she has forgiven her attacker, and for others in her position the mental and physical scars of such abuse in incalculable. If the knowledge that they will be constantly sought and pursued prevents a potential abuser committing a crime, then such pursuit is doing its job.

It is true that Polanski has suffered many terrible events in his life: but does weighing this against his own crime add anything to our own efforts to eradicate and eliminate such terrible happenings? From all I have read, his attack on Samantha Galley was lascivious, self-seeking, heedless of her feelings or well-being, abusive in every sense and committed after he had deliberately fed her with drugs and drink to render her senseless. The pain he has himself endured he has deliberately and purposefully inflicted on a young child. What is perhaps most distressing, and in common with many other paedophiles, is that Polanski has never once suggested he is remorseful or craves forgiveness and instead projects guilt and culpability for the incident on his victim (Polanski was 44 when these events occurred).

We are aware that artists and others bound up in the world of culture and media often live their lives in a moral and ethical bubble of their own making (the lifestyles of many great Rock musicians do not bear too close examination) and are often derived from their unique viewpoint on the world. This can be the fount of their genius. However, if we allow even a chink of leniency to dismantle our laws surrounding this issue, then we are  surely serving to put our young and vulnerable at risk?

The Lord of the Dance

At a recent meeting of the Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury broke off from his comments on worldwide Anglican affairs to say that, although it was completely off the subject, we should all try and get to see ‘The Mysteries’ at the Garrick Theatre. Not amongst those who would pass up any suggestion from Rowan, and finding ourselves in London at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine for our annual residential Lincoln Senior Staff meeting, off we went to witness this remarkable production.

‘The Mysteries’ are, in fact, medieval mystery plays, such as are performed all over England to this day. These particular ones originated in Chester, and bear all the hallmarks of that robust and irreverent attitude to the Bible and religion that produced the Canterbury Tales. However, here the similarities to our own homegrown efforts ends: for these Mysteries are performed by black South Africans who have their origins in the most desperately poor and deprived areas of that country. performed in English, Afrikaans and tribal dialects simultaneously, the stories of Creation, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Noah and the flood, the Nativity, the ministry, crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus are all told from the standpoint of the pitilessly poor people of Africa. God is played by a woman: and her ‘glory’ is indicated by her colourful tribal costume. However, soon God is incarnated into Jesus by the simple device of taking off the impressive costume to reveal underneath the rags of a Sowetan peasant. I can think of no more powerful treatise on God’s self-emptying as this.

The show is riven with music, dance and fine oratory: but all the instruments are ones that  found in the township rubbish dumps: oil barrels become drums, corrugated tubing becomes percussion, plastic tubes become trumpets. Satan, portrayed by a young woman, becomes the snake of Eden and the cock which crowed for Peter by the simple expedient of movement.The dance is thoroughly African: joyous and infectious, and the prose is spoken with the hypnotic clicks and ‘tuts’ of tribal dialects. All of these components build up into a mesmerizing and moving rendition of the principles of the Christian Faith: most moving for me was the scene which portrayed the massacre of the innocents (a reality which many of the actors must have been close to if not actively have witnessed): four women clutching bundles of newspapers and straw became madonnas holding babies, and their murder became real in our minds and linked to the real life murders that are taking place all over Africa as we speak.

The whole of Jesus’s ministry was summoned up in one dance: Jesus, the woman, begins the gestures and shimmies of an African dance: slowly, hesitatingly and with many mistakes, the disciples join in and then, finally, get it right and the dance becomes an expression of their unity and purpose as they move in sequence. At the Resurrection, the disciples test themselves out and find that they can still dance!

There was much to take home from all of this, but primarily the deepest feeling that the wisdom of the Christian Faith is not so much to be found in fancy words, persuasive argument, glorious liturgy or academic theology, more in the way we intuitively experience its Truths in the very fabric of existence: in the dance of life.

Perhaps they should make ++Rowan a theatre critic?

All Quiet on the Western Front?

I will soon be off on holiday and this year we have decided to embark upon a long cherished idea for an adventure: we’re off to France, the Somme to be precise, to have a nosy around the First World War sites. We had a brief glimpse as a family some years ago when we spent a night there on route to Spain. I remember with both delight and chagrin my two sons running around the still extant trenches at the Newfoundlanders’ memorial, pretending to shoot each other and die quite dramatically. I was delighted, because my sons were using their imagination to play around a theme that they  knew little about-only the memories of X Box ’shoot ‘em ups’. I felt chagrin, because I ruminated that neither of those two young boys would have been able to run around in such a way had not my own grandfather survived every major campaign of that ghastly war (he was in the Royal Engineers): sometime after his death and a good while before the birth of my sons, I took part in our school play when we enacted ‘Oh What A Lovely War’. The cutting and satirical insights of that play have stayed with me always, and I remain distrustful of believing that every war that we are enagaged in is a righteous one. I am proud of my father’s involvement, as one of the first Commandos, in bringing down the great evil of Nazi fascism. I have less reason to believe that other conflicts that we have been involved in had such a moral authority.

On Monday last I had the great honour and privilege, but also deeply disturbing and challenging duty, of giving the Absolution and Blessing at the funeral of Captain Daniel Shepherd in Lincoln Cathedral.(www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6723889.ece) . A man of 28 years old with a young wife, he was an undoubtedly very brave man, and he deserves our respect and admiration and also our deep regret and sadness at  his loss. He was part of the Explosive Ordance Disposal Regiment and had already defused some fifty makeshift bombs. He was killed whilst trying to defuse just such a bomb.

At his funeral, faced with the pomp and ceremony of the Cathedral and the Military, I had two very different thoughts going through my head: on the one hand, I thought it right that the death of someone so young who died in such a noble way should be marked by the highest and most lavish ceremony possible to express a Nation’s gratitude and regret and to speak of the hope of the Resurrection even in the deepest moments of hopelessness. Daniel’s wife, family and friends all had a right to the best the nation could give them as they laid their loved one to rest: the fallen in battle. On the other hand, my heart went out to Daniel’s close family who experienced the full glare of the media at the funeral and had to cosset their own private grief in the context of a packed and dramatic liturgy. I hope they get all the love and support they will need in months to come when the media spotlight dims and a nation’s mourning moves on to gather around new, fresh graves.

Four more men came home in coffins today, four more generations of young boys and girls who will now not be born. A nation and a grieving family all have the right to ask the question that we should all ask, and the nation should ask, before it embarks upon and then continues conflict: ‘Is it worth it?’ Sometimes, the answer will be ‘yes’ as, I believe, with the Second World War. At other times we will hear the answer which we should have heard before the First World War: ‘No!’ God give us the wisdom to know the difference.

In Monday’s ‘Independent’, a young soldier wrote from Afghanistan about his feelings and experiences. One passage is worth repeating here…

When you read about a ‘very seriously injured’ casualty that person’s life is never going to be the same, nor is it for the rest of their family, who will be sucked in and forever affected by the aftermath.

Sometimes it is as if we, who are not involved, are playing at war like my two sons in those Picardy trenches. The funeral of that young hero, Daniel Shepherd, reminded me that war is no game for the family and friends who are left behind and for the dead who sacrifice precious years-and that we should think hard and long before we play.

Thought for the day

So ‘farewell then Henry Allingham’, one of five survivors of the First World War and, for one glorious month, the oldest man in the world. Putting his longevity down to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women’ he also attributed his great age to ‘trying to be as good as you can’. He seems to have been a wonderful man who lived a wonderful life. Henry died in a strange week for the news: one in which the highly Calvinist Scottish Island of Lewis has been riven down the middle by news that the Caledonian McBrayne Ferry company are going to disturb the sabbath rest by laying on a Sunday ferry. The Kirk is up in arms and there is much quoting of biblical texts taking place. Interestingly, a similar fracas is taking place in France where President Sarkozy has indicated that he wishes to relax the country’s strict Sunday opening laws. Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but do I recall that the arguments around relaxing England’s Sunday trading laws were that unfettered seven day a week consumerism was already being enjoyed on the Continent and that it would be selfish of us not to join in? Yet another lie then to get us to give in to unbridled profiteering. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Sunday trading for religious reasons but because it has had dreadful consequences for the family, has removed one day of the week when we could all think of ‘higher’ things and not have to work and has also enforced seven day working on the most vulnerable in society. Hey ho! It’s off to the Garden Centre we go.

This is also a week in which that most English of pursuits, Thought for the Day, has been questioned and there are serious doubts as to whether it will survive. As English as the Archers and Cricket on the village green, Thought for the Day has given a platform for faith commentators for decades: and I’m with those who would abolish its exclusively faith based nature. For one thing, the easy access of the Church and other faith communities to this unchallenged privilege of airtime has led to some of the most humdrum and platitudiness spouting on faith and religion I have ever heard. Equally, I am dismayed by those who claim such privileges for the Church because they are part of the fabric that continues to make our nation a Christian one. I am very uneasy when society or organisation claims the involvement of the Church because it stresses our ‘Britishness’ and the Church appears subservient to a strange form of patriotism. The Church should be free and unfettered to speak out as and when it likes, even if it is subversive of a prevailing social trait. Likewise, if Thought for the Day were opened up to men and women of all persuasions and understandings, then the Faith communities would have to fight there corner in the marketplace of public opinion. Wouldn’t this mean our contribution to public thought would have to be more robust and thought through than the sentimental drivel we

sometimes endure now?

Besides, if Thought for the Day were opened up to all, then we might hear the wisdom of men like Henry Allingham who said that ‘one of the secrets of old age is not to hang about with too many old people’. Perhaps best of all, we might have heard him say: ‘War’s stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway’.

Dedicated follower of fashion

   Recently, I visited my daughter and grandson in their Cheshire home-not too far away from the residences of certain lavishly rich footballers, but on nothing like the same grandiose scale. When visiting them, I like to go to the local multi-store shopping complex: itself the size of small town, and then I go into the shop that sells Mark’s and Spencer’s clothing and gear. Half an hour later, pushing an excitable baby in a pushchair, we emerge with a good quality T shirt (£6); a pair of black slacks (for everyday wear-£9) and two packs of 10 black socks (‘priests have the blackest socks in the world’-Father Ted. £10). A very satisfactory shopping experience done with, I loiter outside the shop to await my wife and daughter, who have been pursuing an equally impecunious shopping experience in the M&S for women at the other side of the complex. ‘What’s this? I ask myself, looking at the shop to whose window I have my back. ‘A designer clothes shop’ I answer myself. And there were all the designer labels: Armani, Dolce and Gabbana, Lacoste-you name it, they had it, and there was a sale on too! So, for the second time that day, my grandson and I risk life, limb and wallet thickness in a clothes shop.I emerged, blinking, some two minutes later having realised that their idea of a ’sale’ was to sell the exact same T shirt that I brought across the road for £6 for £40!    The difference? A designer label. And this kind of price inflation was repeated for all the clothing-similar slacks to mine-£50! I seriously considered standing for a while and re-directing the poor unsuspecting fools to M&S, but my too often embarrassed (by me) wife and daughter prevented this from happening, and instead gently led my shocked self away explaining that that was what people did in Cheshire: it wasn’t the quality of the clothing that mattered, but that you could demonstrate by wearing ‘the label’ that you were a person of substance and had some money (to burn). Being a Yorkshireman, it took me quite a few days to recover and even now I have moments of withdrawal when I consider contacting the Ombudsman. It seemed to me to be the worse kind of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and a sad indictment of a consumer mad society. Whatever happened to ‘consider the lilies of the field, they neither sow nor spin and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’?

Recently, I read a charming little book entitled ‘The Return of the Economic Naturalist’ by Robert H Frank in which he questions, as an expert, some of our modern understandings of economics: the ‘trickle down theory’, the efficacy of lowering taxes etc. I leave you with a quote…

Social critics in the past have relied mainly on their own personal prejudices about how we might best spend our money. But a large body of scientific literature suggest our recent spending patterns have not served us well. Careful studies show, for example, that when everyone acquires bigger houses and more expensive automobiles, the new higher standards become the norm, with the result that these expenditures yield little satisfaction. Other evidence suggests, however, that the same resources could have been used in ways that bring permanent increases in health and happiness. The time required to earn the money to pay for larger houses, for instance, could be freed up for family and friends, exercise, or longer vacations. …we may call this ‘inconspicious consumption’. Those who spend more on inconspicious consumption are more likely to describe themselves as happy…less likely to seek psychological counselling…attempt suicide. And they are less likely to die or be ill in a any given year.

Where your treasure is there will your hearts be  also?

 

We shall fight them on the beaches…?

In 1994, one of my parishioners asked me whether I would consider accompanying himself and his friends to France on June 6th. His ‘friends’; turned out to be his old Second World War comrades: the ‘Hallams-Fontenay Club’. These old pals, formerly grocers, steelworkers, newsagents and such like, had found themselves drafted into the York and Lancaster Regiment close to the beginning of the end of the war, and became foot soldiers who entered the Normandy invasion in the first week. They saw and experienced many horrors: the massed bodies of some Canadian soldiers in a street corner who had been massacred by the Nazis being most notable. They soon found themselves in a small village north east of Caen called Fontenay le Pesnel; here they dug into their slit trenches and remained under enemy fire for weeks and months. My parishioner, Arthur, had the dread duty of driving a supply wagon to the soldiers at the Front. One of his pals had been killed on the road he used and each day he had to drive over his body; for war does not protect the living let alone the dead. After some months these ordinary lads beat back their unknown enemy (it was only later that they discovered they were a crack Panzer division) and the long slow march to Berlin began.

I was privileged to become their unofficial chaplain, and accompanied them many times on the visits to Normandy with its landing beaches of Sword, Juno, Omaha, Utah and Gold. The ‘mulberry harbours’, floated on barges to create a makeshift haven, are still there to this day as are the many graveyards which mark the last resting place of young boys who simply went to war in their naievity, enthusiasm and fear. They never counted themselves ‘heroes’, it is we who have made them so, and rightly. Many things stand out in my mind about those visits: the first in 1994, when the streets were filled with 1940s vehicles and young people dressed in the uniforms and day clothes of the time. Thereafter, taking another parishioner, whose brother had been killed in Normandy, and whose grave he had never seen. Standing at the side of the grave some 50 years after the soldier’s death with his weeping septuagenarian sibling-still feeling the pain  of loss. Happening, for the first time since the war, upon a cemetery where ‘Hallams’ were buried. Discovering their white grave markers and one of my companions saying: ‘I was with him when he was shot’ and, for me, time conflating as I looked at the inscription on the grave which said ‘18 years old’ as I stood beside his eighty year old comrade in arms. What could have been and what was not? To this day, when I find myself in Caen, I visit the Commonwealth cemetery there and go and say ‘hello’ to ‘Knocker’ Lees, a doughty old sergeant and boxer in civilian life, who befriended a small, frightened young soldier. ‘Knocker’ was killed in the first few hours on French soil and he died at his young friend’s side. That young friend was amongst our party in 1994 and made me promise that, should anything happen to him, I would visit his mentor and protector whenever I could.

However, two incidents stand out for me as very important: once, when returning home from France, we got into Portsmouth and, whilst we sat on the coach, witnessed an Asian port attendant being racially abused: one of our men shouted out ‘oi-no racism!’. Another time, I conducted a memorial service in a cemetery which contained both British and German dead. I chanced my arm, and nervously suggested that we pray for the enemy dead as well as our own, in the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. As one man almost, they whispered:  ’of course, we must’. These were the real heroes of the Second World War and they adequately demonstrated the values for which they fought and would havedied and which the BNP and others tell us we must recover. The values and the Britain they fought and died for were those which accepted and honoured the stranger, the foreigner and the different into their midst rather than set them in concentration camps. The values they fought and died for were forgiveness and the desire for the peace and unity of humanity-exactly opposite to those values the BNP dress up as virtues. The election of BNP members to the EU is a blemish on the conscience of the British people and it is a slur and an insult to those men of the Hallams Fontenay Club. Perhaps now the real battle for the soul of the nation begins?

At what expense?

 Wednesday was a good day, one of those days which serves to convince that the life and work of a bishop is probably the best you can have. I was invited to visit a church school: St Peter’s and St Paul in Lincoln.  ‘Nothing unusual about that’ I hear you say, but it was ‘unusual’ because the school is a Roman Catholic foundation, and I was the first Anglican bishop to ever go there. So, the usual round of bishopy things ensued, and all great fun: first of all a round table meeting with the Governors who welcomed, as I did, a different faith viewpoint, then a trip into the church next door for school assembly, followed by a tour around the school, a ‘grilling’ from the School Council (we have nothing to fear in replacing certain present day MPs, any one of these youngsters would fit the bill, and honestly), then a wonderful meal prepared by parishioners and, finally, a visit to the excellent gym facilities and to meet children from the RC feeder primary school. I was then disgorged out into the street with grateful thanks for my visit and a hatful of lovely memories. 

But it is to the meal I want to return: for I sat with four young men in school uniform, who were attentive to this funny bishop and made charming and witty conversation. ‘Nothing strange about that’ I hear you say again, and again I reply that it was different because these four ardent scholars were Muslims and Afghani refugees. As I talked to these boys of fifteen or sixteen, I was made aware that they had fled the Taliban in their home country and that, although they had family back home, they had no idea whether they were alive or dead or where they were. One young boy had witnessed his father being executed apparently. It brings you up sharp doesn’t it, and it was if time stood still and the world zoomed in on us as I listened to their stories, which they told with trusting smiles on their faces? In the middle of the benign setting of a Catholic school and lovely Lincolnshire, I was being regaled with tales of such horror that my heart recoiled and I realised just what it can mean when forces of power within any country become corrupt and dishonest or extremist in any form.

It is for this reason, that I am optimistic about the expenses scandal, because it demonstrates that, whilst we have certain individuals in government who seem patently dishonest and self-seeking, the British electorate still expect impeccable  behaviour from those with whom they entrust power. Despite the very real threat that the BNP and others will make capital out of this debacle, surely our people have demonstrated their good sense and their desire for honest incorruptibility: could such a people entrust power to foul extremists?

The Church-BNP at prayer?

 It becomes increasingly evident that the British Nationalist Party is endeavouring to identify its cause with that of the Church’s: on the one hand a recent advertisement for the Party had the audacity to compare their ‘persecution’ with that of Christ and, now, the Church of England Newspaper reports that the morning worship of a Norfolk Village Church was ‘descended’ upon by a BNP delegation ‘including a Church of England Vicar’ citing  ‘The Rev Robert West, who ministers at a church in Holbeach, Lincolnshire’. For the avoidance of doubt, can I emphasise that Mr West is  not an Anglican and has no connection with any Church of England church in Lincolnshire. Indeed, the leadership of all the major denominations within the County has recently issued a statement denouncing extremist political policies and those which encourage racism and social division. What’s their game then?

Recently, Nick Griffin the Chairman of the BNP was asked to define the ‘Britishness’ that he seeks to defend and believes is under attack. Broadly-and it was ‘broadly’ -he suggested that it was Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and North European. In addition, it has been repeatedly claimed that people of black ethnic origin can have no claim to ‘Britishness’. Well I believe there is plenty of evidence now to suggest, through our ability to do genetic mapping, that each of us is a complicated mixture of material from all over the world: on a recent television programme, an outwardly entirely white person was found to have black African ancestry and a cursory look at the programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ will serve to convince us that origin and ethnicity are very complicated things indeed.  So, where do we stop? Is someone ‘British’ if their grandparents were born here? Or what about great grandparents or great, great grandparents? How many of us would find ourselves subject to ‘voluntary repatriation’  if we were rigorous about our own racial mix?

But, of course, it’s not about trying to preserve Britishness, but about instilling fear and anxiety into people-and playing on their natural anxieties-so that the BNP appear to be the instant answer to all our problems. The spokespeople of the BNP suggest that they are not a racist party at all but that they are simply defending ‘Britishness’  in the same way that the ethnic groups in our society seek to continue and maintain their ancient ways of life and culture. The difference is that Britain is the context in which these different cultures exist and try to maintain identity. ‘Britishness’ is not one definable way of life, struggling to survive amongst many other ways of life, it is the background to a multi-faceted, multifarious society: if there is such a thing as ‘Britishness’ then, it is in our national ability, throughout many hundreds of years, to welcome, encompass and protect the newcomer and the foreigner, who then become proud to be British. Put another way: the South Yorkshire steelworker has as little or as much in common culturally with a Surrey stockbroker as does a Seikh with a Muslim, and as little agreement on what it means to be British: what they do have in common is our culture of living together with difference. This is ‘Britishness’. 

It is good that the present Pope has visited Israel and the Holocaust memorial. His position on far right politics has been, to say the least, painted as unclear, but he was able to say at Yad Vashem: ‘The Church is committed to praying and working tirelessly to ensure that hatred will never reign in the hearts of men(sic) again’. Hatred begins when we are unprepared to live together with those from whom we differ but, instead, try to banish those who are not like us. And hatred leads to the Holocaust.

The BNP saw fit to quote Our Lord in their advertisement, so I see fit to quote one of his greatest followers, St Paul: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’.  Let’s bear that in mind when we vote.

Hillsborough Disaster recalled-lest we forget

The jumble sale was just finishing in the church hall, so I wandered back to the Vicarage for a cuppa. Along the way, one of my parishioners stopped me and said ‘there’s been some trouble at the Wednesday ground, someone’s got killed’. I could hear the constant doppler effect sound of the ambulances on the top road which ran between Hillsborough at the bottom of my parish and the Northern General Hospital at the top. I put the television on in the lounge: ‘there’s been a problem at the match between Liverpool and Notts Forest. As many as six people may have been killed’. It was about 3.05, by 3.08 the projected numbers of dead being announced was 20; then thirty…then forty.

In common with a number of my clerical colleagues, I judged it was now time to make my way down to the hospital where the dead football fans and those who had been injured, and any attendant friends, family and well-wishers were being transported. I entered the hospital to complete chaos, a chaos which was being added to by the minute as new dead and dying were brought in. Everywhere was wailing, shouting and mayhem.

Over the next hour, some semblance of order descended as the injured were put in beds and the friends and relatives were rounded up in the staff canteen: the ‘holding area’. Being before the invention of mobile ‘phones, hundreds of confused, frightened and hysterical people were trying to get use of the four public ‘phones: many without proper change or unable to get telephone numbers. I managed to get hold of a hospital official and arrange for a number of office ‘phones to be released for free use and organised something of a waiting order to use them.

By 8 o’clock that night, the mortuary in Hillsborough’s gym had been set up, and a station set up for the grieving families in the local Medico-Legal Center. All that could be done at the hospital had been done so, together with others, I made my way to the ground for further instructions. The Archdeacon of Sheffield had done a brilliant job organising the clergy: we were each to meet one family coming from Merseyside and accompany them to the Medico-Legal Center and then to the ground to identify their loved ones. I met my ‘family’ back at the Hospital: I had been told and assured by officials that they would be informed of their son’s possible death before they arrived. I met them at the hospital step and introduced myself as the one designated to take them through ‘the process’. They had not been informed, and the mother sank to her knees in grief and  horror: they had clung to the idea that they would find their boy alive all the way from Liverpool.

The family came with me in my small sporty car: cramped and grief-stricken. Not knowing the whereabouts of the Medico-Legal Center, I stopped to ask a passer-by: this being Saturday night in Sheffield, he was drunk and tried to force his way into the car. I drove off, eventually finding the place, and there we sat for three or so hours as endless shift after endless shift of families were rounded up, put onto coaches and driven to Hillsborough to find out, one way or another, what had happened to their loved one or ones. Interminable amounts of powdered tea in plastic cups later, it was our turn and we climbed onto the coach, which was entirely silent for the whole of the half hour drive.

Arriving at the ground, we were placed in a queue which led to the double doors of the gymnasium. At the end of the corridor were two notice boards with Polaroid photos of the deceased blu-tacked to them. As a person was identified, the photo was quickly snatched away by a police officer and taken so that the body could be prepared for identification. As we reached the notice boards, we were required to look at all the photos that remained until, at dreadful last, my ‘family’s’ son’s likeness was identified. For the second time, the mother sank to her knees desperately clawing at the photo and notice board as she fell. As we stood there, in this queue of horror, my family were dealing with their own, newly gouged grief, whilst having to listen to the anguished wailings of those who had identified the photos of their loved ones before us and the howls of those through the double doors who were presently identifying their next of kin. As we entered the gym, we saw first an ashen faced young police officer standing to attention at the side of every shrouded body. The young boy we saw was my family’s son. We were escorted to another room where the formalities were taken care of and I left my family then, in the care of social workers and others.

I got home early in the morning and went up to the bedroom with the Spring sunlight slanting through the drawn curtains. My wife got out of bed and wrapped her arms around me as I wept for the first time that night, and thought of my own two young football fan sons lying alive and asleep in the next room.

About three weeks later, my ‘family’ requested that I meet them at Hillsborough and walk around the pitch with them. I did so, and the father, attempting cheeriness, ribbed me about the lack of silverware in the Owl’s trophy cabinet. Then we walked on to ‘West Lower’ where the tragedy happened, and there were the stout, tubular steel stanchions and barriers, bent like paper clips wires into crazy shapes and angles: contorted in the crush by frail human bodies. I have never seen ‘my family’ since, but there is never a home match goes by at Hillsborough that I do not look across from my seat on the Kop, with my vivacious and alive boys at my side, and remember the night when, for those terribly afflicted Hillsborough Disaster families, my football club’s ground: my ‘theatre of dreams’ ,became for them,and for us all, a cauldron of nightmares.

There are many issues that arise out of the Disaster: the position of the Police; the fenced in football ground with standing provision only; the lack of a disaster policy and strategy; the disgraceful behaviour of some of the media and the genuine kindness of the local people of Hillsborough who helped the victims on the night, and took many into their homes. But one issue that remains is that 96 innocent people, who had arrived early at the ground and sober, died at a football match.

May they rest in peace and rise in glory: and may the justice their families call for, be theirs.