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.

Happy Easter!

Alleluia! He is risen!

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Speak to us of life

Last Saturday, my wife and I fulfilled a long cherished ambition: for her it was a visit to Stonehenge and, for me, it was Salisbury Cathedral. Stonehenge holds a place in the heart and mind of most English people primarily, I think, because its raison d’etre is totally unknown. There it stands in all its primeval loveliness, and yet no-one truly knows why. Why did our forebears five thousand years ago go to the extent of carting those massive ‘blue’ stones from southern Wales? Why were the stones arranged in such a way as to catch the early morning sun on the solstice? Why was the site so important in ancient times that many wanted to be buried for eternity in the barrows which litter the skyline around the monument? Save for the possibility of some revelatory archaelogical find, we perhaps shall never know, but surely its purpose must have been in some way ‘religious’? One gem of wisdom struck me from the, very useful and full, audio guide: ‘perhaps Stonehenge was a religious site, perhaps a scientific one designed to explain the movement of the stars and planets, perhaps it was both, as the scientific world and religious world were not compartmentalised as they are today’. In the unhealthy competition between science and faith today, a little ancient wisdom of approach could be beneficial. We also visited the Avebury Circle, which is both bigger and, in many ways, more impressive than Stonehenge. One can only wonder as to why the one is more visited than the other? Perhaps sight-seeing ( or should that be site-seeing) is just as subject to fad and fashion as internal decor etc.

Salisbury Cathedral is, frankly, superb, and was a fitting arena for the excellent Palm Sunday liturgy we attended. Apart from the very English and apologetic procession of the palms from the Green, complete with out of step and soto voce hymn singing which occasioned nervous giggling in the ranks, the service was the very epitome of what is great and good about our Cathedral worship: dramatic, solemn and dignified with excellent music and, above all, fun! How wise of the Cathedral Canons not to preach on this day of all days, when the drama of the Passion story speaks for itself. In their separate ways, both Stonehenge and the Cathedral sum up something about the human spirit that cannot and will not be denied: an inextinguishable desire for the divine and eternal in life. Both stand as testimonies to humanity’s desire to set existence and its big questions in a transcendental setting. There is so much that would seek to negate this in life today, and yet all around we are faced with mankind’s dramatic and extravagant expressions of belief in, and desire for, the eternal. I thought of the excellent book by Peter C Morea called: ‘Finding God in Human Psychology’. Simply put, his thesis is that the very existence of a ‘God shaped hole’ in our psyche suggests that our yearnings for the divine and for eternal meaning are evidence for a God who is the ground of our existence. Morea’s scientific approach nicely complements the Collect’s words: ‘our hearts are restless ’til they find their rest in Thee’.

In this Holy Week: a great construct designed to centre us on the great hope of Resurrection, I offer you a quote from Morea’s book by Boethius ( a philosopher of the 6th Century):

The study of personality suggests that human potential will be fully actualised and complete happiness experienced only in the vision of God in eternal life: the endless, total, simultaneous and perfect possession of life.

Summit summat

A couple of weeks ago, I was struck by an article in my daily read: The Independent. It was a comment on the growing threat of climate change (The Independent have been ratcheting up their rather scary stories about the cataclysm that is to come in advance of the G2 summit-to good effect, I think)-’nothing wrong there’ you say, ‘a good job too’. Well, I agree, but what struck me was the reason the writer gave for addressing changes in the climate: it was because dramatic weather changes would ultimately affect the ability of the big companies to make and maintain profit. There we have it, baldly put: we don’t want to address this terrible problem because of the South Sea islands that will be washed away; because of the villages in India that will suffer flash floods or because of the risk of adding to the millions of  people throughout the world who already suffer from malnutrition, drought and appalling living standards. No, not even the thought that we may pass on to future generations a home planet denuded of fine and exotic animal species and an atmosphere filled with toxic waste, is as important as ensuring that the profit motive is maintained.

Throughout history, there are philosophical paradigms that hold the consciousness of the those who wield power in our world. On many occasions it was/is the desire to wield political overlordship over as much of the Earth’s surface as possible-sometimes for power’s sake alone. On other occasions, power was wielded by those who engaged the spiritual and religious hopes and fears of humanity. On very few occasions has the international will been held by a desire for peace, justice, equity and, dare I say it, love. Perhaps the only time we can truly say these motives surfaced was with the creation of the United Nations and it’s charitable arms such as UNICEF, or perhaps with the IMF. If you couple this chase for profit and self-interest with the burgeoning secularist and athiest agenda-which surely posits, if nothing else, the idea that there is actually no ultimate meaning of any eternal significance at all, and therefore ’spiritual’ qualities such as love, hope and faith are the muffled garblings of those crazy people who believe in an imaginary friend-then we have a recipe, in my view, for a very bleak future for humanity.

Perhaps, the idea that the profit motive is the supreme motive and is what ‘makes the world go round’ is a battle that has already been lost. Will we compound this dreadful mistake by giving into the secularist and athiest agenda as well, which is chipping away at our souls? I recall the words of St Thomas More to Richard Rich: ‘Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…but for Wales!’

Watch the deliberations of the G20 summit carefully, and let’s see for ourselves what motives and aspirations moltivate them.

Precious Jade

When I was a young Vicar of 27 in Salford, I was asked to visit a parishioner who was sick-very sick as it turned out. Typical of that intensely poor and needy area in the 1980s, the girl I visited was very ordinary and a real child of a deprived urban area. Poverty and deprivation were endemic in Salford and this had been protrayed in Walter Greenwood’s novel ‘Love in the Dole’: actually a harrowing story about the parish I was serving. When building a new church in the neighbouring parish, the architect had noticed that the local people seemed to be shorter in stature than the average, so he measured all the congregation from the base of their heel to the back of their knees. He found, on average, that the population was some two inches shorter in this region than elsewhere-the legacy of decades of under-nourishment, poor diet, bad air and much else. He made the pews two inches shorter!  After a fire broke out on the top floor of a local block of flats and someone died, I remember commenting at Diocesan Synod that ‘not even the ladders on the fire engines are sufficient in Salford’. My new friend (shall we call her Susan?) was a product of this environment. She was the ’salt of the earth’ and ‘called a spade a spade’. There were no fancy conversations about Proust or Shakespeare, just down to earth conversations about the things that really matter: home, family, kids, the price of lager. In many ways she was a northern version of Jade Goody. But that is not where the similarity stops; for Susan was dying of cervical cancer and, even in her mortal illness, she continued to be abused: her husband left her and initiated a cruel and malicious court case to take her children from her. Then, as now, it is questionable whether those who cared for her medically acted swiftly or acurately enough. To add insult to injury, she took to going back to the church where she had attended as a child. There she was told that her illness was punishment for her sins by God and that, if her prayer was sincere and effective, she would have been cured. Not giving up on the cruel Church, the family resorted to me and I ‘cared’  pastorally for Susan during the final twelve months of her life.

At times, despite my sincere sadness for her plight, I found supporting Susan hard: she was the same age as me (27), had two kids the same age as mine and she enjoyed many of the simple pleasures I enjoyed-a drink on a Friday night with friends, a laugh and a joke. It was like looking in a mirror and, gradually, I began to realise that what had happened tragically to Susan could happen just as easily to me. How I hated those ‘Christians’ who had suggested that this outrage of an illness had happened at such a young age to someone with two dependent children because God willed it. Eventually, I began to look at my own children with the same sorrow I looked at hers and it was as if the misery of her condition was infecting my body too. When she died and at her funeral, I tried to speak of this ordinary, sometimes bawdy, vivacious victim as if she was the most important person that ever lived because, for her mother and father, for her children and for God-she was.

I thought of Susan when Jade Goody died. This other victim of early abuse and neglect, of a poor and deprived childhood and of a societal inability to recognise her need and nurture her, was also just an ordinary person. But of course ‘ordinary’ is funny to most people: her inability to pronounce ‘East Anglia’ (it became East Angular) and her belief that Liverpool was a foreign country with its own currency, all of these were held up to shameless public ridicule. There were those who shamelessly exploited her and, although she became very rich through their shenanigans, made gain out of her mishaps and malapropisms. To the end, her life was surrounded by intrigue and the media gaze as we all professed to care and to be compassionate: fickle and shallow beings that we are.

But the Susans and the Jades of this world are not extraordinary in the accepted sense of this materialist world, they are ‘ordinary’ and they are an integral part of our society. In every parish I have worked in, the people have had more in common with Susan and Jade than with the chattering classes who treat them as entertainment. They are the people that we send to war on our behalf as cannon fodder; they are those that we send down our mines or into the desert heat of our steel works; they are the ones who are condemned to feel the white heat of a recession first as they watch others receive great riches as a reward for their neglect and mismanagement of our financial affairs; they are the ones who are left in ‘failing’ schools because more academically able children with aspirational parents are jacking up the league tables in the more popular and successful schools. They are the common man and, but for fortune, they are you  and me.

The lesson we have to learn from the everyday death of a very ordinary woman like Jade Goody is that, in fact, she and all those like her, are actually quite extra-ordinary. And why? It is because they survive, with good grace and great courage, all that life and the rest of us can throw at them and still take time to think that life is good. One of the last last things that Susan said to me was ‘look after my parents, won’t you’. Almost the last thing that Jade did was get baptised and married and have her children christened too. Both signs of great hope that life is not ulimately useless and meaningless, but is a great, precious and wonderful gift and not at all ‘ordinary’.

May she rest in peace and rise in glory.

Lost memories of Alzheimer’s

This weekend, as every weekend, I paid a visit to my 90 year old mother who is in a care home in Sheffield. She has Alzheimer’s disease. Looking back, my family and I could see the signs of its early onset around the time she was sixty years old: bewildering little lapses of memory or odd actions which defied explanation. Well, now, some thirty years later, all has become clear and we know that this dreadful illness was beginning to grip her. As a younger woman, she was intelligent, lively and had a keen interest in life. It was from her that I inherited my own fascination with ancient buildings, particularly churches, and, on trips out into the country in our Morris Minor, we would be treated to a running commentary about the history of this stately home or that tiny country church: tales often peppered with stories about the unusual: ‘Why is there a human skull in the lychgate at Cantley?’

Her sickness began slowly, as always, and then accelerated in her 70s: I would be ‘phoned a couple of times a week by her asking me to come and get rid of this awful stranger who would not leave the house: the ’stranger’ was my father, to whom she had been married for fifty years and with whom she had enjoyed a devoted and deeply loving relationship: she simply could not recognise him. Eventually, she suffered dehydration and was hospitalised. We were told in no uncertain terms that she could not return home, as my father could not cope with her and also with the stroke he himself had endured. So, Mom was put in a care home and we had the distressing experience of being followed to the double doors every time we left: after we exited, she would be seen crying with an uncomprehending and distressed look on her face. Over the years, this bright and once very lovely lady, has successively ‘progressed’ from fanciful talk to gibberish and, now, to falling entirely silent. She can no longer walk and can imbibe only drinks and very soft blended foods. She has not been able to recognise me or any of the family for about eight years and, as the weight drops of her, she simply gazes out of the window to the only source of sensation she can appreciate: sunlight.

There are compensations in this dread disease: she was entirely unware of my father’s death, an event which she anticipated with foreboding and fear. Instead, she believed the day of his funeral to be a jolly outing with some vaguely familiar people: the funereal baked meats a family party. However, the overwhelming experience is of futility as you watch a much loved person robbed, not only of their physical and mental capabilities, but of the memories and communication that made them ‘them’ to you. There is a very real sense in which my mother died many years ago, leaving behind a barely recognisable husk.

There are profound theological issues at play here: what makes a human being what they are? Is it memory? If so, is Mom less of a human being than she once was? What happens when quality of life becomes so poor that death would be a better option? Are we to simply carry on caring for the body when all that made the person recognisably ‘them’ has departed? And, ultimately, where is God in all this? Experiencing Alzheimer’s, at the very least, requires a re-structuring of what we mean when we talk about a loving and provident deity.

So you may ask me whether I would consider euthansia in these circumstances. From my present vantage point, my answer would be ‘no’. Aside from the moral and ethical difficulties which surround the matter of the clinical taking of human life (the possibility that it is open to abuse; the position it puts physicians in; decisions about the stage at which we can deem that life is not worth living. etc) I believe that my mother is at one and the same time displaying the humanity and ‘creatureliness’ that reminds us that we are human and created and not divine and undegenerate: and is also still on the very human road to the perfection for which we are destined.  Mother’s ’soul’ is the total summation of all that she has been, all that she is, all that she is to be and all that she could be: and it is this true ‘her’ that we now tend and care for in her final days. As weak and as diminished as she is, her humanity still deserves respect and honour. It is for that reason that my weekly visits to her bedside, as conversationless and dispiriting as they are, are of immense importance.