Wednesday ’til I die

 Sitting on the Kop at Sheffield Wednesday last week, one of the guys who I sit near to tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘read your blog the other day-too much religion, not enough football’. I couldn’t agree more my friend, so here it is…

I’ve been an on/off follower of the Owls all my life: when my mother went into a care home, I found a letter I wrote to her when she was in hospital having given birth to my younger brother (who also comes to the match with me) 45 years ago. I was ten, and it reads ‘I hope he’s a Wednesdayite!’  In the early 90s, my son wanted to go to the football regularly, and my brother used to take him. One fateful night, he couldn’t make it so I was drafted in to accompany the boy to the Wednesday playing Bolton Wanderers. We won 4-1, I was hooked again, and I’ve missed very few home games since.

It was Bill Shankly who was reported to have said (mistakenly actually) that ‘football isn’t a matter of life or death, it’s much more important than that’. What is it that makes, ordinarily sane and quite sensible, people follow this fickle game? True, there is a sense of comradeship, of sharing high emotion with like-minded people. There is the ‘Coronation Street’ factor: you keep going Saturday by Saturday because, if you miss and episode, you don’t know what’s happening. There’s the tradition: my grandfather and father were both Wednesdayites, and so, like the passing on of a baptismal shawl, we keep the tradition going today. And there’s the ecstasy: yes it’s true that 99% of football is disappointment (yes, even for Manchester United fans), but the 1% is pure living and joy: an excitement with which you can live for days, or even weeks. In the end, we also know that we rarely experience the height of human physical achievement at its most balletic as when David Hirst escaped the off-side trap, slipped past two defenders and slotted a pin-perfect shot into the bottom right hand corner. Sublime!

Make no mistake, we football fans are aware of the downside: we know how sad we look to others who simply can’t understand why our emotional life is ruled by whether our team wins or loses. We know that we have been corralled into that section of the public psyche marked ‘hooligan’, ‘cultureless moron’ and ‘foul mouthed idiot’, but we simply don’t care, for this collective foolishness is reserved for the stadium and we return to being the sensible, upright members of society we really are once we leave the ground. And when we count up what the tickets for the game, plus two for the kids, the hamburger, tea and programme have actually cost us, we wince a little and then shrug, knowing that in those two 45 minute halves of football we have experienced more human emotion in one week than most people manage in a year.

And then there’s ‘the crack’: there isn’t a man or woman in the ground who doesn’t believe they would be a better tactician than the present manager: substitutions; formations; set-pieces and player assessments all reverberate around the ground before, during and after the match: the intellectual input of the crowd. And,  you will rarely hear anything as side-splittingly funny as the casual comments of the people sitting by you. Classic cases in my memory are when the trumpeter in our Kop band imitated an ambulance siren as the St John Ambulance men waggled on to the pitch with a stretcher: the time when Ravenelli (the ‘white feather) missed a sitter and the guy behind shouted ‘Nar  then Ravenelli, tha’t a disgrace to all white-haired people’ or, funniest of all, at half time, when reading our programmes, David Hirst was knocking up and struck the ball onto the Kop, knocking a mobile ‘phone four rows out of someone’s hands. The same guy said ‘I knew they were mobile ‘phones, but I didn’t know they were that ****** mobile!’

And then there’s the derbies! My home town of Sheffield is divided into two halves: one blue and white (us!) and the other red and white (them). When we play each other, the ground seethes with partisan dislike and venom, and the winner gets ‘bragging rights’ until the next time. Then, after the passion, the blood and the spit, we all return quietly to work in our offices and factories, next door to the guy in red and white. It’s tribal but its fun, and it means a lot.

Last year, when he was a year old, I took my grandson to his first match. He was wearing the mini kit bought for him by his uncles, and he sat mesmerised throughout a chilly and boring encounter. It all starts again…

Up the Owls, mate!

Nuts! Whole hazel nuts!

Roger Carr, the Chairman of Cadbury’s, has admitted that job cuts and redundancies are ‘an inevitability’ following the American firm Kraft’s takeover of this, highly British, business institution. ‘Nothing wrong with that’ I hear you say, ‘takeovers are happening all the time and, indeed, Britain itself is involved in the economic existence of other nations and owns companies abroad’. Well, that’s true, but just let’s examine what might really be at stake here and what is about to be lost.

Cadbury’s, as we all know, was founded by a family who followed the Quaker credo. George Cadbury, the founder, was a  ’classic Victorian philanthropist’ who wanted to create an enterprise in which the individual worker was valued and prized. So, the venture spawned one of the first Garden Suburbs at Bournville (still a gracious and very human place to live, like Port Sunlight and New Earswick in York). Here, the factory workers enjoyed unprecedented space and light in their homes and a standard of living that was unparallelled at the time. Sharing in the profit making business in this way involved them all in its future prosperity: they became empowered and engaged, and therefore, presumably, happier and more fulfilled.  Over the years, this ethos has been continued, and present day workers speak poignantly about the business: ‘it represented something big, British and powerful’ and, of its sale, ‘this is the saddest day of the decade’. As we speak, local people in Bournville fear for the loss of the village fete, youth and sporting activities, the swimming pool and park: just some of the local infrastructure supported by the Company.

And what’s sad about it? What’s sad is that, once again, a high moral and ethical ideal in the conduct of big business has been sacrificed for the naked profit of a group of individuals. What’s ironic about it? What’s ironic is that Cadbury’s, because of its pursuit of ethical and moral modes of commerce, is a vastly more successful and profitable concern than Kraft. What’s worrying? What’s worrying is that all of this, in the present climate of the western world, can be justified openly and that there can be an frank admission that people will lose their jobs, their livelihoods and their way of life.

It’s nuts! And it’s one more example of how the moral compass may have been lost, and we are all the prey of globalised business, with no concern for local communities or people and a seeming default mandate to pursue profit for profit’s sake without having to worry about the effect it has having on real people in real communities.

It’s nuts, whole hazel nuts!

A fresh year

My New Year’s message recorded for Radio Lincolnshire…Happy New Year…!

The great eastern philosopher and poet, Kahlil Gibran, wrote these words about children: Their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. As we stand on the threshold of a new year, we know that what this new year holds, like the souls of children, is in the house of tomorrow, which we cannot visit. There are some things of which we will be able to be certain as we look into the future: our continued love for our families, the need to provide for them and ensure their safety, the knowledge that there will be both good and bad things happen to us but, for the most part, the events of the coming year and how they will affect us are a mystery yet to be revealed. This, in itself, is a cause for rejoicing for, despite the human beings craving for safety and certainty, the gradual unfolding and revealing of the events of our lives is what makes them so exciting as each day brings new things, new opportunities: fresh experiences of life.

 

On one level then, we will not know whether the tacit agreements to stabilise the climate of our planet will finally be ratified and become agreed actions by the leaders of the nations. We do not know what the outcome of any General Election will be or whether our Service men and women will continue to fight and risk their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Neverthless, leadership is about having a vision and understanding that, although the future is yet to be revealed, there are many ways in which we can influence what is to happen and ways in which we can make the things happen that we wish to see. In recent years, the energies of governments, it seems to me, have been expended in ‘tinkering around the edges’ of life: a few million more or less for the National Health Service, for Education, for the old, for the unemployed, and all of this balanced against the wishes of the tax-payer and comfortable Britain. The days of the grand vision, when we all believed ourselves to be involved in a saga of life in which we were creating a better world, with better conditions for all and a world free of hunger, fear and war, these days seem now to be in the ‘house of yesterday’ and we bicker about the small things.

 

In his acceptance speech on receiving his Noble Peace Prize, Barak Obama once more held out the grand vision: the belief that the house of tomorrow could be a better, fairer, juster place when he said…

 

The one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature…. If we lose that faith-if we dismiss is as silly or naïve, if we divorce it form the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace-then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass. So let us reach out for the world that ought to be-that spark of the divine which still stirs within each our souls. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war and still strive for peace. We can do that-for that is the story of human progress.

 

The one thing that we can be certain of about ‘the house of tomorrow’ is that if there is no love, and the action that flows out of love, then it will be a very cold house indeed.  If there is the belief that, in working in love, we can change the world into something better-and dare I say more divine-that will, indeed, be a house worth living in.

 

 

Lonely this Christmas?

As I set off for a Carol Service at Swarby this afternoon, the snow was coming down in huge wedges, almost blotting out the road and sky. The little country lanes were treacherous, but eventually I made it to this delightful little ancient church and was warmed to see it full of young and old alike. We sang carols merrily, heard those evocative stories of the first Christmas and ‘oohed and aahed’ just a little bit as the youngsters played guitars, read funny verses and cheered after every carol (a small baby girl at the back!). This is what Christmas is about, I thought.

I then got in the car to make the journey to a, by now dark, dank and extremely cold, Lincoln. To the church of St Mary le Wigford to be exact, where Lincoln U2charist is housed. Each sunday night, the church hall plays host to about eighty or so homeless people and Liz Jackson, the animator of the project, organised a full Christmas meal tonight. There were some twenty volunteer helpers, all dressed up in tinsel and Santa Claus hats, to greet the men and women who came in for, perhaps, the first warmth of the day. They are a very mixed bunch of people: some smartly dressed, others bedraggled and wet and in clothes that have seen many Christmasses. There are very young and very old, and the air in the hall seemed to go tangibly colder and damper as they moseyed in. The evening began with an air of diffidence and a quietness and reserve brought on by having to brave the unpleasant conditions. As the tea and coffee warmed our clients, and the soup, turkey, trifle and mince pies invigorated their hearts, there began to be chatter and some laughter in the air. It doesn’t take much to resurrect people. The men and women were entertained royally by John Allison (who sang the UK’s most succesful ever Eurovision entry in 1961-check him out on YouTube-

 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY4vSvQbnO&feature=related ), who pops in most weeks, and then the Salvation Army Band struck up the familiar chords of Christmas. This was a raggle-taggle cross-section of humanity, but to a man and woman grateful for the experience whether server or served.

There are increasing numbers of people sleeping rough in Lincoln: there is a Polish tent village by the river, others sleep in doorways or shed or garage, others ’sofa surf’. A young man and woman I talked to had been evicted and were sleeping on an old mattress under Pelham Bridge; ‘the rains alright, said the man, but the snow blows under the bridge-we’re forever wet and cold’. Official counts put the numbers of people sleeping rough as very low: those who work with them set the numbers very much higher. If you are homeless, you cannot receive mail, save money or keep possessions safe. The low self -esteem brought on my homelessness can lead to self harm, drug and drink abuse, depression and crime. If you have no home to look forward to, you cannot get yourself out of the downward spiral: this, quite pleasant and ordinary looking couple, were in just such a spiral and can see no way out. There are many reasons why people become homeless, but those who know tell us that mental illness, substance abuse and relationship breakdown are the main causes.

I write about this now to highlight the fact that the problem of homelessness is not getting better, far from it-it is getting worse, and the victims are largely unseen, unrecognised and unloved by the rest of society. There is something that can be done immediately and effectively: BeAttitude (the offshoot of U2charist Lincoln that works with the homeless-follow the U2charist link to the right) could do with any clothes that will help the men and women keep warm: offers of financial support will help us feed them regularly and well, and a thought for the homelessness when you come to vote this next year might help as well.

My afternoon showed me that there are quite definitely two sides to Christmas, and two sides to our society. There will be a service in Lincoln Cathedral on 31st January at 6pm, when all the churches of Lincoln come together to focus on the plight of the homeless. Come along!

The new fascism?

The Ugandan government is considering passing a new law which will criminalize homosexual behaviour and punish it with very severe penalties. Anyone who is aware of someone who is gay will be given 24 hours to ’shop’ that person, or they themselves will be prosecuted. Attempts at homosexual encounter will be punishable with life imprisonment. Those who engage in repeated active homosexual behaviour will be executed.

Now I don’t think it matters which side of the great divide you stand on this one, whether you approve of homosexuality or not, whether you think it is an innate state of being or not, whether you think it is condemned in the Bible or not, whether you support gay clergy and bishops or not. Whatever your standpoint, surely this one is a ‘no-brainer’ and is tantamount to legalizing the kind of fascist behaviour that characterised the concentration camps of Second World War Germany.

It doesn’t take an Archbishop to tell us this is wrong, or to speak out on our behalf. It just takes a halfway decent person with an ounce of right-thinking. It is with deep regret that we learn that one bishop, Joseph Abura of Karamoja, actually supports the proposed law: goodness only knows what Bible he is reading or what Jesus he is a disciple of!

I am sure that your representations about this Bill will be heard through Amnesty International. Join now! www.amnesty.org.uk

Mother shall I build a wall? (with apologies to Pink Floyd)

In the summer of 1985, I was invited, along with other Further Education College chaplains, to go to Berlin and investigate their comprehensive and very effective chaplaincy set up. I was billeted, with a violinist from the Berlin Philarmonie, in a grand old second floor apartment of a large ‘Victorian’ (or whatever the German equivalent is!) town house, replete with creaky wire mesh encased lift and flamboyant plaster mouldings on the ceilings. It was in the days before the Berlin Wall came down, and our initial forays were to see the Ka De We (a department store, so dripping with opulence and all the goods the western world could offer that it faintly stirred one’s conscience, and called in full the ‘kaufhaus des Westens’) and thereafter some of the better known ’sites’ of the Second World War, including a pig slaughterhouse in which thousands of dissident Poles were massacred in one night; the Jewish synagogue which was at the centre of ‘Krystalnacht’, the destructive attack which heralded the beginning of the persecution of the Jews and the Spandau Castle in which the sad figure of Rudolf Hess was imprisoned until his death.

After three days of experiencing the extravagant riches of the West, we travelled by U-Bahn (underground railway) into East Berlin to meet with some young Lutheran Christians. We were conscious straight away of the difference that the Berlin Wall symbolised: here, in the East, the buildings were un-reconstructed from the war period and shell holes still pocked the walls. There were few goods, if any, in the shops and miserly cuts of meat hung desolately in the butchers’ windows. We stopped for a cappuccino coffee, Communist style, in the main square to find that it tasted suspiciously of acorns. We were met by the young Christians, all dressed in very modern western gear, who quietly ordered us to split into three separate groups and rendezvous in the basement of a youth club. We were, you see, being followed and the young people were regarded as dissidents and malcontents: revolutionaries wishing to bring down Communism. To meet with us was dangerous, and we had to lose the ‘tails’ the authorities had put on to us. Eventually, we re-assembled feeling like John le Carre agents, and learnt of the group’s desire to bring about a just, equal and free State, and their vehicle to achieve this was the Christian Church, for so long proscribed and hidden, but now beginning, once more, to flex its muscles which had grown weak, but had not stopped exercising its psychological grip over the German people living under Communism (so steeped in the traditions of the Church were they that the Communist regime had to invent a ceremony of initiation into the Communist party at age 11 to mimic Confirmation). After hearing their story, we were rushed through the darkened and deserted streets of the city, with the eerie sound of distant sirens and the clanking of a Stasi style cavalcade of black limousines taking an unknown Politburo official to who knows where, and took the final pre-Second World War tram and subsequent U-Bahn to the unbelievably bright lights of the West. We heard stories of whole families who had been separated by the building of the Wall and of how the Communist regime had bled the East of the city dry, taking such riches as it had to Russia. Yet still, the only real light in those dismal, oppressive streets, was the light of Faith in the youngsters eyes.

Some years later, a German friend ‘phoned me excitedly at the end of the night of 9th November 1990 to tell me that the Wall was being demolished and that Germany was, at last, re-united. I entered into his excitement, although it meant little practically to me, as I contemplated that the World was probably just a little better as brick was parted from brick and stone from stone.

Life is full of walls: some we build around ourselves to protect ourselves from emotional hurt and harm, or to encircle some fondly held belief or position (religious people are very good at building walls, but we call them ‘principles’). We also build real walls: walls which protect the rich from the poor and actually create a fearful living hell for both. But perhaps the most obscene wall of all is the one built along the West Bank in Israel, separating Israeli from Palestinian: a modern-day attempt to solve our problems by cutting ourselves off from those with whom we disagree. This wall too will fall one day and, until it does, the World will remain a blighted place. There is hope! That warrior in art: Banksy, has shown us what may be. Along the length of the wall he has depicted idyllic English rural scenes, or pictures of cosy domesticity: as if we look through the unyielding starkness of the wall to the way the world could be.

                                            Come the young and save us!

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 too 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 gamely 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.