Friday, 17 June 2016

Death and After

Police officers at the scene in BirstallAnyone who becomes known to people they haven’t met runs the risk of becoming a lightning-rod for hate and disturbance. A pop singer is shot dead in the USA; an MP in a small Yorkshire town. Rarely this happens to clergy too, although when they are killed – unless it’s as a result of the kind of random event that could befall anyone – it tends to be by someone they have met and dealt with. I sometimes wonder whether that might happen to me one day, though it doesn’t seem very likely.

You can’t stop unbalanced people being overcome by hate, and attaching it to a particular figure. You can make it harder for them to do anything very damaging with that hate. To kill someone with a knife you have to be very lucky, or really to know what you’re doing, and most unbalanced individuals don’t; guns make it so much easier.

The character of the individual who dies, or the context, makes a difference to what happens afterwards. Years ago Phyl Saville, the President of the Priest’s House Museum Trust in Wimborne where I used to work, was stabbed on her way to church one Sunday morning. It always felt to me as though her gentle, tough, serene faith had already reached out to defuse the evil of her death long before it had taken place. Other deaths are surrounded by revenge and resentment and as a result the hatred escalates. Only lives lived after the pattern of the Cross – whether by religious people or not  – can absorb evil and transform it into hope.

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