The Lamford Oil Men

It was the annual Memorial Service today. Preparing for it I found myself reflecting on how I'd become aware while at Lamford that there was a little sub-group in the congregation of former oil men, all of whom seemed to have worked for Shell - no, silly, not as garage forecourt attendants, but as engineers and so on. I wasn't sure whether they were aware of one another's existence, or how they all ended up retiring to Lamford, but I took the funerals of at least three, I remember. Apart from being connected by their past work, they were of course different people and sometimes had had knocks along the course of life. One had received the Last Rites a total of six times and when I went to visit his wife to discuss the funeral service and asked how she was getting on, she answered 'Oh, it's such a relief!' which is more frank than most people are prepared to be.

I was reminded of the Lamford Oil Men when reading a recent report on the role of the fossil fuel companies in attempting to downplay and undermine the science of climate change over the last few decades. I doubt the perfectly decent gents whose funerals I took in Lamford had any knowledge of that policy or influence on it, but they were involved in it by being part of one of those companies. We're all implicated in the larger movements of history and society even when we play no active or conscious role at all: they move through us and shape us whether we choose or not. And when our awareness changes and a different perspective become the norm, what then? What seemed perfectly normal at the start of our lives may well beyond the pale of acceptability by their end: we start as lambs, and end as dinosaurs. The absolute impossibility of stepping back from our lives and assessing them objectively has to push us towards compassion and mutual forgiveness, and that perfect, objective view of who we have been and what we have done can only come from a place beyond us, a heavenly place.