When the Wolves Were Running

I suppose on a personal level I should be grateful to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mr Miller, who over recent days has provided me with material for a Facebook post, a newsletter article, a sermon, and now a blog entry. That’s good going for the following few words, spoken to US TV channel CNN in reference to recent events in Venezuela:

The US is operating in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world from the beginning of time.

Generously, you could say, yes, they are. International relationships are indeed shaped by balances and imbalances of economic and military power and, as the Lord himself said, if a king goes to war with another king he first decides if he has enough resources to do so. Any nation must have the wherewithal to defend the things it holds important from those who would destroy or steal them. In World War Two the Allies did many immoral things to secure our way of life, ranging from simple deceit to the mass killing of civilians. We know this is the case.

But ‘securing our way of life’ is the point here. Then, we deployed strength, force, and power to defend a state of living which, however imperfectly, said it valued every human being as an individual, which recognised their worth and dignity, and which was expressed in a political and legal system which the human race has, over centuries, devised to protect the ordinary majority from the powerful, the cruel and the violent: the psychopaths who believe there’s nothing wrong with the rule of strength and force. We call it ‘democracy’, and it includes not just periodic elections (tyrants are content with those as they are so easy to manipulate), but limited, accountable government as a whole; free exchange of ideas; universal free education; security of property; and equality before the law. You know full well that this is not what the current US administration intends its strength, force, and power to defend. Instead, they are the kind of people that system is designed to constrain, the wolves it attempts to defang. That’s something of an injustice to wolves, but you get the point. And you know, too, that when they call strength, force, and power ‘the iron laws of the world’ they don’t just apply it to foreign adventures: the world is the whole of life. It’s why, in this view, it’s right not to allow extra support for the poor or marginalised, why law doesn’t matter, why the deaths of small people don’t matter, why there’s no problem with the powerful doing what they like. That’s just the way it’s always been.

By coincidence (or providence) tomorrow is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ; the Old Testament lesson set for the day is Isaiah 42.1-9, which describes the character of the Messiah: ‘a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out’. He will not crush the weak, because they are children who can yet grow Godwards. Such bold restraint, such heroic tenderness, is what we are summoned to as well if we are baptised into his death and resurrection. And remember: the world was made through the Word, and ultimately it stands under the hand of God. He is in charge of it, and the Christ shows how he works. The laws of the world belong to him, not the apes and the wolves.

Episcopal Dealings

A few weeks ago I shared the text of the letter we sent on behalf of the SCP to our diocesan bishop outlining our 'dissatisfaction' with the way the Living in Love and Faith initiative, or its results, were handled. A couple of people wanted to know what happened next:

I wasn't expecting the Bishop to ask whether he might meet with us to talk through the matter, and I wondered what there was to say. In the end 'us' turned out to mean me, and it was slightly odd: both the Bishop and I knew each others' position, we weren't actually negotiating anything, and I don't think he expected me to change my mind any more than I expected him to. I had the strange impression that he wanted to talk for his own satisfaction as much as to exchange views. He outlined some of the ways in which he thought the process had gone wrong, and said he felt too much had been expected of the LLF initiative - that no consensus was ever likely to emerge about a subject that, in his view, required consensus before significant forward movement. He wasn't sure where we went from here now that General Synod had said it rejected the bishops' opinion, while for a substantial body of Anglicans not blessing same-sex relationships had become an absolute touchstone issue, regardless of what anyone else might prefer. He said he felt very keenly a responsibility to keep talking to divergent bodies of opinion within the diocese while trying his best not to say different things to different people, and maintaining his own sense of integrity.

So I was released from the Bishop's house and not consigned to the dungeons. It was a perfectly agreeable meeting but what it achieved was another matter!

Turning Up The Dimmer Switch

As I've been (mainly) off this week, I was able to catch bits of Tuesday's edition of the Today programme on Radio 4, guest-edited by historian Tom Holland. Mr Holland's biggest work so far has been Dominion, in which he traces the influence of Christianity on the culture of the West. Maybe he told part of his own story when interviewed for UnHerd alongside Nick Cave earlier this year; but if so, I hadn't heard it, so here are his words to Amol Rajan a couple of days ago. He'd been given a cancer diagnosis:

They said, this looks terrible. It’s probably spread to your lymph nodes, we’ll let you know the results of all the scans we’re going to give you before Christmas so you don’t have it hanging over you. And Christmas Eve came, and there was nothing. And I went to Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew the Great. And so I sat there and thought, I might as well give it a go. So I made a wholehearted prayer for the first time since I was about ten, I should think. This church is very distinctive because it’s part of a medieval priory and the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared there, it’s the only recorded appearance of the Virgin Mary in London. I went to the place where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared, and I said Come on, please help me out here, because I was that desperate! And my brother James turned out to have been at university with and shared a flat with the daughter of the surgeon, this great man called Bill Hill, who developed this technique where you cut out the infected section of the bowel, and he said, I’ll get in touch with him … And he managed to see the scans and they weren’t nearly as bad as had been thought … I really felt as though I’d massively dodged a bullet there. My rational side says, It’s a reflection of luck, or of privilege … But another part of me did think, Goodness, I’ve been a participant in a medieval miracle. I was a Protestant atheist, and then a Protestant agnostic, and I like the idea that if there’s a God he has such a sense of humour that it was the Virgin Mary who intervened … maybe this is a way I can believe in it, and it makes life much more interesting. … The dimmer switch has definitely gone back up. When I read about medieval people who had a personal devotion to the Virgin, I can now nurture that possibility of a personal devotion to the Virgin in a way that would have seemed – well, I might as well have been sacrificing animals to Athena or something. It’s like a fire I can warm my hands by, and I make sure I keep that fire alight.

I thought this was great - sceptical and yet leading, very gently and very indeterminately, in the direction, not just of Christian spirituality, but of this kind of Christian spirituality. And perhaps the nicest point is that Mr Holland comments with a historian's fastidiousness that the Virgin's manifestation at St Bartholomew's, Smithfield, is her only recorded appearance in London, because of course she may have been around without it being committed to the record.

Picture is another St Bartholomew's, Brighton's, where I was this afternoon. Happy New Year everyone!