Let Not Your Right Hand Know

It's sort of appropriate that tomorrow is the feast day of St Elizabeth of Hungary, the 13th-century princess who ended her life prematurely from severe austerity imposed on her by her spiritual director, the appalling Konrad of Marburg, but who is remembered less for being a victim of abuse than for her charity to the poor of her day. The readings are St James on faith and works and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats - no ambiguity there. 

Appropriate because a couple of days ago my friend Peter - I would say something like, 'Who has a conflicted relationship with the Church', but who doesn't - posted on LiberFaciorum a link to a story about a young woman in the US calling various churches to find out 'if they would help a starving baby', and discovering that quite a lot allegedly wouldn't. Cue all Peter's atheist friends weighing in to say how disgusting it was. I thought the article was quite thin: it didn't quote what Nikalie Monroe was actually saying to the churches she called, what information she gave them, or what their actual response was in any detail. I decided rashly to comment that, if I'd had such a contact out of the blue my first response would be to ask where the caller was: if they were local, I would visit and take it from there, and if not direct another church (and perhaps whatever other agencies were available) in that locality. Such a situation has certainly never happened to me and I have to say were it to my first thought would be how odd it was. The response to my reflections was not thoughtful, and reinforced what one should always remember, that hardly anyone ever engages in this kind of discussion to learn anything, genuinely to exchange ideas, or have their minds changed. It was very clear that the atheists felt the Church should respond to such a request in a way they would not dream of doing themselves. OK, it's appropriate for individuals to behave differently from organisations, but I can tell you absolutely that secular agencies and charities would not respond to unsolicited and uninvestigated requests any more than a church would. In fact I would guess churches are probably more likely to.

At Swanvale Halt church we're talking about setting up a hardship fund: a member of the congregation has a significant amount of money available and thought that might be a useful way of employing some of it. But if I think of the times I as an individual have ended up giving support to people it's almost always ended badly. I have given what must be many hundreds of pounds to Mad Trevor to tide him over crises, always with the assurance that he would reimburse me one day: when he got his substantial payout from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority last year, there was no talk of me getting a penny of it. Not that I ever expected it, I mention it only to make the point that this is what charity is like. I have subsidised people I should not have: one case I recall I finally called a halt to after about a week during which I was giving him up to £40 a day, with the result that he screamed at me in the street: 'What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Call yourself a Christian?' a line I knew was coming. What I was doing, I later realised, was merely supporting him in his addictions, and the people I really needed to apologise to were the local community, not him. Years later he wrote to me from prison to say sorry. And there have been others.

But the only case remotely like that of Nikalie Monroe's experiment that has ever come my way was a woman who I'd come across through yet another hard case - someone my contact had herself given money to and had it all go wrong. This woman called me one Sunday night saying she didn't want money, but had literally nothing in the house to feed her children - could I spare some groceries? I dug everything I could spare out of my cupboards and gave it to her in a bag when she called round. She was, I suppose understandably, awkward and taciturn and tried not to catch my eye. Though I may have seen her about, I might not recognise her, and to my knowledge I have never interacted with her again. 

Learning Experience

Months ago Sally, our pastoral assistant, suggested we should investigate providing meals for families who might need them in our current challenging economic circumstances. Asking around I found that there were several projects of this kind being run by churches elsewhere in the diocese, and more were establishing themselves as 'warm hubs' with or without support from the relevant local authorities. Sally went about the project in an impeccable way, talking to every local agency she could who could be assumed to know more about these things than we as a church might - the home-school link workers, the food bank staff, the Council, the youth service, and so on. Everyone was very supportive and enthusiastic and money was forthcoming from the Council, the Bishop of Guildford's Community Fund, and the like. Most impressively of all, Sally was able to recruit a team of helpers hardly any of whom had prior connection with the church. The trouble was, as it turned out, that very few people availed themselves of the opportunity to benefit. The time of the sessions was tweaked, the marketing was amended, the schools (who were our main source of communication) offered to accompany family groups to the church hall when the sessions were on, but it never caught fire, and Sally has now called a halt to the project and is thinking whether it can transmute into something else. It wasn't the quality of the food which those who did come thought was great!

Thankfully we know it's nothing personal, as the Council report that other similar initiatives have met the same problems and are returning their funding. One 'warm hub' has had not a single person turn up in the months since it was established. I am relaxed about something like this failing: I think we did everything we could conscientiously have done to research and plan, and failure is part of the process of development. The experience does raise big questions about the nature of our local society and how need and poverty are perceived: we doubt that the experience in other parts of the country than leafy Surrey would be the same. But it's very hard to discover why something doesn't work than why it does. 

Sanctuary

As refugees come out of Ukraine in their hundreds of thousands, it raises again the question I have asked myself before in different contexts, and I answer it in the same way, but with more insight into why. I won’t be taking anyone in to my house, although obviously there is space. It isn’t even the prospect of managing practically sharing space and facilities that’s the issue: it’s more that taking someone fleeing another country into your home isn’t just a matter of giving them a roof – I’ve done that with people I know on a couple of occasions – it is, effectively, them joining your family, as I’ve heard the relevant charities say. You become, in a way, responsible for them. I’ve realised how much the sense of responsibility and decision-making in my working life generally affects me, and how much I look forward to not doing it one day, if I get that far, so no longer having a door between me and the things I am responsible for (quite apart from general introversion which makes all interaction hard enough work) isn’t something I am comfortable taking on. I wouldn’t function well.

It was thinking about this that led me, long ago, to conclude that it is a good spiritual principle to do with all your might what you can do rather than lament what you can’t. If I am not going to be hosting anyone in my house, it is all the more vital that I contribute in some other way, trying to help and support anyone who comes to this community and the people who might end up hosting them. So yesterday I found myself watching a presentation by the Sanctuary Foundation, the organisation the bishops have pointed the Guildford churches towards, as they recounted the experience of refugees and hosts, and representatives of charities working in the area, and described how the UK government scheme is set up so far. Not very extensively yet, it turns out, as potential sponsors already have to have a Ukrainian contact lined up to come here and clearly only a tiny fraction of the generous souls who have volunteered their help and their homes do. The most practical outcome from my point of view was learning about Reset UK, a charity which has been co-ordinating community support for refugees for some while – ‘support’ meaning not just hosting, but other kinds of practical help, including for the hosts themselves. This strikes me as a good socialist approach that looks beyond individual charity towards hospitality as something communal.

The co-director of Reset pointed out that Ukrainians aren’t exactly the first people to seek refuge here: it goes on all the time. We know that there’s an Afghan family living in the Swanvale Halt area, for instance, but we have little contact with them. The UK has been quietly in receipt of many Hong Kong Chinese with British passports since China started playing hard-ball there, and I have no idea whether any of them have found their way to our local area. But in general we seem surprised by this happening; meanwhile, my Finnish friend Elsa describes how the first Ukrainian children are already at school in her home country, while here (so the charities say) it typically takes months for refugee children to find a place in the school system.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the UK – perhaps because we are surrounded and shielded by water – sees the mass displacement of human beings from their homes as something rare and exceptional, rather than an event we sadly ought to expect to happen. We have never had to undergo it ourselves: we have never been invaded, never been a persecuted minority, never undergone a devastating disaster. The more we get used to it, the better organised we will get, and the less daunting it will seem.

The Night Journey

It wasn't the usual troublemakers disturbing the good residents of Swanvale Halt yesterday evening, but their parson. Going out to visit Valerie and Craig who are getting married at the church later this year, I not only managed to go to the wrong street and knock on the wrong door, but while going up an alleyway that allowed me to approach the church from the south side and to check whether there was anyone hanging around in the churchyard, I set off a whole pack of dogs, it seemed. 'Shut up, there's no one there!' shouted a voice to at least one of the agitated canines. But there was.

Valerie and Craig have decided to marry after being together for quite a while, and have daughter Jade and twin boys. I was late getting to their house, but Jade was waiting up to hand me an envelope of cash. Her school had asked pupils to do something for a local charity and she had decided to bake cakes and biscuits for sale in aid of the church. £30 represents a lot of work for a seven-year-old. I will retain the envelope and put it in the files, as a holy relic of the kindness of children.

Providence or Something

A couple of years ago, I had a crisis of conscience over the request from a stranger that I open my house to the family of a Nigerian Christian pastor who were in danger of having to go back to Nigeria. I forget all the details but in the end I helped them out with funding their stay until their eldest daughter's GCSEs were over. 

This week I had a letter from one of the people who was trying to assist Pastor Feri's family: they're in Coventry now, apparently. The area where they come from has been the scene of a dramatic upsurge of communal violence. It's a mess that goes back a long time. The Plateau district of central Nigeria is the home of two groups of people, the Fulani, who are partly itinerant cattle-herders and Muslim, and the Berom, who are sedentary farmers and mainly Christian. There has always been the potential for conflict between these two different communities and ways of life, but more frequent droughts in this part of Africa mean that the strain on its natural resources is increasing: the Fulani herders stray farther in search of pasture, and the Berom farmers encroach on the traditional Fulani transhumance routes. The collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya has poured illegal armaments into west Africa, most particularly into Nigeria, and quarrels that might once have been pursued with knives and clubs are now prosecuted with machine guns.

The family who were nearly billeted on me in 2016 come from a district where a large number of people were killed in June this year - figures range from 86 (the Nigerian police's conservative estimate) to more than 230. They didn't include Pastor Feri's mother, who escaped, but did include a cousin and baby, I'm told.

And so Muslims in the Plateau - and in other places - kill Christians and Christians (possibly in smaller numbers, but totting up head counts is invidious) kill Muslims, but this is not Boko Haram country: the Beroms' religion is a way of identifying them and churches are a place to find them, and if they are attacked it is not because the Fulani are trying to wipe out their religion, but because their quarrel is with the human beings who bear it. Notwithstanding that, the death toll is now arguably higher in this conflict than in the civil war in the north of Nigeria in which Boko Haram is involved. 

It isn't the Islamist campaign of persecution that some people would have you, and me specifically, believe. But motivation is probably a minor matter when you have an enraged cattle-herder pointing an AK-47 at you, and perhaps Pastor Feri and his family would indeed have been hacked to collops without my few quid.

Provoking Wrath

It's been a while since I had young men calling at my door selling domestic bits and pieces from a bag, claiming to be ex-prisoners on a work-creation programme. I've long since decided that I won't buy anything from door-to-door hawkers, having done so frequently in the past. It's surprising that you can find little unequivocal advice on the matter, and that what is out there - at least online - seems to cut-and-paste one particular statement made by some body, at some time. But whenever the police have made any kind of pronouncement about it, the consensus has been that, whatever the truth about the young men with the bags of dusters themselves, the 'scheme' they are part of isn't being organised by any official body but by criminals who are, at the very least, exploiting them, and buying their wares helps no one. Since I started turning the hawkers away, they've stopped turning up, which does suggest there is some sharing of information between groups about who will hand over money and who won't.

One hawker came around yesterday, and I refused quietly and definitely to buy anything from him. Imagining, for a moment, that his story may have had some truth to it, it might have been good to have something positive to offer than just refusal to take part in the structure he's part of, but I hadn't worked that out. He went off cursing me, quite literally, and calling me the Devil. I doubt he would have been quite so vehement about someone who wasn't visibly a clergyperson. People are always taken aback and sometimes angrily resentful whenever I refuse to do something they want, I suppose because at some level they see a priest as an index of reasonable goodness and, if the priest won't go along with their desires, it implies that those desires might not be either reasonable or good. 

An Act of Benevolence

The ritual of the pouring of the coffee is an integral part of a visit to the café opposite the church: one of the waiting staff will come over and pour a thin stream of hot water over the coffee grains in the filter paper, in a very slow circular motion so the maximum amount of coffee is infused into the cup. This doesn't happen at the village's other café round the corner where my filter coffee arrives already in its mug, nor do I get a choice of coffees there - Brazilian and Ugandan are on offer at the moment at the first establishment. But the village businesses should be supported, and so I share my patronage between the cafés.

Yesterday Maggie, one of the waitresses, came to my table with the usual filter. 'This has already been paid for,' she told me. 'There was a family seated at that table behind you, and on their way out they said they'd pick up the bill for your coffee! Shall I tell you when they next come in!?' I had no idea who they were, and didn't recognise the little boy with them as one of the Infant School pupils. I wonder whether I looked especially impoverished, although if I'd been all that impoverished I wouldn't have gone there for a coffee.

Il Rettore used to claim that offers to stand a priest a drink were an etiolated translation into a modern setting of the practice of buying indulgences, shorn of its theological underpinning. My friend Martin, another ex-resident of the parish of Lamford, commented via Liber Faciorum:

It may be uncommon for the clergy to be bought coffees in the South of England, but not so in working-class Glasgow. My pal Jimmy described to me how his enjoyment of an Aidirie v. Celtic game (in the pre crowd-segregation seventies) was spoiled by the succession of Celtic fans leaning across him to speak to the priest sitting next to him. "Can I buy you a pie, Father?"; "Can I buy you a coffee, Father?"!

Although perhaps lingering cultural memories of the doctrine of Purgatory were stronger in Catholic Glasgow in the '70s than in Agnostic Surrey some forty years later.

Spring Fair 2017

Due to being on holiday, the preparations for the Spring Fair this year, on the Saturday before the May Bank Holiday, took place with no input from me at all, which is quite the way I like it. We've had all sorts of difficulties this year as the Scouts, who usually supply, erect and dismantle the tents for the parish stalls, decided they couldn't: simply not enough people, apparently, to manage. Somehow the church committee scraped together sufficient tents from a variety of sources, and people to put them up. There were gaps in the rows of charity stalls, again, perhaps, suggesting that local charities and groups are also finding it hard to recruit helpers for this sort of event. 

Last year (I think, after eight Fairs the years tend to blur a bit) we decided that we would always go ahead with the event, no matter the weather forecast, unless the Council (which owns the field where it takes place) was to tell us we couldn't, and that decision removes a lot of the stress and uncertainty. Packing away, too, seemed to be smoother and less stressful than in previous years. The sky was mainly overcast with a couple of half-minute glimpses of the sun, but not enough to put visitors off: the field was pretty busy and we now have a roster of arena events which provides enough interest to keep people coming and going.

What happened to Reg Hand a week last Friday is still on my mind. I had a conversation about the haunting defibrillator with a member of the congregation who's a retired nurse. 'If someone in their nineties has a heart attack,' she said, 'it's next to impossible that they're going to pull through, no matter what you do. And would he have wanted to, after that? I'm 74, not 91, but I've signed a Do-Not-Resuscitate order.' Others tell me the same thing.

Start As You Mean to Go On

'Times is 'ard, I'm takin' in laundry', my old vicar in High Wycombe would sometimes jest if you called round to find the utility room draped with drying smalls. It was in line with his instruction to his dog that you might occasionally be able to hear as he came to answer the door, 'Kill, Max! Kill!!'

This bag arrived in the church porch on Christmas Eve, deposited by an unseen person as we were tidying and cleaning ready for the festivities later in the day. The bag mostly contained children's clothes, with a smattering of adult items, a duvet cover, a towel and a couple of wiping-up cloths. Not only that, but they were all just-laundered, and not even dried out (the laundrette is just around the corner). 

I left the bag for a while to see whether anyone came to claim it, and then took it all home. At least the cold weather meant it didn't go mouldy. Days of moving items around between the airing cupboard and the boiler cupboard have finally dried it all out, and what an operation that's been. I could have taken it back to the laundrette and used the tumble-driers there but it would have taken at least two loads and an unknown amount of time, as well as costing a bit.

I've assumed the clothes were deposited at the church because the depositor had some notion we might distribute them to The Poor. A public-spirited if wrong-headed thought, perhaps, but they might have dried it all out first, or even left a note. It's possible that it's a very unkind prank on someone who is now looking for their laundry, and I will put a note in the window of the laundrette just to check, but otherwise I will have to find a charity shop to sort through it all, or take it to a textile bank. As I say, perhaps a charitable thought, but from my point of view entirely unhelpful ...

From Ruthless Compassion to Extreme Altruism

Giving the Biblical tithe of one’s income isn’t that hard for me, thanks to a generous stipend, house and tax arrangements. This makes me considerably more charitable than the majority of people, though nowhere near as much as the people this article characterises as ‘extreme altruists’. Julia and Jeff, the couple it describes, give away the majority of what they earn, and scrutinise every life decision, including having children, to see whether it will increase or reduce the amount they are able to give. If you find the account of their behaviour challenging, avoid the comments (always wise advice when venturing online) which may upset you in a completely different way.

A friend once described a similar sort of individual, a member of his church. This gentleman (let’s call him Walter), who died a couple of years ago, had inherited a significant property portfolio in and around London which enabled him to become a one-man housing agency for poor and vulnerable people, while himself living a life of such extreme frugality that even Julia and Jeff might have balked at such privations: he slept in an overcoat (considering bedclothes unnecessary), had no heating in his own house, and washed in rainwater. He affected for good the lives of many, many other people, even if his own life was odd (while to him it was entirely rational). His funeral was packed with mainly his current and former tenants, which is not something most landlords can hope for.

The typical response of most of us is defensive as we seek to justify not doing the same kind of thing. We know there is much suffering in the world, and that much of the way we live is strictly unnecessary, superfluous. So we categorise ‘extreme altruism’ as weird and pathological, and come up with convoluted reasons to condemn it morally too (you can, should you choose, read some of them in the responses to the Guardian article).

To be honest, Julia does seem motivated by a sort of ‘survivor guilt’, which compels her to see every pleasure of her own life as paid for by the suffering of someone else; you could indeed describe these thoughts as obsessive-compulsive, and her charitableness as an attempt to buy them off – an attempt which can only ever be in vain, because there will always be more suffering somewhere in the world, and always more one could do, more sacrifices one could make, to alleviate it. No wonder she gets episodes of depression. However this doesn’t seem applicable to Walter, at least in so far as I know his story. As the article suggests, some ‘extreme altruists’ are constitutionally happy, and some aren’t; their life choices actually seem to relate very little to their mental health.

Nor do they seem constrained by ideology that much. Obviously Walter was a Christian and his altruism was framed in a Christian structure. Julia, very interestingly, started out life as a Christian, abandoning her faith in her early teens on realising that ‘other people must believe just as strongly in their holy books’ – a pretty jejune line of reasoning, I think, but there it is. However her altruism remained unaffected by her ideological change. She remained haunted by the sufferings of others, and the conviction that every human being is of equal value continued to demand of her that all her spare resources had to be devoted to their support.

I must say I would question the philosophical basis of this assertion. For assertion it seems to be: if I think what ‘value’ I, or any other person, has, what I find is not something intrinsic, something absolute, at all, but something relational. My own feelings of my worth to myself aside, I am valuable to the degree that I contribute to the life of others; the whole notion of value requires someone else to be of value to. Equally, people I don’t know, who have no social or economic relation with me, are of no value to me. The last human being in existence would be of precisely no value at all, there being nobody else to whom they could be valuable. That is, unless you bring in to the equation an external arbiter of value in the form of God; secular altruism justified in terms of ‘the equal value of all human beings’ seems to me completely baseless; without God, they simply aren’t.

Well. Even Julia and Jeff set a limit on their giving, allotting themselves a minimal allowance which does give scope for occasional unnecessary treats. They have to do this to avoid madness, to escape analysing every tiny action in terms of its effect on their ability to give, to erect a boundary against the limitless need of the world which will otherwise crush them, because, as we said above, there’s always more you can do, always another sacrifice you can make. It’s just that they set that limit at a different level to most of us, even those of us who do choose to give away a proportion of our income.

I don’t feel able to criticise ‘extreme altruists’ too much, because I know I am a bit of a sociopath. In my case, Christian ethics does provide a prod to be more charitable and altruistic than I would otherwise be, and a significant part of my journey as a Christian has been coming to understand the sufferings of others far more than I am inclined to do – especially those around me, rather than abstract and notional human beings far away. But I feel nothing like the guilt that motivates Julia, and find it perfectly, and worryingly, easy to forget that other people are hurting. Last night, work over, I sat and watched a film received from the rental company I subscribe to, drank a glass of wine, had a slice of bread and jam for supper. None of these three things were necessary to my existence, they were merely pleasurable. All of them, strictly analysed, cost money which I could have given away. Yet I don’t feel particularly bad about it; the knowledge, the absolute knowledge, that as I enjoy my pleasures other people somewhere are suffering, doesn’t overly disturb me. 

Ten per cent, the Bible suggests. Jesus tells one rich man to ‘give all you have to the poor and follow me’, but he doesn’t say it to everyone. He commends the wasteful pouring of expensive perfume over his feet; he goes to a party and, entirely unnecessarily and un-ascetically, keeps it going with a miraculous transformation of water into wine. He is both unsentimental and unhaunted. There is no hint in his life that superfluous pleasure is bad, which reassures my sociopathy. And yet: surely the inability to forget the suffering of others, even when it occurs in an unbeliever, is not far removed from the experience of God. Individuals so burdened do not deserve castigation; they are needed to drive society forward.

Admission

The theme we'd selected for the Family Service yesterday was 'helping' and in the course of my talk I thought the subject of the refugee crisis was unavoidable. Our Bishop has asked people in the parishes who'd be willing to give accommodation to a refugee to forward their details to the Barnabas Fund, and given my own somewhat pathetic feelings about this matter I thought I could hardly allow my situation to go without comment. I talked about how I needed a 'safe zone' which could be (more or less) secluded from the world outside, and so I couldn't envisage opening my home to a stranger, no matter how big or small it might be. There were things I could do, however: I could donate to an organisation working with refugees some of the money earned by my old house which is now let, and probably other things too. 'Don't waste time feeling guilty or self-justifying about what you can't do: get on with doing what you can', I suggested. 

I hope the reason the congregation responded so well to this was not because I was effectively absolving them from responsibility. In fact I discovered that a couple of leading members of the church have already registered with Avaaz as potential hosts for a refugee. They will need help from the rest of us, rather than being left isolated. Nevertheless, I can't conscientiously guilt-trip anyone else about doing something I know full well I'm not going to do myself.

However, if I am going to put my money where my mouth is, where might it best be spent? Avaaz is an international campaigning organisation which isn't specifically interested in supporting refugees. The Barnabas Fund, to whom our Bishop directed our attention, very definitely works with Christians only; which is fair enough, but most of the refugees finding their way to Britain aren't going to be Christians, and it dedicates some of its resources to campaigning about the hazards of Islam. I heard a report on Radio 4's Broadcasting House yesterday about a gentleman who has hosted a succession of refugees, but the organisation he mentioned, ASSIST, works only around Sheffield. So I'm still looking.