Let us now sing the praises of famous men,
our ancestors in their generations.
Their bodies are buried in peace,
but their name lives on generation after generation. (Ecclesiasticus 44:1,14)

What a difference a year makes. On 6th June 2019, we marked the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings. In 1944, D-Day approximately 156,000 Allied troops (made up of British, Canadian and American soldiers) landed on 5 beaches in Normandy. One of the largest invasions in military history, D-Day marked the beginning of the end of World War II.

D-Day marked a major turning point in the war and led to the eventual victory of the Allies. For many years, people have visited Normandy to remember those who lost their lives during the offensive. Last year we saw those commemorations extended when 4,000 Armed Forces personnel saluted Normandy veterans at commemorative events that took place in both Normandy and Portsmouth. They were joined by world leaders and members of the Royal Family.

At 0726 on 6 June, a lone piper of the British Army played at Arromanches in Normandy to mark the exact moment the first British soldier landed on Gold Beach.

This year, the commemorations were going to be scaled down, but no one could have predicted that most of them would be cancelled due to the risks involved, especially to those veterans that would have made the journey to Normandy.

Their hard fought fight won our freedom, that we still enjoy today. Perhaps during the lockdown, we are realising what some of those freedoms involve, and that we have taken for granted. The veterans that are still with us that now fall into the vulnerable group that still need to shield, and need protection, our care, support and prayers. History has not forgotten them, and neither should we, and there are things that we can learn from their example that can be applied to life in 2020

From all that was achieved from being united and standing strong together.
From their example of fighting on behalf of humanity and for those who cannot fight for themselves.
For all that was gained from rising up in courage to pursue all that is good and makes for peace.

Lord of the nations,
we honour the bravery and sacrifice of those who served.
Grant us similar courage to recognise and restrain evil in our own day,
and may those who lead the nations of the world
work together to defend human liberty,
that we may live peaceably one with another.
This we ask in the name of the Prince of Peace,
our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Amen.

I took myself our yesterday for a very brief walk. My legs are quite bad now but I said I’d wait until lock-down was over before I troubled the surgery. So, it was a brief walk up Gorefield Road and back. For those who don’t know, Gorefield Road today is like the A47 twenty years ago. It is a country road but in common with many country roads now it, nevertheless, seems to support a constant stream of traffic travelling down it, much of which goes fast, and some as go illegally fast. Or at least that is how it was until the great lock-down happened.

Many people were commenting a few weeks ago how much fresher the air seemed for lack of road traffic and, presumably, other industrial fogs. I concurred. And there was something lovely about the lack of noise pollution as well. However, when I went out yesterday I was met with the acrid smell of car exhaust and the traffic coming down the road was as great as its ever been. It seems that many people now consider lock-down is at an end. Probably, over the next few weeks and months, people will return to work and the general populace return to going everywhere in their cars, whether they have to or not. It will, in other words, become business as usual. The prospect depresses and disappoints me.

The question should really arise, ‘what have we learnt?’ ‘what is there still to learn?’. What was already becoming plainer and plainer even before Covid 19 was that we could not continue as we had been. The world sometimes moves into different forms of living and working together in a gradual and protracted fashion, but sometimes it leaps into a new form with a great jolt. When Corona hit, and during the lock down, it was becoming clear that we might be on the cusp of a ‘jolt’ change. The virus would come to wreak havoc and death for many thousands of families but to some extent it would also provide our culture with a great opportunity to reorient ourselves to a more productive, less destructive, way of life. We could think about the possibility of living a different way of life in which, in particular, we could start working toward an evasion of the very great possibility of environmental break down.

Covid 19 will go away. It was always going to go away eventually. It has been truly horrible and deadly for many of our people and there are many families that have found theirselves devastated and grieving at the loss of loved ones. But it was always, eventually, going to go away. The next crisis, if it is indeed an environmental one, will not. There will be a point where things become irreversible and the death toll from this will make that from Corona virus look tiny. That is what almost all authorities on the matter agree will happen if we return to business as usual in the fullest sense. Of course there are those who will tell you that this is all a media fiction, not least the President of the United States, but the facts, and therefore the most probable scenario based upon them, tends to lean the other way. There are those who will tell us that fear-mongering over environmental break-down is part of some conspiracy, but then there were those who once told us that the world was being taken over in a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy. The question you need to ask yourself is, ‘where is the information you have coming from?’, ‘what qualifications has this source got for saying what they are saying?’, ‘what are the great majority of their peers saying about it?’.

In any case this is only half of what I wanted to say to you. One of the things that irritated me most about all the activity upon Gorefield Rd on Saturday was what it said about the restlessness of my fellow citizens. This was something that concerned me when I was a Vicar. People find it very difficult to keep still. Now, of course, many of the people out and about on Saturday will have been going back to work and setting about essential tasks – so be it, I acknowledge that there are things that people have to do. I know that many people will have been waiting a long time to see loved ones, many desperately need to go to work and earn and many need the children back in school. But this is not the whole reason and perhaps it is not the principle reason for the majority who were now glorying in being able to bustle about, drive their cars and fog the place up again.

Restlessness, doing, activity and lots and lots of noise are the mark of our age, and it betrays in many instances a rather fearful area of mass neurosis. People cannot live with silence, if the world outside them is thus or especially the silence in their heads. It terrifies them. In the depths of the soul.

Every soul is engaged in asking certain questions about the meaning of existence. I don’t mean that they ask in the same way as philosophers do. Rather they do it intuitively, instinctively, unconsciously, implicitly and tacitly. It is all part of the mechanism of survival and self defence. It is on a continuum with the intuitive questioning of every knew situation, where we instinctively scan from threats and opportunities. But these ‘great existential conundrums’ the mind often tends to hide from so that we can get on with every day tasks. They stay in the back of our heads until such a time as there is a great crisis and they are forced to the surface. Then we ask such questions as: ‘what is my life for?’ ‘what is my purpose’, ‘what is really good and important rather than just fashionable’? What is worth fighting for?’ ‘Is anything?’ What can I hope for in this life and beyond ? With regard to the last question I would suggest that it is rooted in a horrible suspicion that we are all merely chaff in the wind and when we die we will become simply extinct. We feel sometimes as though In a couple of generations time will no one will even know we, or our children and everything we love, were ever here.

As I say these questions are asked intuitively by most people in the depths and recesses of the soul. The problem is that we live in an age in which the answer to such questions, shaped over 400 years of capitalism, industrialisation and the cult of science, is that our reality is just a mute, revolving, indifferent mechanism; it is one giant machine without feeling, without sensitivity and without sympathy and therefore it is entirely indifferent to us, to ours and to all we love.

This answer to the great questions of existence that all human beings intuitively ask – albeit most of us ask inchoately, inarticulately and without theorising it – sound in the stillness and in the silence. They sound in the depths of conscience and contemplative imagination and for many, many people in an age like ours the sound is the sound of the abyss. There is nothing there, no life outside humanity and no spiritual dimension to confirm us as spiritual entities thus with potential for surviving our material bodies somehow. The answers to the great questions, therefore, are all too often that ‘you are nothing and your loved ones are nothing’.

It’s little wonder that most people would rather ‘do’ than ‘be’, with the latter consisting of taking a great deal of time in quiet and not doing anything but meditating on the meaning of existence, the possibility of God and all things. They are like it because they need the noise and distraction. They are like it because all they can hear in the silence is death.

Sometimes my chief objection to the way in which our country is so completely repudiating their Christian heritage is not so much because as a culture we replaced it with something else, as because we replaced it with nothing. The existence of a myriad of individual, subjective inclinations toward many weird and wonderful consumer spiritualities is no substitute for serious religion and a cultural, overarching framework of belief. I think that in many ways lock-down provided us with an opportunity to find ourselves again – forgive me if that sounds a bit cliched. It might have helped us find perspective again, see what is most important, orientate ourselves away from things that we use as noise and activity entertainments not to have to think too much of the emptiness of existence. It might have helped us to form a way of life that wasn’t constantly using up resources and belching pollutants into the atmosphere. It might have helped to save us, not just from environmental breakdown, but like all spiritualities are made for, it might have saved us from a soulless and pointless existence.

On Karl Marx and Christianity. 1st June 2019. Revd Dr N.K. Gardner

In the 19th century, popular Christianity in Europe had become fixated upon the instillation of a sense of the importance of piety, morality and obedience in its congregations. In other times in the history of the Church there would be an emphasis of the Kingdom of God, preached on by Jesus, arriving eventually on earth and with the contribution of God given human talent. In such circumstances Christian people, seeing salvation as within their grasp, might begin a struggle to achieve it. Such hope and expectation might encourage especially the poor and downtrodden, to work to change, not just their personal life, morality and spirituality, but the structures of their world: its politucal, social and economic power structures, as well as anything else.

From the perspective of the Victorian ruling class, a sense that God’s Kingdom might be brought into being on earth and through the co-operation of human action would, would encourage a radical and potentially anarchic challenge to structures of economic and politucal power of the 19th century world. Plainly the ruling classes considered this to something that would lead, not to salvation in the form of the kingdom, but to the hell that they had already been witnessed in the French Revolution.

And so the Church, in this period, propagated a notion of salvation obtained for the individual (rather than, say, by God through a mass movement), via conscientious adherence to piety, prayer and obedience and reaching its fruition in the departing of the soul after death into heaven. It dampened down any potential enthusiasm for precipitating salvation on earth by almost ignoring interpretations of scripture, reason and tradition that might be seen as pointing to that, especially in the popular propagation of doctrine, and substituted for this a notion that heaven was a matter wholly and solely in the hands of God without any human aspect in its achievement. In which case the people were taught to accept their lives and continue to work and obey diligently. God alone brings a man to heaven and will, at the end of days, bring the kingdom into being on earth. In the meantime we must cultivate the virtue that qualifies us for God’s reward: we must except our God-given rulers, our place in society and, if it is necessary, our penury.

So, the whole focus of the Christian man or woman was outside of the world. Their hope was directed to a life after death, in a form that was a dis-incarnate, disembodied, peaceful rest that was little different to an endless, passionless quiescence, in the Greek, apatheia . But what is important to bear in mind is that this is by no means the only way of interpreting Christ’s message and the apostles elaborations through the Spirit, and historically it was not the only way in which the Christian Faith was understood and preached.

Christianity in every period of history is ‘inculturated’, which is to say it is never pure, pristine Christianity as Word of God with no human interpretationary ‘pollution’. In every age the people of that age have tended to some extent to read into the faith a form that reflects their own times, their difficulties and priorities. So, it has taken on a particular form in which certain things are emphasised, and certain things are tending to be forgotten, in accordance with the main concerns of a people in their particular struggle to make a life in the world. The 19th century was an age of the most enormous social, political and economic upheaval. Some of that upheaval took the form of violent revolution and hopes of freedom ending in the reign of terroristic regimes such as that of the French Jacobins and the ‘Committee of Public Safety’. In these circumstances many people in England, and elsewhere in 19th century Europe, sought a relatively conservative Christianity emphasising universally valid moral and spiritual teaching that acted as a kind fixed point, something immovable that could be clung to in a world of rapid and disorientating flux. And, of course, that would encourage social order and the obedience of the lower orders.

If we narrow the point somewhat we should say that the priorities of the Church in every age fit in with the priorities of that class of people that have disproportionate influence over the shape of the Church’s culture. The wealthy and better educated in every age have greater access to writing its doctrines and dogma, its liturgies and prayers, its hymns and liturgical settings. The wealthy and better educated families, especially in the socially, hierarchically conscious 19th century, supplied the priests, the theologians and especially the bishops. These inevitably formed a notion of Christianity that reflected their priorities, perhaps their particular sense of sin and guilt as well as their self justifications as a class with certain privileges. This is not to say that they were aware of doing anything other than telling of the truth about Christianity. This was not some cynical conspiracy by the ruling order to stupefy the masses by peddling interpretations of Christ’s teaching just in order to breed social passivity. That did go on, but the majority of those – some of them great names – who developed the doctrine and dogma of the Church, did so as part of a conscientious attempt to lay out an accurate interpretation of the teaching and life of Christ. Any set of theologians, liturgists etc, write and compose through a set of unconscious biases that to some extent direct their thinking without their being aware of it. So, whatever culture we belong to, we home in on certain aspects of the Christian faith without realising, necessarily, that this is what we are doing. The values and priorities of the social group to which we belong form a kind of lens through which we see everything and particularly read something like scripture.

In a very class divided society such as that of the Victorian era, there was a need on the part of the ruling class to justify their privileges, instil popular conformity and get the majority to accept their rather less privileged lot. A simple message that God rewards obedience and punishes dissent in a society still highly religious is a powerful ideological force, that is, it is a message that helps implant social conformity. Preaching ideas such as that God creates hierarchy as a natural order of things justifies structural ‘trees’ of power and privilege. Again, we must be careful of thinking that the ruling class were peddling such ideas cynically. Our liberal ideas and our sometimes blind adhesion to notions of equality, disable our ability to see this but it is important that we try. At a time when many western cultures were being convulsed by violent revolution, breaking out at various times and in various places since the 17th century, and bringing down different ruling regimes, the Church in England played its part in instilling the virtues of just getting on with your work, accepting your place in the order of things and waiting upon your reward outside of this world rather than agitating for it now, and within it.

It was into this environment that Karl Marx emerged as the voice for what were, in many ways, themes of justice and equality, a just redistribution of wealth and hope of living in a better world, that belonged to Judeo-Christianity, but from a position outside it. This is something that we find increasingly where the Church does not sufficiently take up the message and fight for a ‘this world’, living, embodied hope in God through Christ. Human beings cannot live without this hope. So if the Church will not preach it, other people tend to be raised up to do the job from outside of it.

Marx, famously declared, in the introduction of the ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in 1843 – but which was not published until after his death – that religion is ‘the opium of the masses’. However, it is worth quoting the whole sentence, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”. Quoting the whole sentence shows it in a slightly different light; religion is not so much some drug peddled to the masses to keep them supine and stupid, as it is the expression of the heart of an oppressed people.

In any case Marx was undoubtably an atheist in the sense that he considered the Christianity of the period as offering a kind of faux liberation after death rather than a true salvation, one wrought by revolution, human effort and skill, and by which they spiritually matured in the process, and in building a new world thereafter. What tended to happen, as Marx saw it, was that productive technologies – for example, farming technologies, machinery for plowing the land or for building factories and producing commodities etc – in any society might mature to a point that the old social hierarchy starts to be seen as unwilling and unable to make the fairest and most just use it, It is most often the peasantry or industrial workers who agitate for an order that they see as working more fairly, in other words generally giving them a better ‘slice of the cake’. This may or may not lead to a series of crises and conflicts between the ruling order and those who they rule. They may morph into violent revolution until out of this conflict of classes a new order arises with a new way of organising economy and society, as they see it, more justly and fairly. Marx claims that this sort of thing has happened throughout history and had already happened to bring about the liberal, capitalist society he lived in (some people argue that the English civil wars constituted a revolution in which the rising middle classes overthrew the privileges and monopolies of the old feudal order). Marx called this ‘dialectical materialism’.

Such a crisis of the working class against the ruling class of England would come about once people could see better ways of using existing technology to house, feed and clothe everyone more widely and adequately than the present order was able to do. It would happen once the mass of people became aware of this better world potential, and their own potential to achieve such a world together, but also find their way blocked by a ruling class that wanted to hang on to their privileges.

So Marx also considered the Church Christianity of his time to be a bourgeois (the French for burgher, middle class etc), fiction. It was designed to get people to lose consciousness of such a potential, and tolerate an intolerable situation. That situation was not just one that was about being poor and economically hard pressed, but in reality also spiritually impoverishing.

We must not misunderstand Karl Marx’s attitude to capitalism in the way so many have and do. For Marx capitalism represented a stupendous advance in the progress of human beings in the long march to freeing themselves from bondage to poverty, disease and squalor. The technological advances that it sponsored, including advances in medicine and public health, represented a new stage in the reconstruction of the world in terms of reason. It paid for this, however, with the physical and spiritual lives of the poorest and most vulnerable in society, and the spiritual lives of everyone. We need not list the brutalities, the pain of the poor in the 19th and 20th centuries, this is already an infamous, violent story.

We have to realise that each epoch in the history of human civilisation brings with it not just external changes – technology, social and economic administration and fashion – but internal, social psychological changes as well. It also brought about what Marx would consider to be spiritual orientations. Capitalism brought with it changes in the way that people think about theirselves, their relations with each other and the world they lived in and this amounted to Spiritual reflection on things like what is good, true, lovely and loving, and what is sacred.

Marx believed that internal, conscious life, as well as what we called the human Spirit, was a reflection of the way that a people worked to produce a world. Let’s take life in medieval times for most ordinary people. This was undoubtably often very harsh. Nevertheless also people lived within a form of connectedness to each other, their world and their God which Capitalism seemed to have left behind. The medieval economy was rooted in the ownership and cultivation of the land. The ordinary sort were poor, but because of the way the economy and technology was arranged, they each at least owned and controlled a strip of land, the tools they used to farm it, and as long as they gave service or portion of produce to the manor, had the freedom to exploit their land as they would.

This situation, of what we now term a feudal economy created a setting for a strongly developed sense of vulnerability, as well as dependence, and interdependence. This is reflected in a powerful sense of the fear of, and dependence upon, the sacred in an environment of constant attention to how things could almost instantly go wrong. The fragility of the environment bred an attention to the character of the physical world reflected in the multitude of spiritual presences that they saw occupying, for eg, wells and copses, saints bones and statues. There is a connectedness in this world of people both to the land and each other, that was all drawn into a sense of the immanence of the sacred and the mystical, the enchanted-ness of this world and people around them, in a unified, hierarchical, spiritual order ending in God.

Capitalism broke up this old order because it had its roots in, amongst other ways, a new way of making a living. The new middle classes – the yeoman, the gentleman, the burgher, the higher educated administrative staff of aristocratic estates and the merchants, amongst others – less and less made their living collectively. They became, over time, much more individualistic, not relying so much on blood ties (the aristocratic family), ties to the land and ancient prerogative and monopolies, nor upon common land tenure farming interdependencies or trade guild. Rather, they were wealthy enough to stride out on their own.

These presided over the enclosures of the 16th century onwards, where ancient grazing and farming rights on 1000’s of acres of common land, were cut across, ignored and just trampled on as powerful land owners seized the land to take it into usage that they determined were more efficient. Hundreds and thousands, perhaps millions were displaced over these years, they had to leave behind their little strips of land, their tools and so on, and become little entrepreneurs themselves in the new urban centres where the factories, the mills and the forges and mines now were. Of course these people now had nothing to sell in their little ‘enterprise’ but their own labour which they sold, in circumstances of huge power imbalances, to the owners and controllers of the machinery, the mines, mills and factory units.

The power of capital is one rooted in the economic requirements of individual entrepreneurs striding out to establish businesses. It puts businesses in competition with one another and individuals with one another competing for status and position within capitalist enterprises. Latterly making money has been dependent upon lots of customers striving individualistically to obtain what they can regardless of the needs or requirements of the rest of society.

And so we, under capitalism, we become much more disconnected, our economic reality has different psyche/spirituality in which the individual independent of the community, instead of the individual within and obtaining its identity within the community, is most important. With disconnection from each other and the land our intuitive sense of the sacred is inner/individualised, more emotional and fleeting. We feel ourselves to have become a much less spiritually sensitive and more alienated from God, our world and each other. If we go to church we chose our church like we chose where to shop. We have a highly individualised notion of salvation whereby the individual is either condemned for their unbelief or exalted for their belief, punished or rewarded by God, in abstraction from the fate of other people. And God himself is like a grand individual rather than the society of the Trinity, for instance.

Capitalists are those who used their money to generate more money, or capital. They used their money to invest in merchantable commodities or enterprises of production to make even more money. Those who had nothing to sell except their own bodies and labour worked for them. But everyone in capitalism is ultimately a slave to the market unless one they generate a monopoly and control the market.This ‘slavery’ is vital to grasp and important for understanding the sort of ‘spirituality’ left to people under capitalism.

The whole way in which people now worked – whether together or apart according to new divisions of labour – allowed for little self autonomy or creativity and was rigidly supervised and regulated according to abstract clock times in 14 or 12 hour shifts. This was because it was determined ultimately by shifts and movements in the market. Even nowadays, perhaps especially nowadays, people have little control over the greater portion of their waking time, but have to sell their labour to companies who manufacture according to what people are prepared to spend their money on in the market. What your skills or potential capacities are, what would develop you as a human being or especially bring you close to your neighbour and your God, is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the requirements of the market and if that means ringing out the last vestige of your creative capacity by attaching you to pulling a lever up and down for 8-10 hours a day, then so be it.

The crucial matter for Marx in his understanding of human spirituality was the degree of freedom they had to make a life and living with each other, through a particular stage of technological development; to freely dispose of their work and creativity with one another in making a world, a way of life and an understanding of the meaning of things: what is good and true and sacred. This could be, according to capacities, anything from whittling a piece of wood into an ornament, to using thought and application to farm land, building a wall or a house; to writing a poem, drawing pictures on a cave wall, composing a symphony, designing a cathedral etc, etc – all of this put each human spirit in touch with each other, the world and God, in a way that drew from individuals potentially endless new capacities, abilities, skills, ways of thinking. It expanded the limit of one’s understanding, the sensitivity of one person to another, to their the world, and even to an appreciation of art and other various incarnations of the divine in the world.

So, for this potentially infinite series of capacities to have become reduced to pressing buttons on a production line or shifting pieces of paper from one desk to another according to the latest consumer fashion, represents the greatest spiritual deprivation in the history of humanity. It’s worse because for the first time in human history the capacity for changing the world in accordance with the requirements of human spirituality, now exist. But instead in this topsy turvy world human spirituality is made subservient to the mechanism that serves the market. Religion would never be the same again.

Marx saw, in this sense, that Capitalism was rapaciously sacrilegious and represented the very heart of the process of secularisation. He wrote in ‘The Communist Manifesto’
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe”.

Anyone who studies the period has a vision of some of the horror of industrial Manchester or Birmingham, or the fiery Hades that became of the green valleys of South Wales as coal, copper and the iron in its veins were mined to be commodified and sold.

Interestingly many conservatives of the period, such as Matthew Arnold and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were also extremely concerned by what they saw as the philistinical rapaciousness of capitalism as de-sensitising and de-spiritualising human beings, rather than honing their sensitives to the appreciation of beauty. Coleridge, seeing that the Church was not able to capture the imagination of most of these new industrial urbanites, actually advocated forming a new Church that evangelised a canon of the greatest expressions of national literature and poetry – Milton, Dryden and Donne for example – with its own priests to go out and civilise, by these means, this new, coarsened industrial proletariat.

Arguably the Church was making little progress and losing its position at the centre of British cultural life, at least in part because it was seen as representing a ruling class that just wanted to lecture and hector about behaving properly, working hard and being obedient. But there was also something more subtle going on. The sensitivities of people to some kind of transcendent presence in and as the world around, was fading through the coarse of modernity, and the imagination saw the spiritual less in and as things as in an invisible reality running parallel to material reality. For ordinary people the earth reality they lived in felt spiritually evacuated, it was a banal, grey industrial landscape. It was not only the smoke from the factory chimneys that did this. Since so few ordinary people were able to apply their actual powers of creative engagement, and realise potential powers, by actually engaging with one another to freely create a world, they became alienated from that world. It was like something that was inevitable, that went on without them and had little to do with them.

The romantic movement also baulked at the reduction of material reality to a spiritually evacuated husk in which everything was reduced to things that can be measured, quantified, assessed for monetary value, packaged and commodified. They tried to re-enchant the world with art. They saw a superficiality spreading out over the world, with the absence of beauty as coarsening the human spirit and making it less receptive to moral formation. Art would revivify this drab, scientifically, industrially and capitalistically, reduced world and open the human spirit to greater sensitivity, greater spiritual sight, and an appreciation of the spirit immensity in and as the material.

There was something of this in Marx as well. But while the romantics sometimes seemed to live and speak as though you could beautify and re-sensitise the world whilst retaining the same economy based on private ownership of the means of production – perhaps legislate for better conditions of education, for instance – Marx considered that while a society was still based on private ownership of essential things, there would always be pressure to sacrifice the spiritual betterment of the majority, to the owners need to compete. They would need to carve out new markets, and obtain more labour for less investment, either making human beings work harder for less money and worse conditions or making them redundant altogether in favour of new machinery. The only answer was some form of public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, where surpluses from what is produced could be directed toward the the spiritual development of the whole society, starting with basic physical conditions of work and rest, and ending with plowing resources into education, instruction, experimentation and so on, all in the effort to help develop humanity toward full maturity.

Christianity has always, also been about the utilisation of God’s gifts in bringing all humanity to salvation. From its beginning, the Church was orientated to hope of an imminent new heaven and a new earth in which there would be social and economic justice for all. If there is a call for obedience and hard work it is ultimately for these ends. It is about one day entering the promised land, which one Iesua-Ben-Iusef preached in terms of “the Kingdom” and thus did he pray,‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. Do we hear that ‘on earth’? Marx was an atheist because of what he saw as the impoverishment of the Christianity of his time. They talked of heaven as a disembodied state after death. They talked of the Kingdom come but as something impossible for human beings to produce, way beyond human imaginative capacity to picture. Then and now it was too often a dry, moralistic, pious ‘Churchyality’ that leaves world pretty much as it found it. Does the Church preach a salvation, then, that really speaks to the longings and hopes of ‘the oppressed creature’?

I’ll end with a difficult question: does our Christianity take the form it does, run by people more or less like us, for people more or less like us, because we and especially the people who run the Church are actually pretty well off and therefore in no hurry to have the world fundamentally change in the way that someone at the lowest end of our society would be? We are basically satisfied that our Christianity is just about worship and charitable social action (all very important in itself), and so were the Victorian Christians who taught a Gospel message of good behaviour, obedience and piety, as Christianity per se, rather than just the expression of the Christianity of one group in society. But these also benefitted enough from the way the economy was arranged not to fundamentally want to change it. Perhaps there are many, who don’t even think about the Church at the moment, whose lives are poor, crime ridden and hard, or stressful, drab and meaningless, living two steps away from penury, working all the hours just to satisfy bullying bosses etc, etc, – who may respond more positively to a Christianity that preached the kingdom as something that God wants to come now, is imaginable and possible by our hand through the power of God? I still think Marx might have something to teach us?

I took this picture in September 2015.

 I was walking through Museum Square when I saw this rainbow. I changed my position to centre the rainbow over the church and took a quick photo on my phone. At the time it reminded me of the verse in Genesis 9 verse 13 “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.”

The rainbow has been a symbol of many things in the past and has taken on a new role during our present crisis. We can only wonder how it must have appeared to early humans when, for no apparent reason, a beautiful band of colour appeared in the sky and then just as quickly vanished. The idea that it conveyed some sort of message would have been strong and for the early Israelites its connection with the story of the Flood made it a symbol of God’s continuing care for his people which was expressed in the Covenant.

Whilst some gaze in wonder, others seek to analyse. Isaac Newton, in lockdown at Woolsthorpe Manor whilst Cambridge University was closed because of the Plague, converted a room to study light. In his 1666 experiment he showed that white light could be split into rainbow colours by a prism. From this the  suggestion that raindrops acting as prisms split sunlight into the colours of the Rainbow rapidly gained acceptance in the West, an idea that had been suggested 200 years earlier by Islamic scientists.

Four hundred years later the controversy surrounding the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial brought the writing of D.H. Lawrence to prominence and I along with many other students at the time read Lawrence’s ‘The Rainbow’ and saw in it an escape from what we saw as the constraints and constrictions of Victorian morality. Interestingly a similar level of controversy was caused within the Church by the publication of ‘Honest to God’ by John Robinson Bishop of Woolwich which challenged Christians to re-examine traditional concepts and beliefs.

In 1995 South Africa won the Rugby World Cup just a couple of years after the end of Apartheid. Nelson Mandela, the County’s first black President, in his speech to the victorious team, spoke of his country as a “Rainbow Nation”, a term first coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the post- apartheid elections in 1995. The idea that a wide range of races, tribes and clans could be united in the same way that the different colours unite to make up the Rainbow made this an appealing metaphor. The new Republic’s flag used colour to represent this diversity.

The idea that the Rainbow could represent diversity in areas other than race and ethnicity has since been adopted in other areas, particularly in the realm of gender and sexuality. This use is well illustrated by this image which accompanied an online article entitled ‘The sexuality rainbow: a colourful and educational glossary. 

In reality however, the flag is incorrect both as a representation of a rainbow and also as a visual metaphor in that the bands of colour have hard edges, whereas in a true Rainbow the colours vary continuously and one cannot tell where one ends and another begins.

In the last few weeks images of the Rainbow has taken on a new meaning as way of showing support for our NHS and other Care Workers as they battle with the Corona Virus. We are now very familiar with brightly coloured children’s drawings and paintings in windows and on notice boards created to show how much we appreciate those in the front line of the battle against the pandemic. I have no idea how this image came to be chosen for his purpose but I wonder if some kind of folk memory connects it with the sense of God’s over-arching protection from Genesis.

In the last three weeks I have been part of a small online group working to devise a new formula to calculate the Parish Share, which distributes the cost of the Clergy between the Churches of our Deanery. People tell me this is one of the best ways to lose friends but fools rush in …

 In this exercise we have amassed a great deal of data about approaches to this, both within the Diocese and in other Dioceses. This has shown a variety of approaches and has also brought home to me the tremendous variation in size, churchmanship and history of our Churches even within our one Deanery. Finding a solution which recognises these differences and yet is accepted by all as reasonable will be a challenge but I think the image of us as a Rainbow Deanery varied, but part of a single whole, might help us particularly if we imagine the Rainbow over St. Peter’s stretching to arch over the Churches and people of our Deanery.  A similar concept could help us as we try to understand and value the wide range of structures and patterns of worship within the Church of England.

Keith W Aplin LLM.  St Peter and Paul Wisbech, 28^th of April 2020, Day 39 of the Lockdown 

We’re busy doing nothing
Working the whole day through
Trying to find lots of things not to do.

We’re busy going nowhere
Isn’t it just a crime?

We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time?

These words (and I apologise if this song now becomes an ear worm for you) were sung by Bing Crosby, William Bendix & Cedric Hardwicke and featured in the film A Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur’s Court. (1948)Somehow, the words seem appropriate and inappropriate at the same time for our current circumstances. For those who are working from home, there is the daily juggle between the demands of work together with other domestic responsibilities. Those that are in lockdown, are probably getting close to suffering from a form of cabin fever and for others their days have become busier as they try to get through that endless list of jobs that they have been promising themselves that they will get around to ‘one day’.The lockdown has highlighted how we need to re-set our expectations of ‘normal life’ and what is achievable at the moment. As with anything to do with major changes in our lives, especially those over which we have little or no control, it requires both a mental and an emotional adjustment. If you are a natural ‘doer’ then life will be very frustrating at the moment, but we can learn a lot from those who work quietly in the background, supporting and nurturing other people. It is so easy to criticise others for not doing what you think they should be doing, and imposing ourexpectations on other people, but as I have said before, we all have different skills, gifts and personalities, and we should be using all of those in the best way we can.There are rarely any times in life when we are truly doing nothing. Even when we are sleeping, the brain is still working and our vital organs are still doing their job. When we collapse on the sofaat the end of the day, the mind is still ticking over (sometimes a bit too much). In the same way, God never ceases to be at work in our lives. He isn’t only available when we have the time to remember this. There is never a time when He is busy doing nothing!And when we think we are doing nothing, there is much that we are doing. If we are truly able to turn our whole beings to God, and we are bringing ourselves, our tasks and our concerns, into his ways, then our life becomes a continual prayer of offering. We are called to BE Christians and followers of Christ – the doing will follow!

A prayer before going to sleep
God our Father, by whose mercy the world turns safely into darkness and returns again to light:we place in your hands our unfinished tasks,our unsolved problems, and our unfulfilled hopes,knowing that only what you bless will prosper.To your love and protectionwe commit each other and all those we love,knowing that you alone are our sure defender,through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen Church of South Ind

What world shall emerge at the end of all this pain, worry and the upturning of our present world? We should not be deluded, there are strong forces that want to resume business as usual. But of course for a time they will have no choice, for there will just be chaos and consternation. There will be vast problems with unemployment, businesses that simply did not make it through and people who are milling around terrified at how they will pay the bills and so on. The most typical reactions of governments are likely to be pouring vast amounts of money into welfare and unemployment benefit. 

All the old tabloid staple about undeserving wretches taking free money to sit around and play computer games may or may or not be present but if there ever was such vast numbers of wasters who deserved to be left in penury until such times as they were willing to accept a paltry wage for some spiritually evacuated, repetitious dead end for forty hours a week, now there will be many more of us until things can be brought back to some level of equilibrium . That was those papers function of course. They were there to help ensure that the large number of nothing jobs, vital to the economy were not left unfilled. They were there to bully those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder into taking them. It would be nice to think that as obnoxious as, say, Daily Mail reporters could be in their nasty reductionistic portraits of the more wretched end of our society, that at least they had some kind of moral purpose in calling out socially irresponsible leeching off the state, Sadly that was never really their main function.The state was never going to run into the ground because of any minority of people whose upbringing or mental instability left them without the moral resources to find work like most others. But it might have serious problems if the population didn’t have a regular supply of scapegoats or pour their secrete self hatred and guilt upon, and perhaps finally to fill up the jobs that no one who didn’t have to would touch with a long pole.

Business as usual was exploitative, grossly unequal and profoundly unjust. In some ways it was better than many of the ways in which as a society we made a living before. But don’t relax into some morally complacent bubble and think that just because you weren’t doing back to back shifts in some dog meat factory then everything was as good as it was going to be. This wasn’t just how the world is, it was how we, as a society, chose to make our world. There were many who had the power to change things that certainly would not because while present circumstances enriched them, a serious upturning of those circumstances in favour of something more just, in which the social product was used to benefit people more widely, might not enrich them quite so much.

The people who were the victims of what I was talking about above were possibly some of the worst treated and purposely left as the least understood people in the system, but there were many, many others who didn’t suffer quite so much but who the system still regularly belittled, defeated and just left plain badly off. Sometimes it might have been you. Those who just about never suffered the ‘fag end’ of its treatments were the very rich whose interests therefore always lay in the preservation of things just as they are. And this was a particular problem since these were some of the few people who were capable of changing things.

All societies are, to put it in religious terms, riddled with sin. This is the sort of sin that cannot be so easily focused in individual human beings. It lives in the structure of things, the very language we speak, the signs and symbols through which we see reality. There are notions of what is the right and proper thing to do, the things that are worthy of wanting, and the things that are worth living for, that because they are in the structure of things that we imbibe with our mothers milk, seem so obviously true and right that it is common sense. We would rarely think to challenge these, at least as long as we are not seriously mistreated and left bruised and in pain by them, and then their provisional, not so obvious status might be drawn a little more to our attention. But these structures are nearly always partly grounded in truth, partly in the propaganda of self justification of that group of people who are chiefly responsible for shaping all our cultural world views, ie, those with the time and money to release themselves or their children to be the artists, the poets, the philosophers and academics and, yes, the priests. It’s not an accident that a hugely disproportionate number of priests in the Church of England, particularly the senior clergy, the Cathedral clergy and the chaplains of the great universities, are overwhelmingly middle class. 

No society avoids the self delusions that allow these fault lines in human culture to thrive, but there are societies who are more or less self critical and self reflective. The people in a society who do the reflecting are never more important than in a  crisis, and perhaps especially when they work to envisage what may lie on the other side of a crisis. The things that business as usual before crisis broke out, always insisted were impossible, and the stuff of idealist daydreams, suddenly become possible because the old ways of doing things have been turned upside down anyway. It was said only a little while back that it was easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism and certainly it seemed like Hollywood had an easier time culturally preparing us for armageddon when it came, than with the upturning of the capitalism that the industry so benefited from. It has produced little of imaginative insight lately to give us a picture of what might follow in the aftermath. Well, now it is indeed possible to envisage very different and better ways of live. It will be a sin against God if we do not learn from what has happened and do not try to picture a better, more just and kind way of living together. It is the responsibility of every generation of Christians to do what they can to make their society a thing as close to the kingdom of God as it is possible to be. Well, here is our opportunity to reproduce our little world accordingly. It will be a missed opportunity of the most staggeringly immoral kind to return to business as usual.

                         John 10 vs 3 ‘He calls his own sheep by name.’

Can you imagine being a sheep?This is, perhaps,more difficult for men because not only is it an interspecies imagining, it is an intergender one as well. Rams are notoriously anti social so, for our purposes, you are a ewe.

And you are out on a fell, or in a nicely hedged meadow, or, God forbid, being asked to browse on stinky brussel sprout stalks. And, here we draw obvious parallels with Spring 2020, you are prone to a multitude of nasty diseases. You’re not too fond of ravens either or dog walkers’ dogs.

Yet you have a guardian who calls you by your name. And loves you. At lambing time your guardian and protector will stay up all night, every night, to ensure the safety of everyone in your flock. And will tend your children as of they were their own.

When you eat sweet grass no wolf will harm you; when you are becalmed in the snow, hungry and weighed down, you will be fed and sheltered. Annoying flies will be kept at bay and, most of all, you will know who you belong to. You are marked with their sign.

We humans see ourselves as shepherds, and sometimes we are. And sometimes we are more of a liability to a world in our care than a defence.

Yet in God’s eyes we are sheep. It is the most extraordinary thing that Jesus calls you, me, and the couple next door by name. In God’s eyes you are an individual, but an individual in a flock. You do not need to earn God’s attention, you cannot, by purity of breeding, command more, and you cannot be so riddled with disease that you are written off.

What value, though, is there in being called if you don’t hear. Jesus, in our Gospel, talks about sheep ignoring the voice of strangers. If only human beings had the sense of a sheep. If only we could understand the mortal danger of not being able to distinguish the voice of the shepherd from the voices of those who would take us down paths of their own devising.

In our life of the spirit there are many thieves and bandits but only one shepherd. In these times we have plenty of reasons to be fearful yet we are handed one gift-that of quietness as the normal world is cancelled. In the quiet, perhaps, we can grasp an opportunity. We can hear a gentle shepherd’s voice calling us by our name.

Then, surely, God’s goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life.

Amen

       

                                  Passover Eve A.D.33  A soldier talks.

It was a bloody awful day; that is, it was bloody and a day to be remembered but in remembrance more like night.

Which is not to say we didn’t do our job well-we kept our pride if nothing else, proud to be Caesar’s peacekeepers and to do what is required.

The things I’ve seen; you have to think that it’s just my job and not so bad now-not like my father’s father’s days of wading in Gaulish fields thick with Gaulish blood.

Word came that it was a political-done as a favour for some priest. It takes, they say, all sorts.

And politicals are not so bad, show trials serve a purpose what with the beating and spitting-roll up for the theatre of the damned.

Another sparrow legged hothead ridiculed and lost, for once, for words, Caesar’s cat has got his tongue.

Not like the thieves. Poor wretch to be a thief under a pitiless law. Each with a story disregarded by due process. Men like you and me. There but for the grace of God.

But I digress.

It’s a routine, choreography if you like, though never two the same.

The thorns for instance, they were new, taken from acacia thickets where you wouldn’t send a dog.

Kings with such crowns fail to see the irony.

Blinded they fall but not this man.

He was in Hell but not our Hell-more a Universe he had wrapped into himself to overwhelm. We, with our rods and mockery were just a passing thing.

Destiny,I am convinced, hung from wood that day.

We rolled dice but there was no joy in it.

                                                  

Easter Day 1960

Three score years ago, when Eastertide began,

I wore my new white shirt and, joyful sang.

Lent then a memory set aside, no more kneeling quiet

On cold stone floor, and sweets restored

To the diet.

Each year the same, a week preceding of holy high emotion;

Palm Sunday’s Passion read, Good Friday’s devotion,

And familiar faces, familiar phrases and the stately rhythm

Of ecclesia in stasis

Now all is interrupted; should I mourn those days,

Those Easters past, when I imperviously praised

My risen King in hallowed sacramental story,

And would sing, supernal anthems echoing,

Thine the glory.

No, we must believe our Lord is here despite our isolation,

And venture within ourselves to hear his words of consolation

To Mary, and mind that it is to every soul he’s talking.

We’re not confined, and we will find him

In our garden, walking.

                                          19^th April 2020 Easter 2

I wandered lonely as a cloud,

That drifts along in azure air,

When all at once I saw a crowd

Of dandelions, flowering where

They’re considered plants of little worth.

An interesting flower, though,feminist,

Males having been found superfluous.

Its blooming and seeding all consist,

Parthenogenetically virtuous,

Of an altogether virgin birth.

Each dandelion fruits as a crown

Of symmetry, pure and crystalline.

Each facet light as thistledown-

Built as a clock they then combine

To scatter from a small child’s mirth.

Is it too much to suggest a parallel

With Christ new risen from the dead,

And with seeds of the hope that conquered Hell;

Not born to die but dispersed instead.

To settle on a waiting Earth.

The character in my story looks for certainty, chiefly the certainty that all will be well. This is what we all want of course but have learnt to ignore the desire to know to a degree since we come to realise as adults that in this world no such certainty is available to us.

People of religious faith often are motivated by the need to see God in the face as it were. We are taught in our faith that even if it was possible for us nevertheless it would not be good for us. Even the God of Jesus Christ is the God who would not show himself to Moses face to face. Nevertheless there are Christians who would want a direct, immediate, unmediated experience of God, God as he really is rather than some representation of him by someone else; by the Church. To have such an experience would be to see absolutely the meaning of things; how all things come together for our good. The question ‘why?’ arrests us at the hardest times, but the vision of God would answer all such questions and supply the reassurance that we are desperate for in the most difficult days of our life.  It would be to see beyond death, and to know absolutely that our loved ones who perhaps are dying, or have even died, yet live; we will see that we will live after death and there will be no more doubt, the fear and uncertainty regarding life and death that underlies and seems to burden our whole existence will be banished. We will have peace.

I don’t know why God has made it so that this ‘vision’ is an impossible ambition in this life, but he has. We are can only know God via media, via words, symbols, language, the testimonies of other people and all these being various media of the the witness of the first Christians. None of this is certain, it is a basis for faith. In ordinary times such faith is relatively easy. In times such as we find ourselves in at the moment it becomes much harder. And there are many people who are grieving at this time for whom faith, if they have had any at all, becomes a much more difficult thing to sustain.

There is something necessary about our uncertainty. And what has been taught since the beginnings of the faith, is that a part of that necessity has to do with fostering a sense of dependancy upon God. To have a self contained certainty regarding God and all the most essential things would be to obtain a sense that we no longer need God nor anything else. We are made to live from God as a constant source of life just as we live from food and water. And just as this living from food is no sort of impediment to life but a source of enjoyment, living from God, in full dependancy upon God, so that we go back to him every day, is joy and peace.

There will be times of uncertainty and there is nothing to be gained from underplaying how hard it is to live without the certainty of the love of God when we or those we love are in danger or taken from us. Then there is heart break and devastation and some of us will feel that we are taken to a dark, dark place  from which we will never return. That darkness is black as pitch. But men and women have been brought back even from here. It may take time; it does take time, but people who place their broken hearts into the hands of God do come home.

Practically speaking the route would be, as far as any of us are able, through prayer, through reading of scripture, through study of the word. Study of the word is not a popular aspect of all this but for me, through theology and philosophy, it is a matter of getting to know, more and more deeply, someone that I love. And by getting to know more, I love more.

But there are times when the heart no longer has the energy even to pray, at least not in the most formal sense. I remember that Lynn had trouble thinking about prayer in any other way than the most formal way and thought her connection with God must be severed if she can no longer find the will to do that. But it is not so. We remember Augustine’s words: ‘pray as you can, not as you can’t’. This must extend all the way to sighs of the heart, the reflexes of emotional pain. The most authentic prayer is a cry of desperation in the night. We are told that we are heard.To all of you I wish God’s blessing and that we all come through this strange and, for many, this painful and fearful time. Remember that we are made to live from God each day, one day at a time. But you are only called ti remember that as best you can, speak it in you heart, long for God’s pea

Some thoughts for Low Sunday, on which I would have been preaching

In the Aplin household now the children have all left home, breakfast is normally a solitary meal. Whichever of us gets up first lets the dog in and prepares their own breakfast whilst the other uses the shower. Then roles are reversed and so we both eat alone. (Although we eat together for all other meals.)

However, on Easter Sunday morning, I laid the table for us to eat together and I did it properly, hotel style, with matching cutlery, crockery etc. The meal was to be boiled eggs and toast, the last two eggs we had, which I had decorated with permanent marker pens. For drinks we had orange juice and then cups of tea. In addition, there were two chocolate oranges as I couldn’t get Easter Eggs as we are self-isolating.

At ten past eight as we ware cracking the eggs, we turned on the radio to hear Archbishop Justin celebrate the Easter Eucharist in his kitchen. We both found the service very moving, as we quietly continued our meal. The music chosen was beautiful and the message from our Archbishop was both uplifting and profound and exactly right for these very difficult times.

When we came to the communion, as Archbishop Justin said the words “take eat this is my body which is broken for you” Eileen broke off a corner of her toast and passed it to me and we both ate a small piece of toast. Like wise at the words “This blood is the new covenant in my blood” we both took a sip from our glasses of orange. This was entirely spontaneous; we had not planned this at all. We continued to the end of the service, joining in the prayers and hymns as best we could and by the end, we both felt very blessed.

Later I reflected on whether we had in fact, taken part in a communion service. The bread had at least been bread but the orange juice was not wine and neither element had been consecrated. Nonetheless I felt particularly close to God at that point which is one meaning of communion. There was also a wonderful sense that God had come into our home and was sharing the meal with us.

We will all I am sure, be very keen to get back to worshipping in our churches as soon as it is decided that this is safe to do so and we will be pleased once again to celebrate the Eucharist as it should be celebrated; but I shall cherish this memory, hoping that it will help me to remember that Christianity is not some thing that just goes on in churches but must spread into our homes and all aspects of our daily lives.

I shall think of it particularly when we read of Jesus meeting the disciples at the lakeside and sharing fish with them as I believe that just for a few moments Eileen and I shared in that experience.

Truly for us that Easter morning service was one of the most nourishing things that has come out of the Archbishop’s kitchen in a very long while.

Keith Aplin LLM.

Parish Church of St Peter and Paul Wisbech, 13^th April 2020 the 26^th day of self-isolation