Tag Archives: christianity

IT’S NOT DARK YET BUT I’TS GETTING THERE

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I fully identified and completely understood King Charles, some weeks ago, when he was confronted with the pitiful pile of children’s shoes, on Holocaust Day, and said it was something he would never forget. I had visited the holocaust gallery at the British War Museum and the Yad Vashem remembrance centre in Jerusalem, but it was being in Auschwitz, Oświęcim in 2012 that did it for me. I saw the railway carriage, the mountain of shoes and false teeth, the bullet ridden wall, I stood in the chamber with the ovens when the young Polish guide asked us to be silent out of respect for those who were incinerated there and I stood at the end of the rail line, when she told us to be careful where we stood, because the ground was covered with the powdered bones and dust of the million souls murdered in this place. It was April, but there was no sign of Spring. The trees were dark and bare and there was no bird song to lighten the awful silence. The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I realised then, in a way I had never understood before, that there was no end to evil. Given a free reign, evil in the human heart descends further and further into an abyss of total darkness. It was like looking over a pit and knowing there was no bottom. Any faith I had in humanity could never be recovered. I too would never forget.

All these memorials are helpful but we really don’t need reminders. We saw it, just this week, on full display to all the world, the abomination of naked evil. The choreographed parade, the giant displays, the stage, the mock signing of documents, the celebrating crowd, the cameras and in the centre the bodies of the murdered family, the mother, the nine year old son and the four year old child lying on the platform locked in black coffins. All was black and grey even the sun couldn’t bear to look at the scene and hid it’s face. The sky was embarrassed. This too I will never forget.

The holocaust, however, was then. This is now. That was our “never again”. This is the now reality of evil. There can be no rational, political or sociological explanation for the utter depravity on view. And its roots are in the oldest of hatreds morphed, as Jonathan Sachs lucidly explained, from hatred against the religion through hatred against the race to hatred against the nation and it comes from the very pit of hell.

The main-line news has to sanitise their reports, of course. It has to fit the narrative and so every effort must be made to soften the impact and whiten what is, in reality, irredeemably black. They don’t show you the crowds of men, women and children, some in their father’s arms, shouting cheering and singing over the bodies of the murdered children and later dancing on the stage as if it was their graves. This is a new level of wickedness. The Nazis’ tried to hide their crimes, here they are openly celebrated. And this is what is truly sickening.  When, what looks like, ordinary folk with families of their own, taking part, joyfully it seems, in such a macabre spectacle, any sense of humanity goes down the drain. And I wonder if those who protest on our streets every Saturday actually know who they are supporting.

Terrible as it may sound, I have no faith in humanity. If I had, I lost it and nothing could restore it now. But I do have faith in the one who created humanity, who became humanity, who lived perfect humanity and by his sacrifice made it possible for us unhuman: murderers, liars, cheats, mockers idolators, adulterers, abusers, thieves, slanderers, swindlers, or just decent folks to be made truly human, in him.

HISTORICAL GUILT

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The denomination to which our local church belongs recently found it necessary to carry out an audit and examine what links the church may have had with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.  As a relatively newcomer in the denomination, I was unaware of the controversy, that dated back to the early days of the church, which was founded in 1843. What at first was puzzling was that Slavery had already been outlawed in the antis-slavery act ten years earlier (though this only covered part of the British Empire) and it seemed strange that the church could be complicit in slavery when it was still unborn.  The reason for the controversy, however, was explained, by a visit which a delegation from the new church made to the American South in 1846. This group which included Thomas Chalmers were seeking the support of churches in America and you can understand why a secessionist movement would get a great deal of sympathy in the South. The delegation returned with a not insignificant gift of £3,000, but many within and out-with the church considered this money to be “tainted” as it likely came from slaveholders and a campaign to “Send the Money Back” was initiated. Fredrick Douglas, the abolitionist, was a strong and vocal advocate for the campaign, and lent his support while in Scotland, which included an attempt, with others, to carve the slogan on the cliffs of Salisbury Crags. His portrait now graces a wall in Gilmore Place, close to where he once lived. But the “blood money” was never returned. How the church resolved this at the time, I am not sure, but I suspect that a degree of pragmatism was involved. Even if an error was acknowledged, returning the money would not have helped the cause of those still enslaved in any practical way.

But why, more than 150 years after the event, the issue has now had to be revisited?  It seems strange in the extreme. Afterall, the history of these events has been well known to the church and this assessment could have been done at any time. Why now?  And why is that while the history of this hideous trade has been taught in school and accepted for what it is a heinous sin in our nation’s history, one on which there was national admission of guilt, repentance, the passing of anti-slavery laws and the costly efforts to have the trade banished world-wide, why now is there to be a another reckoning? 

Is it simply to do with the way these things come in waves in the public consciousness?  I remember in the 60’s the campaign for nuclear disarmament was a very hot issue, but strangely over the following decades, despite increased proliferation, the issue slipped into the background and only resurged again in the more recent decades. I remember one of my colleagues in our Architectural practice back in the early 70’s arriving at the office one day sporting a CND badge. We thought that rather quant at the time.

Could it be the very subtle infiltration of a way of thinking that owes more to Marx and Lenin than our Judeo-Christian heritage? A way of thinking that views the act of de-humanising another human, made in the image of God, not so much as a sin but simply part of the worldwide class struggle? The never-ending battle between the oppressed and the oppressor, the powerless and the powerful, the victim and the victimiser.  Guilt is not so much personal but historical and in Marxism there is no forgiveness. Czeslaw Milosz, in his classic work “The Captive Mind” which must stand alongside works by Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and Havel in exposing the depravity of totalitarian culture, explains this succinctly in a chapter entitled “Man- the enemy”. Here the real enemy of the Marxist-Leninist project turns out to be humanity itself.   

“The contradiction between Christianity and Stalinist philosophy cannot be overcome. Christianity is based on a concept of individual merit and guilt; The New Faith on historical merit and guilt. The Christian who rejects individual guilt denies the work of Jesus and the god he calls upon transforms himself into History”

The enemy then is the reactionary.

“The sin of the reactionary is argued very cleverly: every perception is orientated, i.e. at the very moment of perceiving, we introduce our ideas into the material of our observations; only he sees reality truly who evaluates it in terms of the interests of the class that is the lever of the future, i.e. the proletariat. The writings of Lenin and Stalin teach us what the interests of the proletariat are. Whoever sees reality other than the proletariat, sees it falsely; in other words, his picture of reality is deformed by the pressure of the interest of classes that are backward and so destined to disappear. Whoever sees the world falsely necessarily acts badly; whoever acts badly is a bad man; therefore, the reactionary is a bad man, and one should not feel sorry for him.”

So you can feel indifferent to the sufferings of those whose only crime is the blocking of “historical progress” and Milosz concludes :

“This line of reasoning has at least one flaw – it ignores reality”      

But I suspect there is also another reason. It is much easier and less troublesome to focus on vague historical communal guilt and show virtue over our passion for the sins, than it is to confront the brutal reality that slavery exists today. Added to that is the disturbing thought that we could in some way be complicit in and benefit from it.

My contention is that instead of wasting our efforts, handwringing and agonising over the crimes of the pasts, we should be grappling with the brutal reality of slavery today. Instead of exhuming skeletons, historic crimes, which have been acknowledged and confessed, which have been forgiven and forgotten by God, we should apply ourselves to the very real live suffering of others. I am thinking of trafficking of children, the sweat-shop factories and the mining of toxic minerals. Minerals, which are necessary for the production of our mobile phones, electric cars, and all sorts of devices, including the one that this is written on.

Crawford Mackenzie

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

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I remember being drunk once. I am not proud. It was the last evening of a field trip with fellow students in my fourth year in Architecture and we were drinking in a barge moored on the Ouse in the centre of York.  It was a riotous evening and for the first time I was right in the centre of it and shared a wonderful new-found bond with my compatriots. There was a piano on the barge and when the landlord was trying to usher us out at closing time, (there was “closing time” in those days), three of us got onto it and started to play. One of the guys was actually an accomplished Jazz player, but together it seemed we produced the most amazing thrilling. When the only guy with a car drove us home, he was also drunk, we were doing some crazy things at speed around parks and up-side streets. I remember the terrible feeling that things were now quite out of control. Finally, when we got to our accommodation, I climbed the rickety stairs to the room in the attic, which I shared with three others, and threw up in the sink.  The next day, on the journey home, I felt terribly ill.

I remembered that event, recently, when thinking about what Paul said in his letter to the Christians in Ephesus “Don’t get drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit.” We often refer to people who have had too much to drink as “being under the influence” we don’t need to say of what, we know. Paul seems to be saying don’t put yourself under the influence of strong drink, which can change your mood and your manners, sometime quite spectacularly. It can take over control of your mind and your body and your tongue, but put yourself under the influence of the Holy Spirit, let him control you.

It is not insignificant that potent alcoholic drinks, whisky brandy vodka etc are classified a “Spirits”. And you can see why. It begs the very difficult question “whose control are you under?”. Most people would answer “Me, of course, I am in control of myself” I decide, I chose to go and do and say and think. I chose to drink or not to drink. My life my choice. but if we are brutally honest with ourselves, do we really believe that? Do we really believe that we have full control of ourselves? Have we never regretted what we said or did or thought? Have we reacted in the way we wanted to:  when thrown a curved ball, when someone cuts us up on the road, when we suffer unjustified criticism, abuse, and slander or when our kind acts are returned to us with ingratitude?

When Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit, later in his letter, he puts in self-control as the final facet of the fruit of the Spirit.  And it follows that it is only under the influence of the Holy Spirit that we can have true self control.

I want to be under the influence of God’s Holy Spirit today.