Through a glass darkly

Letter from Leurbost

I am writing this on my knee in the cottage. On Tuesday afternoon. Outside the skies are grey and there has been steady rain since lunchtime. We are in Leurbost, a scattered community on Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, twenty minutes south of Stornaway.

We arrived here yesterday afternoon, driving up from Leverburgh in South Harris. I booked the cottage on-line a few months ago, but Google maps did us no favours. After what started to feel a long drive their instructions led us only to the garage and the school. Three people in the garage consulted their mobile phones to point us us in the right direction; on the left of the road on a right-hand bend after the church.

This occasional blog has never been a diary. And I am aware that I haven’t written [posted] anything for about three weeks. Partly because all the family came up to Edinburgh the week before last. It was excellent to see them. We saw Jem and family last summer, but hadn’t seen Joanna and Craig and the little girls for over a year. Amazingly it was dry and sunny, and unusually hot, all the week.  Jem assembled the new flat-packed garden furniture very competently, and we ate more in the garden than in the house. We did Edinburgh Zoo on the Monday, along with a lot of other families. The new giraffes haven’t arrived, and we failed to find the tiger[s], but there were lots of very entertaining penguins and good ice-creams. Tuesday we went to the beach at Gullane: younger family members went in the sea, we had a carry-out picnic from Cherish, those who didn’t use sun protection got a bit burned; and we ended the outing with more ice-creams.

Later in the week we all went our separate ways.Joanna and Craig and the girls went over the bridge to Fife to see Craig’s Mum. Jem and Anna went to Stirling because either Freya or Oskar is doing a school project on castles. We haven’t been to Stirling for years, but I always remember the castle there being used to stand in for Colditz in the 1955 film with John Mills and Eric Portmaf. Susie and I went down to Berwick for the day and met up with John, an old school-friend whom I hadn’t seen for about thirty years. He is remarried after his first wife died very young of leukaemia. The media is full of stuff about the importance of friends in a time of lock-down. I am grateful for an easy rapport with people I knew at school some sixty years ago.We walked a bit on the town ramparts, and then had lunch at The Maltings, the arts centre with a fine view of Berwick roofs. 

Kung: Why Priests ?

Back in Edinburgh I read Han’s Küng’s slim volume on the priesthood. I haver always struggled with the word ‘priest’, and am sceptical about the traditional Anglican dogma of ‘the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons’. Küng starts by suggesting that we no longer know what a ‘bishop’ or a ‘priest’ is. Is he primarily a liturgist ? Or a preacher ? Or an organiser ? Kung explores what he calls the ‘constants’ and the ‘variables’ in ministry:

• administration in the Church is not necessarily a full-time ministry
• the ministry of leadership in the Church is not necessarily a task for life
• the ministry of leadership in the Church is not a social position
• the ministry of leadership does not necessarily require a university education
• the office of leader in the Church does not require celibacy
• ecclesial minsters should not be exclusively masculine

It is radical stuff. We need, he argues,  a radical rethinking of the concept of ordination. The calling must not be confused with nomination by the Church to a specific community. Ordination is rather a general call to ecclesial service. It does not take away the humanity and frailty of the individual. Küng does not make any distinction between the ordination of bishops and of priests. He criticises the Catholic emphasis on being ordained “to offer the sacrifice of the mass”; and, equally, the Protestant emphasis on obedience to fixed and polemically oriented confessions of faith.

Kung envisages church leaders being elected by the community. The election of priests and of bishops would be for a fixed term with an obligatory age limit. Local communities are valid churches; subsidiarity means localised decision making, but equally a commitment to solidarity with other communities. “The old, sacralised image of the priest, inherited from the late Roman Empire … is no longer viable, either in theory or in practice.” The job of the leader is edification. Specifically preaching the word. And this may involve posing big questions rather than supplying all the answers. As I read the book I recall the late Colin Bennetts [subsequently Bishop of Coventry] saying to me before a Biahops’ selection conference: in the Church of England, you’re not being ordained to the priesthood [whatever that means]; you’re being ordained as a leadership resource within the church. Quite so !

Hebridean Journey

We left Edinburgh on Saturday morning in bright sunshine in a hired VW Golf. After a few more days we shall probably have mastered the electronic brake. First stop was coffee in Callander, full of cafes and Edinburgh Woollen Mills and shops selling home-made fudge. Readers of a certain age may want to know that this is where, once upon a time, they filmed the television series Dr Finlay’s Casebook. Second stop was The Real Food Cafe in Tyndrum, basically an up-market chippie which does excellent haddock and chips. The Rumanian waiter talked us through the complexities of ordering on-line in a time of COVID. Apart from fish they do excellent cake, but … no.

The weather darkened a bit as we climbed across Rannoch Moor and descended through Glencoe. Our first night away was in The Old Library at Arisaig, close to the sea and under new management. Arisaig is where Susie camped as a child with her family, on Alistair’s croft at Port-Na-Doran. The wife of the couple now at The Old Library is the daughter of Peter, Alistair’s cousin. It’s that sort of community. We had dinner with our good friends Mike and Wendy, who were staying in a cabin just up the road. 

Sunday started anxiously with a text from CalMac [the ferry company] saying that, “because of inclement weather conditions …”, they reserved the right to amend or cancel our ferry booking ! Fortified by a substantial Highland Breakfast we walked by the sea at Morar, on Camusdarach Beach as featured in the film Local Hero. And, as England’s Euros campaign was getting under way against Croatia, we were sitting in the car in driving rain at Mallaig waiting for the boat.

The crossing from Mallaig to Lochboisdale in South Uist is three and a half hours. The wind and rain ruled out spending much time on deck. I watched the second half of the England game. And we worked through the Saturday paper and slept in reclining seats, peering briefly at the Isle of Rum through the mists. The boat arrives on time. Lochboisdale is small and undistinguished. Rupert, our host in a very comfortable B&B, is an academic who used to lecture at uni in Aberystwyth, an expert on birdsong and bird communication.

There is time to walk into town, deserted and shop-less, for a drink at the Lochboisdale Hotel, a splendidly old-fashioned establishment overlooking the harbour. Tomorrow we continue north, towards Peter May country, to Harris and Lewis.

June 2021

The business of safeguarding

About a year ago I wrote a blog about sexual abuse, mainly of young boys, in [mainly] the Roman Catholic church. The blog was triggered by watching rather half-heartedly the film Spotlight, which focussed on the unhealthy goings-on in the Catholic Diocese of Boston, and then reading the book of the same name. The book rather left the story hanging, but church spokesmen, and they were all men, were keen to say that “lessons have been learnt”.

During these damp, cold days of May, I have discovered a new occupation; filling in Church of England Safeguarding forms. Of which there are rather a lot. After a couple of hours coaxing the multi-tasking printer into life, I am not greatly advanced. And my suspicion is that safeguarding is a growth industry sponsored by Rank-Xerox and by assorted paper manufacturers. Yes, we want children and vulnerable adults to be safe in church life. And yes, we are all too aware of some significant abuses and abusers in recent decades. But I’m not sure that this extraordinary  multiplication of paperwork is necessarily helpful.

It began with a request from the Diocese to renew my PTO [Permission to Officiate] which has run out. In order to do this, I downloaded and filled in several pages of Confidential Information Form, including a list of countries that I have lived in in the past 60 years together with the dates. I sent it off in March in a manilla envelope. At the same time I was asked to undergo the initial levels of Church of England Safeguarding Training. These are done on line, in your own time. There is a lot of general information, a plethora of abstract nouns, and some quite elementary case studies, in which you are invited to respond through MCQs [multiple choice questions]. I scored 97% in the Introductory module and 100% in the Foundations module. Which is probably about average.

The problem with this material, perhaps inevitably, is that it is all a bit black and white. And there is always a ‘right answer’ which the module requires. Spoiler alert: the standard correct response is ‘Contact your Safeguarding Officer/Advisor’; and then record the details of the episode and put what you have written into a secure [locked] filing cabinet. Good sense. Good practice.

The problem is of course that in real life pastoral situations are quite nuanced. And situations often present in an unclear manner, in the middle of a sequence of events. I think of a situation in my first charge where I discovered quite by chance that an elderly member of the congregation who lived close to the church and ‘kept an eye’ on the churchyard had been informally cautioned by the police a few years earlier for behaving inappropriately with children. Was any action  required ? And I think of being asked, usually by their wives, to sign shotgun licences for men with alcohol problems. And I think of a young man in the congregation, a friend of my daughter, who was accused by anonymous letter of ‘interfering with’ young Air Cadets; and of the grossly ill-judged way that the Air Force handled the matter. [It was a malicious accusation, and the accuser, whom I was happy to identify on the phone to the police, ended up in court.]

And I think of situations in a chaplaincy in the Diocese of Europe. The good-looking young Frenchman who arrived in church life on Sunday mornings and proved to be a great hit with some of the girls in the congregation. It was all a bit reminiscent of the film A nous les petites anglaises.

Was I right to ban him from church life ? And was it enforceable ? [Was I right in thinking that it was in part my job as chaplain to steer young christian Anglo-Saxon girls away from potentially predatory, lapsed Catholic, young Frenchmen ? I don’t think that particular issue features in the on-line Church of England Safeguarding materials.]

More disturbingly one of our African refugees, quite a recent arrival, accused a fellow African, an established member of the congregation, of raping the primary school age  daughter of another African woman. Who was away in Africa at the time. [After some serious praying and some discreet consultation in our refugee community, I wrote the whole episode down and hid the report in my filing cabinet. And did nothing beyond that. And I was grateful to get the seal of approval from the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor a few months later.]

I don’t want to come across as an elderly dinosaur who doesn’t take safeguarding seriously. But I have real reservations as to whether the church is tackling the question in the right way. The current system goes to considerable lengths to establish that I am who I say that I am. And to ensure that I do not have anything nasty lurking in my past. [A recent article in The Times suggests that the several hundred former sub-postmasters wrongly accused by the Post Office of fraud because of a seriously flawed computer system would not be allowed to work with children in Sunday School because they now have a criminal record.] But most of the better known church abusers of recent years were not hiding behind false identities or concealing criminal records. They were enabled to behave badly and ruin lives primarily because their fellow clergy couldn’t and didn’t believe that ‘they would do things like that’. The disease was cronyism in the church hierarchy. And their protestations of innocence were given credibility over the complaints of the individuals whom they abused. People like Bishop Peter Ball were given the benefit of the doubt by their peers. And then, as the tide turned, Bishop George Bell’s reputation was posthumously traduced by a committee of well-meaning people who clearly didn’t know what they were doing.

The Diocesan Safeguarding checks at least have some clear objective, the renewal of my PTO [Permission to Officiate]. More alarmingly, I have had e-mails in recent days from an Orwellian sounding organisation called PeopleSupport System. Written thus. Who asked me to log onto an unspecified website and upload details of my church pension. The e-mail was couched in the style of the Boilermakers Union minute book of c.1910. I replied to say that I assumed the communication was a scam devised by a Gavin Williamson algorithm. Which drew a hurt reply that the request came from a hitherto unknown part of the Church of England. Who were concerned to develop a National Clergy Register. In the interests of safeguarding. I couldn’t initially log on to the system because my allocated user name is orthographically illiterate. And anyone who imagines that uploading my pension details will help safeguard children and vulnerable adults, whether in the Church of England or anywhere else. must be totally barking.

What saddens me most about all this stuff is the disproportionality. During thirty-odd years of church ministry, no ecclesiastical line manager ever showed any real interest in what I was doing. No-one asked me about my prayer life. Or about my preaching. Or about my pastoral deficiencies. Bishops turned up from time to time [roughly every five years], and were generally friendly. But there was no serious attempt to assess what I was doing. And how I might do it better. I joined a peer group Appraisal scheme. And I eventually had a ‘spiritual director’ at Taizè. And I signed up for a distance-learning taught MTh. in Glasgow. But these were all personal initiatives. Rather than a conscious attempt by the church to advance and to improve my ministry.

By contrast, now that I have been more-or-less retired for eight years, a whole army of nice, well-intentioned people are employed to help me negotiate the paperwork of safeguarding. Two years ago Archbishop Justin told The Spectator that the Church of England safeguarding budget has increased from about £50, 000 to £7 million per year. I might write a grumpy letter to the Church Times. Or maybe I’ll just scratch my head in bewilderment.

May 2021

The great all-rounder

C.B. [Charles Burgess] Fry was the great all-rounder. He was an outstanding cricketer for Oxford University, Sussex, and England; who regularly topped the batting averages of his time, and who captained the England team without losing a single test. In addition, at football he was an FA Cup finalist and an England international; at rugby he played wing three-quarter for Oxford University, Blackheath, and the Barbarians; and he was, for a short time, holder of the world record for the long jump. After the First War he was closely involved with the League of Nations, and was a credible candidate to become King of Albania. His social circle included, at various times, Hilaire Belloc, P.G. Wodehouse, and F.E. Smith; and he worked in close contact with Winston Churchill and Louis Mountbatten. He might well have been a character in the eponymous Fry’s Magazine, a successful boys’ magazine of which CB was the founding editor.

On the debit side he contracted a loveless marriage to a sadistic and  tyrannical woman. He suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness. He stood unsuccessfully three times in the 1920s for Parliament as a Liberal candidate, in Brighton, and in Banbury, and in Oxford. In the mid-1930s he developed an admiration for German efficiency and punctuality, and was impressed by Hitler and by Baldur von Shirach, the head of the Nazi youth movement. It was unfortunate that this view of Hitler was set down in print in his autobiography, Life Worth Living. Which was published in 1939.

Repton and Oxford

C.B. Fry was born in 1872, somewhat improbably in Croydon. He came from a family of Sussex landowners, but bis father, Lewis Fry, worked for the Metropolitan Police. In 1885 Fry entered Repton, the Christian public school in Derbyshire. [Repton once produced a number of well-known cricketers; and two Archbishops of Canterbury, William Temple and Geoffrey Fisher, were successive headmasters there between 1910 and 1932.] At Repton Fry gained academic success, specialising almost exclusively in Latin and Greek. And he soon made his mark on the football pitch, as an athlete, and above all as a cricketer.

Fry’s longstanding weakness in maths ruled out his hopes of joining the Indian Civil Service. So, at the end of 1890 he tried for an Oxford scholarship, and was invited by Wadham College to become their Senior Scholar. Rivals whom he defeated included F.E. Smith, subsequently Lord Birkenhead, later described as having the best mind of his generation.

At Oxford Fry flourished. In his first term he won a footballing Blue and also played for England against Canada. In his second term he won a Blue for athletics, breaking both the Varsity and British records in the long jump. In the summer of 1892 Fry gained a third Blue, for cricket, taking his place in the Oxford XI which beat the supposedly stronger Cambridge side in a high-scoring game. Away from the sports fields Fry heard Gladstone deliver the first Romanes lecture at the Sheldonian; and spoke frequently at the Wadham Debating Society.

In his second year it was in athletics that Fry made his biggest mark. In March 1893, in front of a substantial crowd at Iffley Road, Fry jumped 23 feet 6.5 inches, equalling the world record. The event was much embellished by later writers. John Arlott states that CB broke the record after a substantial lunch, having poured himself a whisky and starting to enjoy an after-lunch cigar. In the event CB had equalled, not broken, the world record; and it only stood for another eleven months. But he was a top class athlete in the prime of his life. By the end of his second year, CB had appeared in county cricket, scored a first class hundred, secured two triple Blues, won an England cap at football, and equalled a world athletics record. He also secured a First [class degree] in Classical Mods. He was just twenty one years of age.

In the years that followed Fry dominated the university sporting life. He was captain of the Varsity Soccer team, President of Varsity Athletics , and captain of Varsity Cricket. He also took up rugby and led Wadham to considerable success in inter-college matches. In 1894 he scored an undefeated century in the Varsity match at Lords. In view of his all round achievements, Wadham was now often referred to as ‘Fry’s College’, and, as the saying went, it consisted of ‘Fry and small fry’.

These achievements came at a cost. While at Oxford Fry received little or no money from his parents, but his extravagant lifestyle led him deeply into debt. Which may explain why Fry, whose good looks attracted much comment – “the handsomest man of his day, a Greek god, so beautiful in face and body that he might have been wrought by the chisel of Praxiteles”, according to F.E. Smith’s biography, accepted an offer to do some nude modelling. Occasioned more by financial need than personal vanity. 

CB’s final terms also were dogged by an unreciprocated crush on a fellow undergraduate, and by the first onset of mental illness. He was in no fit state to sit his final exams. So, after four years at Oxford, CB, Wadham’s senior scholar, ended with a Fourth in Greats and mountainous debts. 

An unexpected marriage

After Oxford CB was invited by Lord Hawke to join his 1895-96 cricketing tour of South Africa. Returning to England, he missed the 1896 Olympic Games because, according to his autobiography, “no-one told me they were on”. And his cricket career stalled as, playing as an amateur, he simply could not afford to play enough cricket to earn a place in the England side. His availability was further limited when he took up an appointment as Assistant Master at Charterhouse. The job was poorly paid and prevented him from playing in many first class matches. Which remained the case until, unexpectedly, in May 1897 CB married Beatrice Holme Sumner at St Pancras’ parish church.

It was an improbable marriage. Beatie was born in 1862 to a landed gentry family fallen on hard times. In her youth she had been a celebrated horsewoman and an acknowledged beauty. But she was a headstrong, wild child. seduced at an early age by Charles Hoare, a fellow huntsman and [very] wealthy banker. Beatie was a teenager and Hoare much older with five children. No-one knows for sure why Fry, one of the most eligible men in England should want to marry a woman with two illegitimate children, a woman whose misdemeanours had been reported in detail in several national newspapers;  she was, according to her biographer,  “thirty six, greying … with cropped hair and mannish clothes.” Iain Wilton, author of the fullest biography of Fry, thinks that he was in love. Others have suggested that Beatie may have been a replacement for the mother to whom he had been so attached. Less conjecturally, it is clear that Fry benefitted financially; Hoare had set Beatie up as Manager of the Mercury, a naval training establishment for boys aged twelve to fifteen. The school was based on a 400 ton barque moored on the river Hamble.  After their marriage Charles Hoare seems to have settled money on both of them. Eight months later a baby [another Charles] was born. But the family later confirmed that he looked more like the long-term lover than the new husband.

Cricket for Sussex and England

Released from financial worries, CB flourished as a batsman. For a decade from 1898, in what some call the golden age of English cricket, he was clearly one of the best batsmen in England. In first class cricket, playing for Sussex, for the Gentlemen, and for England, he scored some 30,000 runs, averaging 50, in an era of natural wickets, mainly against bowlers of great speed or of varied and subtle spin and accuracy. From Yorkshire bowling alone he scored nearly 2,500 runs in all his matches against the county during its most powerful days, averaging over 70. In 1903 he made 234 against Yorkshire at Bradford. Next summer he made 177 against Yorkshire at Sheffield, and 229 at Brighton, in successive innings. In 1901 Fry scored six centuries in six consecutive innings, an achievement equalled only by Bradman, but across an Australian season. Fry’s six hundreds came one on top of the other within little more than a fortnight. 

Some critics thought Fry was a bit stiff, a bit wooden as a batsman. He certainly scored many of his runs on the leg side, with pulls and on-drives in an age when players were expected to drive on the off, between cover point and mid off. He was often batting in partnership with Ranjitsinjhi, the incomparable Ranji, who would have made most batsmen look plebeian. Commentators invariably remarked on the contrast between Fry and Ranji. Fry batted like a nineteenth century rationalist, exhibiting a moral grandeur, practising patience and abstinence. Ranji at the other end played like an oriental magician.

The criticism is made that Fry was not successful as an England batsman, compared with his performances in county cricket. That he was [like Graeme Hick decades later] ‘a flat-track bully’. Across 26 tests between 1899, when he opened the batting with W.G. Grace and 1912, when he captained England in the ill-fated triangular tournament, he averaged 32.18. Among contemporary England batsmen that puts him below [Sir] Stanley Jackson [test average 48.79] and Ranji [test average of 44.95] but very similar to Archie MacLaren [test average 33.87], and significantly higher than Plum Warner [test average 23.92]

The Great War and After

In the autumn of 1914 The Globe announced that C.B. Fry was one of many sportsmen volunteering for active service. In reality he did no such thing. While his two younger brothers, and many Reptonian contemporaries were all killed in the war, Fry accepted promotion to Commander in the Royal Naval Reserve, and remained at the Mercury. After the war Fry was recruited by his old friend and batting partner Ranji, who had acceded to the throne of Nawanagar in 1907, to work with him at the newly created League of Nations. In the company of Ranji [and at Ranji’s expense] Fry made several visits to India. One visit coincided with a visit by the Prince of Wales, and enabled Fry to develop his friendship with the Prince’s young naval officer ADC, Louis Mountbatten. Whose relationship with the Mercury that lasted for over fifty years.

His work with the League of Nations, standing for parliament, and helping Ranji in India kept Fry busy in the 1920a. And away from Beatie and the Mercury. But towards the end of the decade he disappeared from public view, and saw very little of his family and his friends. Fry clearly suffered an extended bout of mental illness [there had been an earlier breakdown at Oxford], leading into several years of depression. His condition may have been accentuated by an unhappy marriage and an intimidating wife. It may have been the consequence of a highly-strung temperament, a condition that affected a number of top-class cricketers. Fry’s garb became increasingly unconventional, sometimes dressing as an Indian rajah; and he was said to have been seen trotting around the streets of Brighton stark naked. A nurse was employed to look after him [[paid for by Ranji], and electric shock treatment, in itself  traumatic, was prescribed.

Journalist and commentator

Fry’s illness began to recede in the 1930s. And it was cricket that brought him back into public life after six yeas of seclusion. In 1934, with the Australians in England for the first time since the bodyline tour, Fry became a highly paid cricket commentator for the Evening Standard. For the rest of the decade Fry was a conspicuous figure around test cricket, invariably dressed in his own version of a Norfolk jacket with extra-large pockets, a broad-brimmed hat, and a broad ribbon that carried his monocle. He was the only sports-writer to have his own limousine, formerly owned by the Prince of Wales, and his own butler-chauffeur, Wignall, another larger-than-life character, who dispensed small sandwiches and champagne from a large picnic hamper..

In early 1934 the German Nazi party sought to bring British and German youth movements together, and decided that Fry might be a suitable go-between. In consequence he made two or three visits to Germany, and was much impressed by Hitler’s skill as a public speaker. Fry had a meeting with Rudolf Hess -“I thought well of him”; and tried to persuade von Ribbentrop that Anglo-German relations would be improved if the Nazis took up  cricket. There is no doubt that Fry admired the Hitler Youth Movement. Ribbentrop organised a meeting between Hitler and Fry at the Reich Chancellery, and they enjoyed an animated, wide-ranging conversation.

In 1936-37 Fry made his first ever visit to Australia, accompanying the English touring party; his first overseas cricket tour since visiting South Africa as a promising all-rounder in 1895-96. His dress on the ship out was characteristically eccentric; one day dressed as if for a Polar expedition; another day in solar topee and short leather trousers looking “as if he was about to trace the source of the Amazon”. He held forth on a wide varietv of subjects from a deck-chair on the promenade deck and was partial to demonstrating the latest dance steps. One of  Fry’s few blind-spots was music, which put him at odds with the fellow columnist and music writer Neville Cardus. One day after a long harangue from Fry over lunch, Cardus commented that “for years they had known about C.B. Fry and now they knew all about Fry BC”. It was the end of an old friendship.

After Australia and New Zealand, Fry returned home via Hollywood, where his host was his old friend, Aubrey ‘Round-the-Corner’ Smith, another Corinthian footballer and Sussex and England cricketer. Smith was a leading light in the Hollywood Cricket Club, where fellow members included Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and David Niven. Fry’s own hopes of a profitable Hollywood career came to nothing. But he much enjoyed the glamorous company of Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh and Marlene Dietrich and, above all, the red-haired Mary Astor.

In 1939 Fry published his long-awaited autobiography, Life worth Living. It was largely dictated in dressing gown and bedroom slippers to Denzil Batchelor, a younger writer and wine connoisseur, now acting as CB’s secretary. The combination of famous characters and an exotic life-story, ensured that the book received instant critical acclaim. But sharp-eyed critics detected a number of inaccuracies and wondered why the book exaggerated some of Fry’s footballing and cricketing and athletics achievements. The chapter on Hitler and favourable comments on Nazi Germany read badly in 1939; and the family thought that this aspect of the book scuppered any chance of Fry receiving a knighthood or similar honour. 

Declining years

Life on the training ship Mercury continued much as before. Charles Hoare had died in 1907, but a grim-faced Beatie continued to run the ship with a rod of iron. CB was an occasional, benevolent presence. Beatie’s fear of failure, and her intense desire to prove herself in a man’s world, drove her to act like a tyrant. Arthur Ward, a former petty officer, a powerful man, was selected by Beatie to beat the boys into submission. The punishment  regime would have excited the attention of any historical abuse commission. Young boys were marched to the gymnasium and strapped to a naval gun before being publicly caned. Often “for being a General Nuisance”. Other punishments included ‘going truck till midnight”’, which involved spending the day without food or drink at the top of the signal mast; or being deliberately  mis-matched with bigger, more powerful boys in the boxing ring. Ronald Morris, who joined the Mercury in the year Beatie died, wrote a chilling but not unsympathetic account of life on the ship, in his book The Indomitable Beatie.

After Beatie’s death in 1946 [her memorial service was attended by a clutch of senior naval officers including Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville] all the family felt a strong sense of relief. Fry struggled briefly to keep the Mercury together, but retired in 1950 to a London flat within easy reach of Lord’s cricket ground. He enjoyed returning to Oxford for lunches and dinners, and any opportunity to indulge his passion for ballroom dancing. As his health deteriorated, he enjoyed translating segments of the English hymnal into Greek and Latin verse. In December 1955 he was ambushed by Eamonn Andrews for the new television programme This is Your Life. [Did I perhaps see that programme on a friend’s tv ?] He died in hospital in September 1956 aged 84.

Envoi

Fry received little recognition from cricket’s ruling authorities during his lifetime. He never became President of the MCC. He received less attention than [Sir] Pelham Warner, though Fry was a better batsman and a more influential journalist. But after his death the tributes flowed thick and fast. One obituary said “Undoubtedly the greatest all-rounder of sport of all time – outstanding at cricket, rugby, soccer and athletics …”. Neville Cardus agreed: “He belonged to an age not obsessed by specialism … he was one of the last of the English tradition of the amateur;”. The News Chronicle obituary in said: “CB is gone to Olympus … He was the Englishman of tradition. The Englishman we would all like to be.”

His memorial service at St Martin’s in the Fields was attended by many admirers drawn from the diverse area of CB’s interests and achievements. They included five former England cricket captains, two former Olympic champions, and representatives of the worlds of politics and journalism and literature. The address was given by Harry Altham, a fellow Old Reptonian and  Oxford man. The concluding prayers were said by Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Was it the life that his early days had promised ? Was it the ‘life worth living’, that his autobiography proclaimed ?  Doubts have certainly been expressed. There are people who ask why Fry’s autobiography exaggerated all his sporting achievements. Who say that Fry as a batsman falls short of the very highest class. There are people who are convinced that Fry’s marriage to Beatie was a loveless sham, a mercenary transaction. Who say that the training ship Mercury was an unsuitable backwater for a man of Fry’s gifts. There is no doubt that CB could be self-important and pompous. And long-winded. But there is evidence too that he was a warm-hearted and generous man. The range of his accomplishments and the diversity of his talents are still unsurpassed. He was a multi-talented sportsman and a prolific writer, whose life gave pleasure to a great many people.

May 2020

Opening Up

We have now had both our COVID jabs and the world is starting to open up a little for the first time in a long time. To be honest I haven’t been unhappy with lockdown. Perhaps I am naturally Billy-No-Mates and  self-contained ? I have enjoyed reading some serious books, and trying to write something for this blog once a week. If that sounds too couch-bound, I have also been walking round or over Arthur’s Seat most days, the volcanic plug which I can see from our sitting room. And I am on a 77-day streak learning Spanish with Duolinguo. Muy bien, gracias.

A few years ago I decided to walk from Edinburgh to Berwick, which is about 60 mies or so. Not in a day, I hasten to add. So far I have walked from Fisherrow to North Berwick, which is about 20 miles, as much as I can manage in a day; and from North Berwick to Dunbar; and from Dunbar to Cockburnspath. Most of it is by the sea, and everywhere is accessible by bus from Edinburgh. But I am a bit intimidated by the stretch after Cockburnspath, along the cliffs to St Abbs Head and then onward through Coldingham and Eyemouth. The very fit looking ex-soldier who walks it on a Youtube video carried his tent with him in a hefty back-pack. But that’s not my style. I walked from Fisherrow to Gullane again the other day; it was glorious in spring sunshine.

Susie and I have also made a couple of expeditions in City Car Club cars. We don’t run a car, and I can walk to most places in Edinburgh that I want to visit. But we need to keep our hand [our eyes ?] in for a planned return trip up north in June. Our first trip was to Stenton [stane toun], a granite hill village on the edge of the Lammermuirs. Stenton is an interesting place, a medieval settlement that was once a place for buying and selling wool from the hill farms. The village has no shop and no pub.  But it does have an ancient church, now in ruins, converted into a dove-cot [doo cot], some dignified stone houses, and uninterrupted birdsong.

A couple of miles beyond Stenton, heeding into the hills, is Pressmennan Lake. In a very steep sided valley a nineteenth century land-owner dammed up the stream to create this narrow lake. The woods are managed by the Scottish Woodland Trust. There are said to be roe deer in the woods and otters in the lake, but neither made themselves known to us. We had never been there before. On a bright, sunny day we walked the length of the lake to the dam, and returned on a path higher up the side of the valley, with a picnic on a rustic bench.

After which we came home via White Castle Fort, the remains of an Iron Age fort, which was occupied from about 400 BC to about 100 AD. The fort is at close to the 700 foot contour on the northern slopes of the Lammermuirs, totally unspoilt, and close to the side of the very minor road the makes its way from Garvald to Cranshaws and Duns.

More recently we had a trip down to Peebles. The road down from Edinburgh is dreadful, all IKEA traffic and temporary roadworks. But Peebles itself is a delightful county town with the feel of a Victorian holiday resort. ‘Peebles for pleasure’ was its original tourist tag. The wide high street with a church at each end is parallel with the river Tweed, one street away and crossed by a green wrought iron bridge.

The river is wide and has footpaths on both sides. We had good lentil soup in what used to be the Eastgate Theatre. A few miles on, on the south side of the Tweed, Traquair House, the oldest permanently inhabited house in Scotland, visited in 1566 by Mary, Queen of Scots, with her infant son James VI, was Closed to Visitors. Innerleithen has a good ice-cream shop, and we came home on a minor road, new to us, which climbs over the bare Moorfoot Hills.

Not opening up

Life may be opening up, but blustering Boris isn’t. The latest media storm concerns the cost of the refurbishment of the flat above 11 Downing Street occupied by Boris and Carrie. [I am tired of the term fiancée. Would not partner be more appreciate. Or possibly current mistress ?] The work was done at a cost of, depending who you believe, between £58,000  and £200, 000. Boris is notoriously mean. And was keen to solicit financial support from wealthy Tory supporters. But he now insists that he paid for the work himself, and had a hissy fit when Keir Starmer suggested otherwise in the Commons. Iain Blackford, the SNP leader in Westminster, accused him of lying.

There are now several [probably toothless] committees looking into the affair. If Lord Brownlow paid for the work, then the gift should have been declared. And Boris will be liable for tax on the benefit received. And why did he lie about it ?  What may continue to rankle with many people is the report that the couple wanted to transform the apartment from his predecessor Theresa May’s “John Lewis furniture nightmare” into a “high society haven”. Since John Lewis furniture and furnishings are aspirational for many who voted for the Tories, the comment may come back to damage him. No-one has seen photos of the refurbished flat. The latest upgrade was carried out by interior designer Lulu Lytle, causing one insider to suggest that the apartment may now look more like an up-market Turkish brothel.

Boris had already spent £2.6 million on a new Briefing Centre in Downing Street, supposedly so that his new Press Secretary Allegra Stratton, could stage-manage Trump-style press conferences. The media centre has only been used once, and journalists likened it to a Travelodge hotel decorated with four outsize union flags. But now there aren’t go to be any White House style briefings. Presumable because Boris doesn’t like answering questions from journalists. And Allegra Stratton has been summarily moved from her job. Possibly because, in response to questions about the affair of [with ?] Jennifer Arcuri, the American businesswoman who alleged that she had a relationship with Boris while he was London Mayor, Allegra Stratton replied that “there is no case to answer”. She added: “He does believe in the wider principles of integrity and honesty. He acts with integrity and is honest. He follows the Nolan principles when conducting himself in public life.” A statement so preposterous that even the Daily Telegraph was incredulous.

Someone at 10 Downing Street fingered the late, unlamented Dominic Cummings as the ‘chatty rat’ who was responsible for damaging leaks about the behaviour of the government. It was a foolish move. Dom is now threatening to come clean on a whole raft of stories about Boris’s mishandling of the COVID epidemic. Including the suggestion that Boris personally  promised [Sir] James Dyson immunity from tax responsibility if Dyson, already a tax exile in south east Asia,, would work on the much needed ventilators. In the event no ventilators were produced.

Allegations of sleaze and inappropriate behaviour continue to accumulate. Did the Prime Minister say that he would rather see thousands die and “bodies piled high in the streets” rather than order a third lockdown. He has called the story ‘absolute rubbish’. Bit it does sound like the sort of thing Boris would say. And Robert Peston among others has blogged that two witnesses have confirmed to him that the Prime Minister did use these words, shouted in a rage in his study.

Envoi

So we are back where we started. The Prime Minister may well be a habitual liar. Which is sad. [My current Bible reading is in Zechariah. “Yahweh Sabaoth says this: ‘These are the things you must do. Speak the truth to one another ‘ …”. [Zechariah 8:20]. 

But we are grateful for all who worked to develop, and then to roll out, the vaccine. We look forward to seeing our family, children and grandchildren, next month for the first time in nearly a year. After that we hope to be able to travel north, to the Outer Hebrides, in June. And we continue to pray for the awfulness of the situation in India and elsewhere, in places where the COVID virus continues to ravage the population unchecked.

April 2021

Deaths column

We have just lived through a week of mourning following the death of HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. As many tributes emphasised, the Duke of Edinburgh, the longest living consort in British history,  lived an exemplary life of public service. He was, as the Queen herself has told us, a rock and support to the Queen through almost seven decades. Unlike some royal figures elsewhere [Spain, Thailand] and unlike too many of our politicians, he was a man of decency and integrity. I am too old to have been involved in the Duke of Edinburgh awards, and, while I once met the Queen, I don’t think that I ever met the Duke.

Other people continue to share their memories of the Duke of Edinburgh and to write obituaries. But I would like to pay tribute to another ninety-year old who died this month who had a more direct influence of my life. Hans Kung was a Roman Catholic priest and theologian who died at the beginning of April at the age of 93. Kung was a one-time friend and near contemporary of the German theologian Josef Ratzinger, and they worked harmoniously  at the University of Tübingen in the 1960s. But they came to hold very different views on the church of which they were a part. Kung remarked in 2013 that Ratzinger, who had now become Pope Benedict XVI, was “living in the Middle Ages”.

Hans Kung

Hans Kung was born in Sursee, Lucerne, in Switzerland in 1928. He studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian College in Rime, was ordained in 1954, and was appointed Professor of Theology at Tübingen in 1960. In 1962 he was appointed by Pope John XXIII as peritus, as the youngest expert theological adviser to the Second Vatican Council. At Kung’s instigation, Tübingen recruited another peritus, Josef Ratzinger, as Professor of Dogmatic Theology.

In 1963 Kung made a tour of the United States, lecturing to enthusiastic university audiences on ‘The Church and Freedom’.; and he received the first of his many honorary doctorates. In a reception at the White House, President J. F. Kennedy introduced him to group of politicians saying “this is what I would call the new frontier man of the Catholic Church”.

But in the late 1960s and beyond Kung came increasingly into conflict with the church hierarchy. In a book published in 1971 Kung called into question the [nineteenth century] dogma of papal infallibility. He also expressed doubts about the practice of celibacy, proposed opening up the priesthood and the diaconate to women, and wrote that that certain current Catholic practices “contradicted the Gospel and ancient Catholic tradition and ought to be abolished”. In December 1979 Kung was stripped of his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian. He thereby lost his position in the theological school. But he continued to teach as Professor of Ecumenical Theology at Tübingen until his retirement in 1996. He also lectured widely overseas, and he wrote an impressive  number of books; on the Christian life, on Freud and the problem of God, on Christianity and world religions, on the theology of Hegel, on ethics, on Judaism, on euthanasia, on the Catholic Church, on science and religion, and on Christianity and Islam. 

I have been looking again at Kung: On being a Christian [published in  1974], one of the first Christian books which I ever bought and read, back in the early 1980s.

On being a Christian: The horizon 

The introduction clearly states that the book is intended for those who believe but feel insecure in their faith, and for those who are at a loss between belief and unbelief. In Part 1 Kung engages in dialogue with contemporary, humanist culture. He acknowledges that man wants to be fully human. He notes that the great figures of terror in recent history, Stalin and Hitler, were programmatic anti-christians. He insists that Christians can be humanist and humanists can be Christians. But he asks whether the contemporary modernisation of Christianity, where worship too often abandoned both liturgy and theology, is a sellout of the gospel. Is there  a danger that ‘the Church has lost its soul’ ? Against such criticism he writes: “In the long run it is impossible, even for the Catholic Church, to serve, for the delight of a few aesthetes and philanthropists, … as a museum of Christendom.”

Kung celebrates modern advances in science, technology, medicine etc. But insists that science and technology cannot  be the key to man’s happiness. Technology cannot be a substitute for religion. Equally he rejects Marxism as a credible explanation of reality [a Weltanschaung]; noting that Marxist-Leninist practice led directly to authoritarianism, intolerance, and totalitarian attitudes. 

Kung approvingly quotes Eugene Ionesco, who wrote in 1972: “People are going round in circles in the cage of their planet , because they have forgotten that they can look up to the sky …” There will always be religion, just as there will always be art. The perennial dilemma is the relationship between faith and reason. Can man only know God if God takes the initiative and makes himself known ? The idea of biblical revelation.  Or can man only believe in God if he has already known God by reason ? This question leads Kung into a detailed philosophical excursus. In which he writes approvingly of Kant’s ‘postulation’ of God deriving from man’s  self-understanding as a moral, responsible being.

In the final part of his scene-setting introduction Kung addresses the question of Christianity and the other world religions. He anticipates later writers like Lammin Sanneh by noting that “several centuries too late …  the attempt is being made to liberate Christianity from its European-American, Latin-Roman wrappings”. If all religions contain truth, what makes Christianity the truth ? He agrees with modern theologians who believe that men can attain salvation in other religions. But, he insists, “the question of salvation does not make the question of truth superfluous”.

On being a Christian: The distinctiveness of Christianity

Kung emphasises that Christianity is founded on Christ, God’s last and decisive ambassador. Being a Christian does not just mean standing for all that is true and good and beautiful. It means a belief that Jesus is decisive and definitive for man’s relations with God.

But the question then is:  Which Christ ? We have the Christ of piety, the “holy infant so tender and mild”. We have the Christ of dogma, whose nature caused such problems for the Church Councils [as they sought to define Jesus in terms of Hellenistic thought]. We have the Christ of the enthusiasts, from flagellants and Anabaptists of the Middle Ages to modern day charismatics and Pentecostals. And there is the Christ of literature. Here Kung notes that writers can often be “more alert, more perceptive, and more sensitive than the theologians”.

Kung emphasises that Christ is a historical person, not a myth. But he acknowledges the uncertainties: Bethlehem or Nazareth ?; the nature [and the historicity] of the gospels. Kung notes the Protestant emphasis on the Bible; the Orthodox emphasis on tradition; the Catholic emphasis on the Church. He argues for a combination of faith and of knowledge. He recalls that Jesus was a Jew. And he regrets the historical hostility between Jews and Christians. He acknowledges the real theological differences, but welcomes the contributions of Jewish scholars to understanding Jesus.

On being a Christian: The Program

Jesus did not belong to the ecclesiastical and social establishment. Jesus was not a priest. And he was not a theologian. His style of teaching is popular and direct. He preaches that the Kingdom of God is imminent; it will come, not as judgement, but as grace for all. Not only sickness and suffering, but also poverty and oppression, will come to an end.

The Jesus of the gospels is not the sweet and gentle figure of hymnody. He is not a prudent diplomat. In the gospels he is an unarmed, itinerant preacher and a charismatic healer. He preaches a non-violent revolution. Not as a monastic retreat from the world. Was Jesus an Essene or a Qumran monk ? Kung demonstrates clearly that Jesus was very different from these dualist ‘sons of light’. Equally, he is very different from the pious legalism of the Pharisees. “Pharisaism lives on in Christianity … but it is contrary to the spirit of Jesus.” 

The central cause of Jesus is the kingdom of God; a kingdom of love and joy and peace. Jesus expects the kingdom to come in the immediate future. Does this promise of the kingdom still hold good after two millennia ? It will not come about by social revolution.

Jesus’s miracles cause more problems for modern man than his teaching. The miracles are not scientifically tested documentaton. The healing miracles often involve curing the possessed; the exorcism and defeat of devils. Some of the miracles may be anticipated portrayals of the risen Christ. The word used in John’s Gospel is signs. In that gospel the different signs point to Jesus as ‘the bread of life’, as ‘the light of the world’, as ‘the resurrection and the life’. What is demanded is not faith in miracles; but faith in Jesus. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Jesus expects [demands] a fundamental re-orientation of man’s life towards God. This is metanoia, translated as repentance but meaning conversion. Based on an unshakeable confidence in God; which is described in the Old Testament as faith. Humanity replaces legalism. We are to love God, and to love our neighbour. And our neighbour is the person who needs our love. This love will involve forgiveness, without limits; and service, that is humility; and renunciation. Jesus has a particular concern for the weak, the sick, and the neglected; for woman, for children, and the poor.

Jesus got involved with irreligious and immoral people; tax collectors and sinners. Table fellowship meant more than politeness; it meant peace, trust, fraternity. Must the sinner first make an effort to receive grace ? For Jesus grace comes first; acceptance comes before repentance. 

Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom. He did not found a church. His disciples are a mixed bunch; we are not even sure of their names. Their role is to be ‘fishers of men’.

The Gospels all point towards Jesus’ death. Things changed when he went up to Jerusalem. Jesus was baptised, but neither he nor his disciples baptised before Easter. Kung is not worried whether the Last Supper was a ritual Passover Meal [as Mark says] or not [as John says]. His violent end was the logical conclusion of his proclamation and his behaviour; he was seen as a heretical teacher, a false prophet, a blasphemer. Jesus’s death on the Cross suggested that the Law had conquered. The peculiarity of his death is that Jesus is forsaken by men, but also totally forsaken by God.

On being a Christian: The new life

It is only after Jesus’ death that this new movement started. After an [apparent] complete failure and a shameful death, emerges an explosive message and a new community in the name of the defeated leader. The earliest New Testament writings [Paul’s letters]  never mention the virgin birth, nor the descent into hell nor the ascension, but firmly proclaim the resurrection of the crucified Christ as the centre of Christian preaching. Jesus is a living person, encountered by his disciples.

Kung notes: this is a work of God; his being raised [passive] rather than his resurrection [active]. He insists that both resurrection and raising are pictorial, metaphorical terms. In Luke’s gospel and in Mark’s supplement the Easter appearances and the ascension take place on the same Easter Day. Only Acts of the Apostles mentions forty days between Easter and Ascension; forty being an important Biblical number. Again, it is from Acts that we have the story of Pentecost [50th day]. Which was celebrated in the first 3 centuries only as an extension of the Easter celebrations.

Kung notes the development of the Easter tradition. And that Paul makes no mention of the empty tomb. But Kung insists that the empty tomb does not by itself prove the resurrection. The Easter faith is oriented to the living Jesus himself. “Without Easter there is no Gospel … no faith, no proclamation, no Church, no worship, no mission to Christendom.”

Jesus’s death on the cross remains problematic. There is a diversity of interpretation at many levels. The distinction between ransom, representation, and sacrifice [Passover, covenant, expiatory sacrifice] is blurred. The work of Jesus on the cross was interpreted in the Latin West by means of juridical concepts; the need to restore God’s honour, to make restitution. “The idea of the death on the cross as an expiatory sacrifice, understandable enough for Jewish Christians at the time, is only one and not the most important model for the interpretation of that death.”

Kung explores the link to suffering. The book of Job is about the incomprehensibility of God in time of suffering. Jesus does not explain suffering, but endures it to the end.His death only acquires a meaning with his resurrection to new life with God. Suffering, even though it can seem like being forsaken by God, can also become the point of an encounter with God. The Christian looks in suffering to the one who secretly sustains him even in nothingness, loneliness, and despair.

Kung looks in detail at the birth narratives. And notes that extraordinary events are traditionally associated with the birth of the founders of religions. “Today it is admitted, even by Catholic exegetes, that these stories are a collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary, and ultimately theologically motivated narratives, with a character of their own.” 

The Virgin Birth presents a particular problem. The emphasis moves from virginal conception to virgin birth. “Both doctrines had something to do with the negative valuation of the sexual act on the part of the Fathers of the Church.”

The veneration of Mary is relatively recent. The efficacy of praying through Mary comes from the 12th century. The dogma of the immaculate conception dates from 1854; the dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary dates from 1950. From the time of Pius IX the popes have promoted Marian devotion. Marianism and papalism go hand in hand, and give each other mutual support.

On being a Christian: Community of Faith

The Bible did not drop out of heaven [unlike the Koran]. The books of the Bible were written and collected on earth. Which explains the shortcomings and mistakes, confusions and concealments. “I do not believe first in Scripture … I believe in God who revealed himself in the history of Israel … and finally in a liberating message in the person of Jesus.”

The Holy Spirit is unintelligible to many people today. He is the Spirit of God himself, self-bestowing but not controllable, life-giving, a source of power. The Latin Church proclaims the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son [filioque]; the Eastern Church proclaims the procession of the Spirit from the Father through the Son. “An unnecessary controversy.” Kung insists that any formulation of the Trinity must not cause us to  abandon the monotheistic faith.

For Kung the church is simply “the community of those who believe in Christ”. He notes that the Germanic language words [German kirche, English church, Swedish kyrka] derive [not from curia, as Luther supposed] from the Byzantine Kyrike, meaning ‘belonging to the Lord’. But the Romance languages [Latin ecclesia, Spanish iglesia, French église, Italian chiesa] derive from the Greek ekklesia meaning ‘assembly, called out from’. 

What is the relation between the local church and the universal church ? Kung insists: “The local church is the the church and can fully represent the cause of Jesus Christ.” The church is the whole community of God’s people; offices and office-bearing are not important. There is no need for a priest as mediator. The church should be a community of brothers and sisters; it cannot be a patriarchal power structure. It is better to speak, not of office, but of ministry. The word ‘priest’ is never used in the NT for those who exercise a ministry in the Church. 

Paul writes of charisms which [given by God] serve the congregation. He never speaks [in authentic letters] of ordination nor or presbyters. But, after Paul’s death, institutionalisation could not be avoided. With the emergence of presbyters and bishops. “It cannot be maintained historically that the bishops in a direct and exclusive sense are the successors of the apostles.”

Does the Church need a universal leader, a Pope ? Roman Catholic ecclesiology has always been reactionary and hierarchical. Hence the 1870 definitions of papal primacy and papal infallibility. While the Catholics venerate the Pope, the Orthodox venerate tradition, and Protestants the Bible. There have been parties in the Church from the time of Corinth. The Church must exist to serve the surrounding society. “There is nothing about the Church which perfect, which is not imperilled, fragile, questionable, which is not constantly in need of correction, renewal, and reform.”

On being a Christian: Practice

People can be put off by the Church; “an unevangelical and externalised ritualism which is still tied to the medieval, baroque tradition … to a rigid, authoritarian, unhistorical, unbiblical textbook theology.” But, Kung insists, breaking away from the church leads only to isolation, or to a new institutionalising. In a renewed church, bishops would be appointed openly by clergy and laity; equally the pope would be elected by clergy and laity; priests would be allowed to marry if they so wished; and women should be given dignity, freedom, and responsibility. In spite of the forces of resistance and inertia, we must not give up.

On being a Christian: Being human and being Christian

Being a Christian is not just about self-denial and self-renunciation. It is about a new orientation, a new approach to life, with Jesus as our guiding principle and our living model.

What is ultimately important ? Churches influenced by Calvin have stressed the importance of ‘works’ in everyday life. Which has led to an emphasis on achievement; and seeing man as an economic unit. Kung insists that this attitude is a threat to man’s humanity. “A man can be a marvellous manager, scientist, official, or skilled workman, be generally credited with playing his part brilliantly, and yet fail completely as a human being.”

Christian freedom means freedom  from dependence on the false gods which drive us on to new achievements: money or career, prestige or power, or whatever is of supreme value for us. We know that life has a meaning not only in successes but also in  failures.

Finally, Kung offers suggestions as to what Christian freedom means in our culture:

*  willingness to renounce rights without compensation

*  willingness to voluntarily use power for the service of others

*  willingness to practise freedom from the consumption of possessions

Consumerism is self-defeating.  “New needs are created as soon as the old ones are satisfied … luxury goods are classified as necessary consumer goods.” Uncontrolled economic growth widens the gap between rich and poor countries; and creates feelings of envy, resentment, and hatred, and also despair and helplessness.

In summary, to be Christian means to be fully human.

“By following Jesus Christ, man in the world of today

can truly, humanly live, act, suffer, and die

in happiness and in unhappiness, life and death,

sustained by God and helpful to men.”

Envoi

I first read this book in the 1980s. It was the second Christian book I ever bought. [The first was by Don Cupitt ! A friend at St Andrew’s, Linton Road, made a telling comment about ‘baby and bathwater’.] Re-reading it, I am hugely impressed by both the breadth and the depth of Kung’s writing. Back in the 1980s and again now I find this book a magisterial and engaging account of the Christian faith. Written for the most part in accessible language. [Though I am not sure about ‘theonomy’.]  And I am very struck by the way in which Kung anticipates stuff  [other books] that I have been reading during this past year; he touches on the problem of suffering, on the dangers of clericalism, the origins and nature of Marianism, the meaning of the Cross, and the need for the church to escape from its medieval, Latin-Roman wrappings. It is easy to see why the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy were so disquieted by him. But I was saddened to see a shabby obituary of Kung in Echoes, a Roman Catholic forum, written by George Weigel, which accused Kung of being an anti-papal show-pony. The truth may be that, as the Church Times obituary noted, he was a Roman Catholic and he was a distinguished theologian. But he was not a Roman Catholic theologian. 

April 2021

The Water of Leith

The Water of Leith is a small river that flows from the outlying village of Balerno to the south-west of Edinburgh, on the edge of the Pentlands, down to the Forth at Leith. Leith most probably derives from the Brittonic word meaning ‘damp’, while ‘Water’ here indicates a large stream, something between a burn in size and a full-grown river. There were once some eighty mills on this stretch of water, producing flour, paper, woollen and linen cloth, spices, and snuff, none of which survive. The Water of Leith rises at Milestone Rig in the Pentland Hills. From Balerno down to Leith there is a walkway beside the river for walkers and cyclists. It is a little bit more than thirteen miles. Last week as the lockdown restrictions ease, it seemed good to go back and walk it again.

Balerno to Slateford

After changing buses in an almost deserted Princes Street, I took the 44 bus out to Balerno. Access to the walkway is next to the High School. The early miles are quite rural.  The water runs between wooden banks a bit below the A70, the Lanark road, but largely hidden from the road itself. The first landmark is Currie Kirk, an eighteenth century building in a delightful setting, with Calvary crosses and a Knights’ Templar gravestone in the graveyard.

Beyond Currie new housing is much in evidence. A dense estate of new houses with miniature gardens has been built right to the water’s edge. A further development with a decorative water wheel sits below a thundering bridge which carries the southern bypass across the water. 

At Colinton the remains of the station are visible. The station was opened in 1874 by the Caledonian Railway, offering mainly a freight service for the local mills but also carrying passengers in and out of Princes Street. Access to the station was by steep steps known as Jacob’s Ladder. The last passenger train ran in 1943, and the station officially closed after nationalisation in 1949. Beyond the rains of the station a curved tunnel is liberally decorated with graffiti.

Spylaw Park on the right contains the rather grand Spylaw House, built by a wealthy mill-owner, which was briefly a youth hostel before being converted into [luxury] apartments. Steps on the right lead down into Colinton Dell and Craiglockhart Dell. But two bridges in Colinton Dell are currently closed, so I carried on to join up with the Grand Canal. Turn right along the canal, cross the aquaduct, and you arrive at the Water of Leith Visitors’ centre at Slateford. Roughly halfway. The centre sells maps of the Water of Leith and good coffee. But is currently closed.

Slateford to Stockbridge

Beyond Slateford is a relatively dull patch, the pathway flanked by a graveyard and some extensive allotments. You leave the water briefly to cross Saughton Park, and then recross to the east bank as the new-ish stretch of path skirts west of Murrayfield stadium. I look at the stadium wondering how Scotland managed to beat both England away at Twickenham [for the first time since 1983] and also France in Paris [for the first time since 1999], but then lose, very narrowly, at Murrayfield to both Wales and to Ireland, games which they could [and perhaps should] have won.

The pathway crosses the Corstorphine Road at Roseburn, and the Water of Leith then runs through a deep, wooded ravine that skirts round the west end of Edinburgh’s New Town. It is one of the most attractive sections of the walk. The bronze figure in the water below the National Gallery of Modern Art is one of six installations by [Sir] Anthony Gormley. They are called Six Times; I don’t know why. Shortly afterward a boardwalk leads into Dean Village, a higgledy-piggledy collection of odd-shaped houses with grey slate roofs that fall down a steep slope to the river and then up the other side. Expensive cars parked on double yellow lines hint at gentrification.

The water pours noisily over a broad weir while Dean Bridge, built by Thomas Telford in 1823, carries the road 100 feet above the water. One of the characters in the Peter May Lewis Trilogy is forced as a young boy to risk his life squeezing vertiginously across the outer parapet of the bridge. A little further on is the elegant St Bernard’s Well, built in 1789, a miniature temple on Doric columns; and then a flight of stone steps leading you up to Stockbridge.

Balerno to Stockbridge is about ten and a half miles, and Leith is only another three miles further. But the sky had turned dark grey and the wind was cold and gusty, so I bought two pieces of banana cake from Soderbergs [excellent] and came home on the bus. Leaving the rest for another day.

Stockbridge to Leith

I re-started two days later at Rosewell again, a bright and sunny Good Friday. There were more people and more dog-walkers on a bright morning. Beyond Stockbridge you can see the backs of elegant, stone-built New Town terraces.  Across the water there are views of The Colonies, eleven parallel terraces laid out in 1861 by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Association, with the intention of providing affordable home ownership for respectable artisans. Each terrace consists of two stories with outside stone stairs leading to the upper ‘cottage’. I don’t think that there are many artisans living there now.

At Canonmills the pathway rises to cross another busy road. A south-facing bench in St Mark’s Park was a good place to stop for a coffee break and to ring Susie. The final mile or so takes you through a light industrial area past the backs of some scruffy buildings in Bonnington. And then opens out into a broader riverside walk. Leith has been reinventing itself for a long time, and may shortly be further connected to the city by an extension of the tram system. People formed distanced queues for carry-out coffees and sat dangling their legs over the water on The Shore. It all looked very attractive in the sun. One of these days it will be possible to eat there again.

April 2021

The Christmas Truce

When I was writing about the international working class movement a few weeks ago [TaGD – 36], I regretted that international solidarity died with the outbreak of the Great War. When many of the delegates at the meeting of the Second International in Brussels in July 1914 rushed home to join up in their respective armed forces. And I made reference to the French film Joyeux Noël; a fictional reconstruction of the unofficial Christmas Eve truce of 1914, when front-line troops clambered out of their trenches to share greetings and drinks with their enemies; to play football and celebrate Christmas together. 

It is often said that the Christmas 1914 truce was a fairy story, like the Angel of Mons, a journalistic invention. And when people acknowledge that something did happen, it is often dismissed as a very small affair. Which was disowned and much frowned upon by senior officers on both sides. In order to try and establish the truth, I’ve been reading a [second-hand] copy of Malcolm Brown & Shirley Seaton: Christmas Truce: The Western Front, December 1914. The authors are both television journalists and military historians. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Richard Holmes said: “It is unlikely that this fine book’s account of the truce will ever be bettered.”

The run-up to Christmas 1914

Although historians now tell us that the First World War was ‘inevitable’, it didn’t seem that way at the time. Harold Macmillan, then an undergraduate at Balliol, wrote many years later:

“Had we been told, when we were enjoying the carefree life of Oxford in the summer term of 1914, that in a few weeks our little band of friends would abandon academic life for ever and rush to take up arms, still more, that only a few were destined to survive four years’ conflict, we should have thought such prophecies were the ravings of a maniac.”

The early weeks of the war were full of action and movement: the indecisive encounter at Mons, the  long retreat, the turning of the tide on the Marne, and the first attritional battle of the war on the river Aisne. After which the British Commander, Sir John French, wrote to King George V:  “I think the battle of the Aisne is very typical of what battles in the future are most likely to resemble … … The spade will be as great a necessity as the rifle”. So in the closing months of 1914 the two armies dug in where the last attacks and counter-attacks had left them. And long lines of trenches appeared across the terrain of France and Belgium, sometimes no more than fifty or even thirty yards apart. The enemy was so close in some places that you could hear him talk. As the weather deteriorated the trenches turned to mud, and the principal struggle was against the conditions rather than the enemy. Arthur Pelham-Burn of the Gordon Highlanders wrote in December to a school-friend:

“ I used to think I  knew what mud was before I came out here, but I was quite mistaken. The mud here varies from 6 inches to 3 and 4 feet, even 5 feet, and it is so sticky that, until we were all issued with boots, my men used to arrive in the trenches in bare feet.”

Closeness bred curiosity about the enemy. Which was a powerful motivation in what followed. What was the German soldier really like ? Was he the archetypal enemy with his spiked pickelhaube helmet, his barbaric record in Belgium, and his hymns of hate ? Was he happy to be there fighting for the Kaiser ? Coping with the rain, the mud, the lice, and the rats ? Or would he rather be home with his loved ones in the equivalent of ‘Blighty’ ? Imprecisely there developed  a kind of comradeship with the enemy, which no civilian could properly understand. Rifleman Leslie Walkinton of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, looking back years later, wrote:

“ We hated their guts when they killed any of our friends, then we really did dislike them intensely. But otherwise we joked about them, and I think they joked about us. And we thought, well poor so-and-sos, they’re in the same kind of muck as we are.”

Hostilities grumbled on with occasional spasms of activity, artillery fire, frequently limited on the British side by a shortage of shells, a certain amount of sniping, and trench raids that too often resulted in death or injury without yielding much advantage. Andrew Todd of the Royal Engineers wrote a letter home which ended up in The Scotsman:

“Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that the soldiers in both lines of trenches have become very ‘pally’ with each other. The trenches are only 60 yards apart at one place, and every morning about breakfast time one of the soldiers sticks a board in the air. As soon as this board goes up, all firing ceases, and men from either side draw their water and rations. All through the breakfast hour, and so long as this board is up, silence reigns supreme …”

According to Brown and Seaton, such breakfast truces became an accepted ritual on many parts of the Western Front throughout the duration of the war. Other minor acts of fraternisation included lobbing across tins of bully beef or jam or biscuits, and some reciprocal hymn singing on quiet nights.  Captain C.I. Stockwell of the Royal Welch Fusiliers noted in his diary that a German soldier in the facing tenches who spoke excellent English revealed that before the war he had been the head-waiter at the Grand Central Hotel.  A trooper in the Scots Greys had a shouted exchange with two Germans who had worked in a hairdressers shop in Princes Street in Edinburgh.

Christmas Eve 1914

On Christmas Eve there was a curiously prophetic article in The Manchester Guardian:

“It will be strange if one of those truces tacitly arranged by the men and winked at by the commanders does not occur tonight in order that, if possible, the Germans may find something to take the place of Christmas trees and the English something to take the place of holly in the trenches … … For the longer the troops lie over against each other in trenches there grows up a friendly interest . This however does not interfere with the business of fighting.”

December 24th was ‘very quiet’ on the front occupied by the Royal Welch Fusiliers. South of Armentières a German band was playing hymns in or near the trenches all the afternoon. Near Pont Rouge the 133rd Saxon Infantry Regiment  posted lighted Christmas trees on the breastwork of the trench, and began to sing old Christmas songs, ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht and O du Fröliche. Private Albert Moren of the Royal West Surrey Regiment recalled the singing years later: “I shall never forget it. It was one of the highlights of my life. I thought what a beautiful tune.”

Near Ploegsteert Wood Private Tapp of the Royal Warwicks watched as a sergeant made his way into No Man’s Land, and returned with cigars and cigarettes  which he had exchanged for tins of Maconochie’s and a tin of Capstan tobacco. Together with an offer from the Germans not to fire until Boxing Day. A little way to the north the Seaforth Highlanders shared in some competitive carol singing with the Germans opposite, and then climbed out of their trenches to share conversation and cigarettes in front of the barbed wire entanglements.

Major Buchanan-Dunlop of the 1st Leicesters, a committed Christian and an old boy of Loretto, wrote to his wife to tell her that he had organised a select choir of officers and men to sing carols to the Germans, who then responded with carols of their own. This exploit made him briefly famous as ‘The Major who sang Carols between the Trenches’, which later got him into difficulties with the military authorities.

Christmas Day 1914

Christmas Day dawned with light mist and a hard frost. British accounts suggest that again the Germans made the first overtures of goodwill, as they had the night before with their carol singing. Numerous local agreements were made for the burial of the dead  whose bodies lay in No Man’s Land. The Revd J. Esslemont Adams, a Free Church minister and Chaplain of the Gordon Highlanders, agreed with the local German commander for burial of the dead, after which there would be a short, shared service with the reading of the 23rd Psalm and prayers in both English and German. Second Lieutenant Arthur Pelham-Burn of the Gordon Highlanders, who intended to train for the Anglican ministry, wrote about the service at Fleurbaix to an old Lancing school-friend: 

“We then had a wonderful joint burial service. Our Padre arranged the prayers and psalm etc … … They were read first in English by our Padre and then in German by a boy who was studying for the ministry. It was an extraordinary and wonderful sight. The Germans formed up on one side, the English on the other  … … Yes, I think it is a sight one will never see again.”

Other burial ceremonies involved fewer people. North of Ploegsteert Wood some Germans helped dig graves for two dead Frenchmen. At Bois Grenier seven stretcher-bearers, all wearing Red Cross armbands, were allowed by the Germans to bury dead British troops who had been lying behind German lines. As well as burial of the dead, men from both armies met together in friendship and good humour to celebrate Christmas in their own particular fashion. Second Lieutenant Bruce Bairnsfather of the Royal Warwicks, destined to become a celebrated cartoonist of the war, stated that “there was not an atom of hate on either side that day”. Up and down No Man’s Land gifts were exchanged: bully beef, Maconochie’s stew, Tickler’s jams, cake, biscuits, tea and Christmas puddings were offered by the British; cigars, sweets, nuts, sausages, sauerkraut, cognac and schnapps were offered by the Germans in return. Buttons and cap-badges were valued souvenirs. It was a day of instant friendships. Photographs were brought out and admired.

There was much photographing on Christmas Day 1914, enemy photographing enemy, soldiers standing cheerfully side by side. There was a general regulation against taking photographs while on active service, and a crackdown on cameras in the trenches began shortly after Christmas. But papers like the Daily Mail were offering payments for war photographs throughout 1915.

It has become widely accepted that a central part of the Christmas truce was a game of football between the English and the Germans. [Which the Germans presumably won ?] Football, or ‘footer’, would certainly have been the game of choice for the fraternising soldiers on both sides. Private Tapp of the Royal Warwicks wrote that: “We are trying to arrange a football match with them for tomorrow, Boxing Day.” But there is no evidence that such a game took place. And the ground between the lines was certainly in no fit shape for any serious game of football.

… and after

Rifleman Bernard Brooks recorded in his diary: “The Germans wanted to maintain a partial truce until the New Year, for, as some of them said, they were heartily sick of the war, and did not want to fight; but we were due to leave the trenches … and insisted on the truce ending at midnight … Death and bloodshed would once more reign supreme.”

On Boxing Day there was a reluctance in many sectors to get back to fighting. But General Horace Smith-Dorrien, after a visit to the trenches, circulated a memorandum to all commanders in II Corps which pulled no punches:

“”I was shown a report from one section of how, on Christmas Day, a friendly gathering had taken place of Germans and British on the neutral ground between the two lines, recounting that many officers had taken part … … This is only illustrative of the apathetic state we are sinking into … illustrating that any orders I issue on the subject are useless, for I have issued the strictest orders that on no account is intercourse to be allowed between the opposing troops … … To finish this war quickly we must keep up the fighting spirit …”

As the foul weather continued at the start of 1915, so did the war. There was no large-scale fighting on the British front until the costly Battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915. But for many units the Christmas truce was now slipping back into history.

There is a suspicion that certain units were punished in some way for their participation, by being taken out of the line as untrustworthy. But Brown and Eaton find no evidence for this. Nor is there any evidence for the idea that Saxon regiments were sent to the Russian Front for fraternising.

In January the New York Times broke the story under the breezy headline, FOES IN TRENCHES SWOP PIES FOR WINE.  The story reappeared in England in The Daily Sketch with several photographs captioned TOMMY’S TRUCE BETWEEN THE TRENCHES. A thoughtful leader in the Daily Mirror commented that it was hard “to keep up the gospel of hate when chance throws men into companionship of toil and danger”. When a photograph of Major Buchanan-Dunlop appeared in the Daily Sketch under the caption MAJOR WHO SANG CAROLS BETWEEN THE TRENCHES, Generals Smith-Dorrien and Ingouville-Williams were both furious. But there was no court-martial and no reprimand. [Buchanan-Dunlop survived this war and the next, and died with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1947.] But it is believed by his family that he failed to receive the DSO  he wold have been awarded because of his involvement in the truce.

Envoi

Was the Christmas truce a significant event, or just a sentimental aside in the dialogue of war ? A boyish prank ? An end-of-term bit of fun ? In a debate in the House of Commons in 1930 the Liberal MP for Banff, Major Murdoch McKenzie Wood, who had been at the front in 1914 with the Gordon Highlanders, made this comment:

“In the early stages of the war, at Christmas 1914, I was in the front trenches, and took part in what was well known at the time as truce. We went over in front of the trenches, and shook hands with many of our German enemies. A great number of people think we did something that was degrading … … The fact is we did it, and I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired. For a fortnight that truce went on. We were on the most friendly terms, and it was only the fact that we were being controlled by others that made it necessary for us to start trying to shoot each other again.”

The song of the Christmas angels was “ On earth peace to men on whom [God’s] favour rests”. Or, as Private William Tapp of the Royal Warwicks put it: “… it just doesn’t seem right to be killing each other at Christmas time”. 

Amen to that.

March 2021

A Journey towards the Cross

We are rapidly moving through Lent towards Passion Week and Easter. Lent is, as preachers often tell us, a journey towards the Cross. In both Christ Church, Duns, and in Lyon we often arranged things so that Easter Day was an all-age Family Communion service. Which called for some creativity in our presentation of the Easter message. But which rarely provided an opportunity for a more in-depth exploration of the Cross. So it seemed a good time to have another look at Jurgen Moltmann, this time at his 1972 book, The Crucified God.

This book, as Richard Bauckham acknowledges in the introduction to my 1974 edition, is a theological classic; theo-logical in that it is concerned with who God really is. It takes up theology in the light [in the shadow?] of the Holocaust. It is about God’s impassibility. The book is about the cross of Jesus, and his apparent abandonment by the Father. It asks the question: ‘Who is God in the cross of the Christ who is abandoned by God ?’

The Crucified God

In the preface Moltmann acknowledges that the cross cannot be loved. But he insists that the church and the theologian must try to understand the crucified Christ in order to show the world the freedom he offers. The church must demonstrate what it really believes about Jesus from Nazareth who is crucified under Pontius Pilate; and what practical consequences we draw from this. Where his earlier book Theology of Hope [see TaGD – 12, June 2020] began with the resurrection of the crucified Christ; this book looks at the cross of the risen Christ. “Unless it apprehends the pain of the negative, Christian hope cannot be realistic and liberating.”

The Cross is the central symbol of the Christian church. Christianity has been described as ‘the religion of the cross’. What does that mean ? We have too easily turned the scandal of the cross into a theory of salvation. The symbol of the Cross points to God, “who was crucified not between two candles on an altar but between two thieves in the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong.” But as the church grew it left the cross behind, and gilded the cross with the ideas of salvation.

The idea of following Christ has been neglected in particular by bourgeois Protestantism; it no longer recognised the suffering church, the church of the martyrs. 

The word ‘theology’ does not appear in the Bible. The theology of the cross originates with Paul; in 1 Corinthians 1 he develops his understanding of the Cross, which, though a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Greeks, becomes for believers the power of God for freedom. The theology of the Cross is central to Luther’s thought; contrasting it with the theology of glory of the Catholic church.

Questions about Jesus

Christian faith is essentially a profession of faith in Jesus. So – the first task of Christology is to determine ‘Who really is Jesus of Nazareth ?’ But the more the early Church emphasised the divinity of Jesus. the more difficult it became to hold that that the Son of God was of one substance with Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate. Consequently a mild docetism runs through the Christology of the early church. That Jesus was not quite fully man.

The current Christological question, Moltmann insists, is more about the true humanity of Christ, about his awareness of God, and about his inner life.  In modern Jesuology the attention is turned away from his suffering and death and concentrated on his life and teaching.

Moltmann wants to engage with the question asked by Judaism; the Messianic question ‘Are you the One who is to come ?’ is the earliest question asked about Christ. The Bible brings an eschatological awareness into the world; the universe longing for redemption becomes a future hope. “Faith lives by the anticipation of the kingdom through and in Jesus.” The Christian answer is that God brings the sinner, whether Jew or Gentile, to repentance through his suffering in the cross of Jesus.

‘Who do you say that I am ?’ is the question is not only asked by others of Jesus, but by Jesus  himself. When the disciples proclaimed the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, they were proclaiming the future of the crucified Christ. Christianity looks forward to the new age and the new creation, in which the crucified Christ can no longer be a scandal and a foolishness; because he is the basis of the proclamation ‘I make all things new’. [Rev. 21.5]

The Way to the Cross

How did Jesus who preached become the Jesus who was preached ? What is the relationship between the primitive gospel of Christ and the historical Jesus ? Paul recognised the danger of preaching about a spirit in the heavenly world, which is why he preached Jesus crucified. The preaching of both Jesus and of Paul is eschatological preaching; but where Jesus preaches the kingdom of God, Paul preaches the righteousness of God.  Jesus speaks of the dominion of God which is to come; Paul speaks of the dominion of God which has already been inaugurated in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The eschaton changes from the future to an event which has already begun. The essential Christological question is “how the dead Jesus became the living, the crucified became the resurrected, and the humiliated became the exalted”. And Molmann concludes “the basic problem and the starting point of theology is the scandal and folly of the cross”.

The death of Jesus is the consequence of his earthly ministry; and how his ministry was received and understood by the Jews and [differently] by the Romans.

For the Jews Jesus was a demagogic false Messiah, a blasphemer. First he set himself over and above [the contemporary  understanding of] the law. Further he withdrew from the circle of John the Baptist: both preached that the kingdom of God was at hand. But where for John the Baptist this meant judgement; for Jesus the kingdom came as the unconditional and free grace of God. Jesus rejects the notion that the kingdom is for the righteous, while there would be judgement for the unrighteous. The theological dispute with the Jews is between the gospel and the law.

But Jesus did not undergo the punishment for blasphemy which was always stoning. Jesus was crucified by the occupying Roman power. This was the punishment for rebels against the Imperium Romanum. Bultmann writes: “What is certain is that he was crucified by the Romans and thus suffered the death of a political criminal … … it took place because his activity was misconstrued as a political activity.” Moltmann goes in detail into the question as to whether of not Jesus was a Zealot. And emphasises that there was undoubtedly a political dimension to Jesus’s ministry.

But neither Jesus’s theological conflict with Judaism nor his political conflict with the Roman Empire can explain the inner pain of his suffering and death. The synoptic gospels agree that Jesus’s death was troubled; “he was greatly distressed and troubled” [Mark 14:33].And the words of the dying Jesus [from Psalm 22.2] are “My God, why has thou forsaken me ?”  NB Luke omits these words, and replaces them with the confident utterance of the Jewish evening prayer, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”. For Jesus the torment on the cross was his sense of abandonment by God; something that took place between Jesus and his Father.

Every Christian theology must come to terms with Jesus’s words on the cross. Moltmann insists: “The cross of the son divided God from God to the utmost degree of enmity … …  The resurrection of the Son abandoned by God unites God with God in the most intimate fellowship.”

The Resurrection

In early Christian tradition there is no dispute over the resurrection. Talking historically about ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ binds him to his past; talking eschatologically about ‘Christ’ looks to his future. 

The disciples knew of the resurrection through the ‘appearances of Jesus’. And/but there are no witnesses to the process of resurrection from the tomb. Resurrection is not just revivification. Resurrection means a new quality of life which no longer knows death; “Christ being raised from the dead shall never die again” [Romans 6.9] It means the annihilation of death. Resurrection conforms to the Jewish apocalyptic promise that, at the end times, God would raise the dead; and thus demonstrate his power over the power of death. This is not the ‘language of facts’; it is the language of faith and hope, the ‘language of promise’.

The early church understood the resurrection as a preparatory act by God for the good of themselves and the whole world. An early form of confession is : “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures … “ [1 Corinth. 15.3-4]  Very early on the community understood that this was an event ‘for us’. Moltmann insists that this is not just about expiatory sacrifice: it is rather a sign of the coming, redeeming kingdom. “He died ‘for us’ in order to give us, ‘the dead’, a share in his new life of resurrection, and in his future of eternal life.”

The earliest Easter message is: “You killed him, but God raised him up” [Acts 2]. The Easter story is very similar to the Exodus story: God brings freedom to his people, first from a tyrant, and then from the tyranny of death. In their theology of the Passion, both Paul and Mark understand that the God when raised him from the dead was equally the God who crucified him and was crucified.  So, Moltmann concludes: “In the passion of the Son, the Father himself suffers the pains of abandonment. In the death of the Son, death comes upon God himself, and the Father suffers the death of his Son in his love for forsaken man.”

The Crucified God

To what degree is God affected by Jesus’s death on the cross ? Moltmann insists: “the death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology”. He rejects the phrase the ‘death of God’, preferring to talk of ‘death in God’. God’s sharing in the sufferings of the cross is a complete rebuttal of the impassible god of the Greek philosophers. This understanding is developed in and through the trinitarian doctrine of God. 

Moltmann suggests that many Christians fail to grasp the Trinity; their belief is little more than a weakly Christianised monotheism. But to understand the Cross, it is necessary to talk in Trinitarian terms: “The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son.” It is an event [exchange] between the Father who forsakes and the Son who is forsaken; the Father who loves and the Son who is loved

A God who is conceived as omnipotent and infinite cannot be the God who is love in the cross of Jesus. God is not only other-worldly but is also this-worldly.

Anyone who suffers without cause thinks that he has been abandoned by God. In these circumstances, the God of theism cannot help; he can neither love nor suffer. But a trinitarian belief draws us into both Christ’s forsakenness and God’s love. “God is, God is in us, God suffers in us ” The theology of the crucified God leads to a significantly changed anthropology. Abraham Herschel writes about the pathos of God; describing the way in which God is affected by human events and suffering in history. The Bible speaks of God’s lamentation and sorrow over Israel in exile. He is present with them in their suffering. There is a striking example in Elie Wiesel’s book Night about his experience of Auschwitz. When the SS hang two men and a boy in front of the whole camp, a voice cries out asking where is God. “And I heard a voice within me answering: ‘Where is he ? He is here. He is hanging on the gallows’ …” Moltmann insists: any other answer would be blasphemy. 

God himself creates the conditions for communion with God through his self-abasement in the death of the crucified Christ, and through his exaltation of man in the resurrection of Christ. This is anticipated in the primitive creed in Philippians 2. The God-forsaken man can accept himself where he comes to know the crucified God who is with him and has already accepted him. A theology after Auschwitz may seem impossible to those who are stuck with a simple theism. But, as Moltmann concludes: “God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God – that is the basis for a real hope which both embraces and overcomes the world.”

Going forwards

In the closing chapters Moltmann begins to enter into a dialogue with Freudian psychology, and with psychotherapy. And he looks too at the relationship of the Christian faith to secular, political movements. Again he emphasises the importance of the Trinity.  Politico-religious monotheism was overcome by the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Which insists on the essential unity of God the Father with the incarnate, crucified Son in the Holy Spirit. The crucified God is a stateless and classless God. But he is the God of the poor, the oppressed, and the humiliated.

The real presence of God liberates us from the vicious circle of poverty; frees us from the vicious circle of alienation; and liberates us from the vicious circle of meaninglessness and of god-forsakenness. He comes to us in the figure of the crucified Christ who gives us courage to be. 

Envoi

I’m not sure whether I’ve done Moltmann’s book justice. Reading the book has certainly reminded me that I have never wanted to be a theologian. And I’m well aware that ‘theological’ is sometimes used in a derogatory sense; meaning arcane or of limited value. But I am grateful that Moltmann is forcing us [me] to think more deeply about the mystery of the Cross. He is wanting us to discard the notion of a remote and impassible deity. And encouraging us, against the gloomy backdrop of the COVID pandemic, to reflect on the secure basis for our Christian hope.

March 2021

The Story of 25 Eventful Years in Pictures

One of the books that has been sitting in our porch waiting for the charity shops to re-open is a picture book published by Odhams Press to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V.  It contains some 400 pages of sepia photographs from the period 1910-1935. For each of those years there is a one page summary of Principal Events followed by a dozen or so pages of photographs, and the last 40 pages are given to ‘Style and Speed through 25 years’. It is a fascinating collection, both for the photos it contains and for what is omitted.

The book was given to me by some 60 years ago by Uncle Bill and Auntie Se, who died within a few months of each other in the very early 1960s. In retirement they shared a large house in Bradford-on-Avon with my maternal grandparents. It was a highly unsuitable house for old people, and not a very happy arrangement. Se, short for Selina, after whom my mother was named [to her great chagrin], was one of my grandmother’s three sisters, who all grew up at Fownhope outside Hereford. She married Bill Hucker, a railway guard from Shropshire. Uncle Bill fought through the whole First War on the western front, and lived to tell the tale. Except of course that he never spoke about it. The silk postcards which he sent home were made into a rather crude fireguard, and now hang on our sitting room wall. I keep promising myself that I’ll sign up to an ancestry website and see if I can learn something of his military record.

History in the making

There’s not a lot of text. But what is there seems to have been written largely in capital letters:

“Never since the world began has so much been achieved, such an abundance destroyed, so many hopes denied, as in the fleeting span of the last quarter-of-a-century. Each year in the reign of King George V has been an act in a drama almost incredible in its speed, intensity, and incident. They have been tremendous times … Progress has bounded ahead with awesome purpose, smashing ruthlessly the conventions of centuries”.

The royal family

As this is a Silver Jubilee souvenir book, pictures of the royal family are prominent.  The first double-page spread is of George V and Queen Mary surrounded by their five, almost grown-up, children. This is followed by a double-page spread of Edward VII’s funeral procession; Edward’s favourite charger is led at a walking pace with boots reversed in the stirrups, and George V rides by the side of the Kaiser, who is carrying a Field-Marshal’s baton. George V’s coronation in 1911 looks to me not unlike Queen Elizabeth’s coronation not quite fifty years later. In July 1918 a royal group celebrate ‘Their Majesties’ Silver Wedding’. 

The Whitehall Cenotaph is unveiled by King George V on Armistice Day 1920; followed by the state burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. Princess Mary marries Viscount Lascelles in Westminster Abbey in February 1922. The Duke of York married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at the Abbey the following year. The Prince of Wales tours India and Japan. And on his return  is pictured lighting the Toc H Lamp of Maintenance at a rally at Albert Hall.

Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother, died at Sandringham in November 1925. In April 1926 the Duchess of York gave birth to a daughter, Princess Elizabeth. In 1927 the Duke and Duchess of York open the new Parliament Buildings in Canberra, “the magnificent new capital of the Commonwealth”.

In February 1929 the King is pictured recuperating at Bognor [Regis] after a serious illness. Later that year the Prince of Wales is pictured visiting miners and their families in the depressed areas.

In November 1934 Prince George, the King’s youngest son, marries Princess Marina of Greece.

War and politics

In January 1911 there are photos of the Siege of Sidney Street, in East London, with the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, taking command of a detachment of Scots Guards. June 1914 has photos of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, and of Prinkip, his Serbian assassin. Some predictable Great War photos follow: Sir John French arriving in boots and British army warm at Boulogne; an extraordinary photo of the German  infantry sweeping across open fields in Belgium; Scottish troops being rushed forward on London buses to the Marne; Kitchener’s iconic poster, ‘Your country needs you’. [Who was it said ‘An undistinguished general, but a great poster’ ?

Later war photos are more sober: early gas masks at Ypres in April 1915; digging trenches on an exposed hillside at Gallipoli; Kitchener on the deck of HMS Iron Duke in June 1916, a few hours before his death; stretcher bearers at the Battle of the Somme; horses knee-deep in mud on the Western Front; merchant vessels torpedoed by German submarines; wounded British troops on the Menin Road; a field of casualties blinded by poison gas; a biplane being launched at sea for the first time. And finally German officers carrying a white flag approaching the Allied lines, and huge crowds celebrating the end of the Great War on London streets.

Away from the war there is a dramatic photo of crowds fleeing from a hail of bullets in Petrograd at the start of the Russian Revolution. Photos of a studious Trotsky and a hard-eyed Lenin sit next to a group photo of the Russian royal family, assassinated at Ekaterinberg in July 1918. 

De Valera is pictured taking the salute of the Sinn Feiners. The Irish Free State comes into existence in December 1922. In January 1924 Ramsay MacDonald becomes Prime Minister, and there is a photo of Britain’s first Labour cabinet. Needless to say they are all men. And not young.

In April 1926 the miners go on strike. There are empty railway trucks and striking miners playing cards. In London volunteers drive trams and buses, and Special Constables are enrolled.

When the Labour Party takes office for the second time, in 1929, there is a photo of Miss Margaret Bondfield, Minister of Labour, the first woman to hold a cabinet position. In August 1931 there is a great financial crisis, and a run on sterling and British funds. King George returns from Balmoral. Ramsay MacDonald forms a new National Government.

The new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre is opened at Stratford in Aril 1923. Broadcasting House, Portland Place, opens the same year. The huge Masonic Hall in Great Queen Street, London, is opened in July 1933 by the Duke of Connaught. In the same month the King and Queen open the King George V graving dock in Southampton, the largest dry dock in the world.

In 1934 the Labour Party take control of the London County Council for the first time. They inaugurate a number of progressive measures, including healthcare in elementary schools. Later that year free milk is provided  daily for school-children.

In September 1934 occurred one of the worst disasters in mining history; nearly 300 miners lost their lives at Gresford Colliery in Wales. There is a photo of a volunteer who risked his life to recover the 234 bodies that had been sealed into the pit.

In March 1935 Sir John Simon and a youthful Anthony Eden are photographed at a meeting in Berlin with Herr Hitler, as they begin discussions on the European situation.

Exploration and shrinking world

Early in the book, in 1910 is a photo of the Wright brothers with Mr Horace Short, taken at Eastlands Flying Ground, England’s first aerodrome. Captain Scott’s tragic journey to the South Pole features in 1912. Later the same year the Titanic strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage. [Katharine Minchin whom I used to visit at Cruxfield in Berwickshire in the 1990s remembered seeing the Titanic on her maiden voyage off the coast of southern Ireland.]

In July 1919 Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown made the first Atlantic crossing by aeroplane, from Newfoundland to Clifden, Ireland; in the same month the airship R.34 flew from East Fortune airfield, Edinburgh, to Long Island, and then back to Norfolk; and later the same year Captain Ross Smith and his brother, and two companions, won £10,000 by making the first flights from England to Australia. They left England on November 12th and arrived in Darwin on December 10th. The first London-Paris air service was inaugurated  in July 1919. The world’s largest airship, the R.38, broke up in flames over the Humber in August 1921, with the loss of 44 passengers. 

In February 1928 Mr Bert Hinkler made a record flight from England to Australia, arriving in Port Darwin after 15 days. [He disappeared 5 years later trying to improve on his record.] Also in 1928 the Italian General Nobile flew over the North Pole in an airship. It crashed the following day. London’s first airport, at Croydon, was opened in May 1928.

The tragic disaster of the airship R.101, which crashed and caught fire at Beauvais, France, in October 1930 with the loss of 48 crew and passengers, led to the abandonment of all airship construction by Great Britain.

In 1932 there is an aerial photo of the Sydney Harbour bridge, the new wonder of the world. “It is the largest single span bridge in the world … made entirely of British workmanship and materials”.

In April 1933 two British aeroplanes overfly and photograph Mount Everest. In October 1934 there is an England-Australia race with a prize of £10,000 and a gold cup. It is won by a British pair who complete the flight in 2 days and 22 hours.

The place of women

The first prominent woman is Edith Cavell, pictured with her two setters, shot in Brussels in October 1915. On the Home Front women assume new roles: land-girls working in the fields; a milk-woman with her cart; a woman bill-poster, exhorting men to ‘Do it now’; women driving ambulances, attending to factory furnaces, and heaving sacks of coal. Captioned: “Doing Men’s Jobs and Doing Them Very Well !” Viscountess Astor takes her seat in the Commons as the first woman MP in December 1919. In April 1926 a young American, Gertrude Eberle, is the first woman to swim the Channel. She breaks the existing record by about two hours. In May 1930 Amy Johnson flies solo to Australia in just under three weeks.

Sport and leisure

There is steady advance in motoring and motor transport; in 1920 the first filling station opens at Aldermaston in Berkshire. In April 1923 Bolton Wanderers beat West Ham United 2-0 in the first Wembley FA Cup Final. Later the same year [Sir] Jack Hobbs makes his hundredth hundred in first class cricket. During the summer of 1926 England finally regain the Ashes from Australia. Jean Borotra, the bouncing Basque, wins Wimbledon wearing a beret. In the summer of 1930, a young Don Bradman, scores 334 at Lord’s; following his record score of 452 not out the previous year.

In 1934, unprecedentedly, Great Britain wins both the man’s and women’s single titles at Wimbledon; Dorothy Round is the women’s winner, Fred Perry the men’s champion.

Envoi

Now that I’ve looked at the book again, I may save it for one of the grand-children rather than let it go to the charity shop. Three things strike me after looking through the book.

First, I am a bit shocked by the time perspective; to realise that as I was growing up I was quite close in time to some of these events. When I started at secondary school in 1956, that was only thirty years on from the General Strike, forty years on from the Battle of the Somme. But now the First World War is over a century ago. And the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street is already more than forty years ago. As remote now, as the Great War was when I was younger. And for our grandson, aged six, the First World War is now as remote as the Crimean War was when I was his age.

Secondly, I realise that this book covers the first twenty-plus years of my father’s life; he was born in London in 1909. But I have no idea how he experienced or responded to any of these events. I don’t know whether he attended the Wembley Exhibition of 1924. I don’t know whether he was a schoolboy supporter of a football team. Or whether he ever watched first-class cricket. I don’t know whether he had any vestigial recollection of the reporting of, say, the Russian Revolution. Or of the first Labour Government. I don’t know whether he had any interest in these air pioneers as they set records for flying across the Atlantic or to Australis. And it is certainly much too late to ask him. Do we talk to our children and grand-children enough ? And what about ?

Thirdly, I think about Uncle Bill, dead for the past sixty years. And I wonder how he survived life in the trenches. I’m going to start by looking for his army record on one of those ancestry websites. I think I at least owe him that.

March 2021

On the home front

Susie and I are grateful to have had our first COVID jab, with the Oxford AstroZeneca vaccine, at the beginning of February. I know it doesn’t work, apparently, in France and in Belgium, but there is no prospect of our being there in the immediate future. Friends in continental Europe are envious, and perhaps a bit amazed, at the speed of the vaccine roll-out here in the UK. And the success of the vaccination programme has given blustering Boris a bit of a bounce in the polls. Helped by the fact that Sir Keir Starmer, though a credible politician and a considerable improvement on Jeremy Corbyn, has all the charisma of yesterday’s porridge. 

I am pretty sceptical about the government’s willingness to claim credit for the vaccination programme. Which probably owes more to the dedication of NHS staff assisted by a large number of volunteers. And I think it needs to be underlined that Boris and his government are seriously failing in other areas. The consequences of BREXIT continue to cause alarm. As CAP [Christians against Poverty] underlined this week, the financial hit consequent on the COVID pandemic is not shared equally across the population.

The consequences of BREXIT: the fishing industry, and Northern Ireland

Fishing played a surprisingly prominent role in the BREXIT negotiations. One of the bizarre images of the campaign was Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey sailing up in the river Thames in a trawler. Boris echoed their slogan in promising to make our coastal water “a sea of opportunity”.  Three months on the reality is that most of Britain’s fishing fleet is tied up in port, unable to go to sea because their profitable markets in the EU are blocked off by Whitehall bureaucracy and red tape.  Post-BREXIT arrangements have meant a dramatic increase in the amount of paperwork before British shellfish can be exported into the EU. For Scottish fishermen Boris has delivered a deal that is even worse than the widely unpopular Common Fisheries Policy. 

The situation in Northern Ireland is worse.  The Northern Ireland border was the great BREXIT lie. Boris told the taoiseach that there would be no border in Ireland. He then told North Ireland’s unionists that there would be no border in the Irish Sea. At the same time he told everyone who was listening that he would leave Europe’s customs union. The policy was self-contradictory, a messy fudge, a Johnsonian untruth.

Now that the UK is refusing to regulate a customs border in Belfast, Brussels is understandably angry. Since Christmas there have been problems with food supplies getting into Northern Ireland and empty shelves in supermarkets. The sticking-plaster response of the UK government is to extend, without consultation, the length of the initial transition period. Which amounts, in current journalistic parlance, to kicking the can down the road. At some point Boris must decide whether to erect a customs barrier round the six counties of the north, which would be a clear breach of the Good Friday agreement. Or to erect a customer barrier round the Belfast docks. The first option would be a logistic and emotional nightmare, and would probably drive the north’s eventual reunion with the south. Barricading the Belfast docks would enrage the Conservative party’s Unionist allies. And violence would no doubt follow. A decision will have to be made. But, as we know, Boris is not very good at decisions. A northern Irish telecoms engineer has just been upgrading our broadband connection. His comments on the present mess were unprintable. Sadly, since he was from Donegal, they were also largely incomprehensible.

In recent days that undiplomatic ex-diplomat David [Lord] Frost  has complained of the EU’s continuing ill will towards Britain. The EU’s attitude might of course be an understandable  response to the relentless mixture of half-truth and belligerence with which Frost and his political boss conducted the BREXIT negotiations. There is no reason why the EU should make it easy for Britain to leave. Versions of the Northern Ireland problem have existed ever since partition in 1922. The issue was exacerbated by Boris’s instance on leaving the customs union. Frosts’s haphazard negotiations left a range of issues unsolved; Scottish fishing, the status of the financial institutions, policing and terrorist information exchange, cultural exchanges. Britain could leave the customs union. Northern Ireland realistically could not.

Levelling up

When he became PM, one of Boris’s frequently repeated promises was that of ‘levelling up’. He presents as an inclusive, one-nation Tory. But we all know that the UK is increasingly two nations; rich and poor, north and south, employed  and jobless, pro- and anti-BREXIT. To say nothing of pressures on the United Kingdom: the coming [May] independence referendum in Scotland;  growing discussion of the possibility of a united Ireland; and even some noises about Welsh independence. Sadly, if predictably, the levelling up seems to exist only in Boris’s campaigning speeches. Money is available for consultants to work on the failing Test and Trace system, and to renew the decoration of their Downing Street apartment in accordance with Carrie’ expensive tastes. And to ‘help out’ with urban regeneration in a few Tory constituencies. But there is no aid money for struggling Yemen. Not enough money to give NHS staff their previously agreed pay rises. And no mention in Rishi Sunak’s budget of Social Work, another area where Boris promised major new initiatives. Which are now forgotten.

Who gets the money ?  The Community Renewal Fund

In theory the Community Renewal Fund [CRF] exists to accelerate the promised levelling up. But in Sunak’s recent budget it transpires that a significant proportion of the areas selected to receive this money are not notably deprived, but that the vast majority of them are represented by Conservative MPs. Similar concerns have been expressed about two other funds intended for similar purposes. There is a fund specifically for urban areas that need a helping hand, but 39 out of the 45 places that the fund supports have Tory MPs. 

The shadow communities secretary, Steve Reed, said that the allocation of these funds “must be done transparently, fairly, and with a say for local communities … but Ministers’ murky decisions to prioritise wealthier areas are anything but fair or transparent.”

Rishi Sunak has not yet been willing to outline the formula by which CRF funds are allocated. It is shocking that Richmond-shire in North Yorkshire, Sunak’s own constituency, a markedly wealthy area that attracts the well-heeled retired middle classes, has received money from both funds.

Last November Parliament’s spending watchdog raised serious concerns that the distribution of the £3.6 billion of town funds was politically motivated. The cross-party public accounts committee said it was “not convinced by the rationales for selecting some towns and not others” when the first money from the fund was distributed by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) in 2019. A MHCLG spokeswoman said that allocation of funds took into account things other than deprivation measures. And that statement certainly seems to be true ! Like, ‘Are they our people ?’

Who get money for what ?  Test and Trace

For the past year a motley collection of Tory ministers have stressed that the government’s priority it to tackle the COVID pandemic. We have often been behind the curve. But ministers insist they they will do ‘whatever it takes’. And Rishi Sunak has been spending [public] money on a hitherto unimaginable scale. This has been particularly true of our test and trace system. We all remember that last year Boris promised a world-beating Test and Trace system. Which would be run, as a token of his commitment, by his old chum and Tory peer [Baroness] Dido Harding. It emerges today that Test and Trace have currently spent the eye-watering sum of £22 billion. But, according to a report today by a cross-party group of MPs, there is no clear evidence that the scheme has contributed to any significant reduction in the corona-virus infection.

Labour’s shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Rachel Reeves said the report shows the significantly outsourced system has “failed the British people and led our country into restrictive lockdown after lockdown”. She said that: “It underlines the epic amounts of waste and incompetence, an over-reliance on management consultants, … while ministers insist our NHS heroes deserve nothing more than a clap and a pay cut.”  Lord Macpherson, a former Treasury chief, tweeted that the Government’s flagship £22 billion Test and Trace programme “wins the prize for the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time.”

Who doesn’t get the money ? Yemen

Last November the UK ditched its policy of spending 0.7% of national income on overseas aid, a key promise in the party’s 2019 general election manifesto; supposedly to help pay for the coronavirus crisis at home. At the time the Tory MP Andrew Mitchell called Rishi Sunak’s foreign aid cut a ‘shameful mistake‘ that will make Britain ‘less safe and less prosperous’.

Now tens of thousands of lives will be lost as a result of cuts to the UK’s aid budget, according to the chief executive of Oxfam. Oxfam is one of more than a hundred UK charities that have written to the Prime Minister condemning a government decision to cut aid to Yemen. The UK says it will now give £87m in aid to to Yemen having previously promised £160m in 2020 and £200m in 2019.

Meanwhile, a leaked document says civil servants have discussed reducing aid to Syria from £137m pledged last year to just over £45m this year. In South Sudan, spending could drop from £110m to £45m, while aid to Libya could be cut by 63% and Somalia by 60%.

Oxfam chief executive Danny Sriskandarajah, one of the signatories of the letter to the Prime Minister, commented: “The UK government has been proudly leading the effort to provide humanitarian assistance in places like Yemen. It’s a betrayal of not just the promises we made to the world’s poorest and most needy. It’s a brutal betrayal of British values. It’s an undermining of this government’s stated aim to be global Britain  … …  And arguably, worst of all, it’s a particularly callous decision because this government has actually increased the sales of British arms to Saudi Arabia which is a party to the conflict (in Yemen).”

Who get money for what ?  Refurbishing bits of Downing Street 

Those with long memories may remember the furore caused when Derry Irvine, the first of Tony Blair’s Lord Chancellors, spent £59, 000 on hand-made wallpaper for his grace-and-favour apartment. [The same man who in a recent speech described the COVID pandemic as “a unique financial opportunity”.] This sum seems relatively modest compared with the reported £250,000 that Carrie Symonds is reportedly spending on refurbishing the Downing Street flat. Reports stress that she has “exquisite taste”. Even the Daily Mail is excited about the costs. Who is going to pay ? There is some doubt as to whether the Johnson-Symonds family budget will stretch to meeting the full cost. Especially after they have paid the cost of making good the damage done by their dog at Chequers. So the latest wheeze is to set up a privately-funded, not for profit organisation on the lines of Jackie Kennedy’s White House Historical Association. 

According to the Daily Mail, Boris was present when a plan was mooted to ask Tory donors – including environment minister Lord [Zac] Goldsmith, a close friend of Carrie Symonds, controversially ennobled by Boris in 2019, and billionaire JCB construction boss Lord Bamford, to contribute to the costs. The same source reports that there is some concern among some senior Tory figures over whether it was ‘appropriate’ for party funds to be used ‘in effect, to subsidise the Prime Minister and his partner’s lifestyle’.  Sir Alistair Graham, the former head of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, described the plans as “monstrous”.

It appears that the couple have also enjoyed an estimated £12,500 of food deliveries in Downing Street, delivered to the back door, from a luxury organic farm-shop owned by Lord Bamford’s wife. 

There is of course ample opportunity in these arrangements for blatant conflict of interest. Two chandeliers for a knighthood ? A month’s supply of smoked salmon for a peerage ? Meanwhile a reported £2.6 million has been spent turning the basement of 9 Downing Street into a suitable setting for White House style press conferences. Another of Boris’s ‘vanity projects’. It hasn’t been used yet. Maybe Boris is starting to realise that public appearances where he constantly refuses to answer questions are not an electoral asset ?

The unknown-to me Lib Dem MP Daisy Cooper said: “This is nothing more than an expensive vanity project and is just more evidence that this government’s priority is spin, not substance … … the prime minister himself said that he ‘owed his life’ to Covid doctors and nurses but now he’s happy to see frontline nurses take a real-terms pay cut, whilst he gets a flashy new TV studio”. 

Envoi

I could go on. But it’s too depressing. If John Moore reads this, he will no doubt say that it is our Christian duty to pray for leaders, even including blustering Boris and his colleagues. And I’m sure that he is right.  I think I’ll go and cheer myself up by reading Jörgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. Of which more in due course. Disgracefully I have lost my current bible-reading notes, so I am reading Moltmann as a Lenten penance. It is good stuff  But it is hard work. He reminds me why I have never aspired to be a theologian. 

March  2021