Burgundy Pilgrims

Last night I looked at the moon and saw a beautiful shining face. Why does our spirit leap in subtle and indescribable ways when we look at the swathe of the Milky Way, when we see a shooting star, when we hear Allegri’s Miserere, watch a sunset or hold a newborn in our arms?

There is something inside us, imprinted in our genes that appreciates beauty which is, in itself, an indescribable something? Does beauty really exist? We can’t hold it or even describe it and yet it is something that each one of us experiences and can share with others.

Just as we can describe beauty we can also describe the opposite. Those who cannot distinguish good from evil and right from wrong are thought to be defective – and so they are. Imagine a world in which hate, murder, torture and vice are the norm.

The fact that we can look towards a creator of beauty and good is not just wishful thinking. It has to be. If it were not so we would be inconscient, unthinking, unable to relate to others – in other words – not us. The fact is that we are us – we do have these attributes and we do exist in this way. Therefore if we can distinguish good and appreciate beauty it does exist and not randomly but for a purpose.

I therefore exhort all of us to appreciate beauty, cultivate goodness, kindness and love and, above all, look at the stars. There is something bigger, better, purer, lovlier, kinder and more beautiful and, what is more, it is a person and not a thing. He is God.

As non-believers point out, religion is not necessary for morality. It is possible to have a secular morality and for people to do the right thing without recourse to God. Professor Dawkins, the eminent atheist, says that he has a very strong feeling of how he would like it if someone behaved badly to him which gives him a very strong empathy for others enabling him to do the right thing. However, Christianity isn’t just a moral code – it gives us something much more. The ability (if ability is the right word) to forgive great hurts is god-given and supernatural in origin. If your child was brutally murdered, would you be able to forgive the perpetrator?

The first time I was aware of this was in 1987 after the Enniskillin bombing in Northern Ireland which killed 11 people who had gathered for the annual Remembrance Day service at the war memorial. Marie Wilson, who died in the blast, was a 20 year old nurse. Her father’s words and attitude made a deep impression on me at the time and still do. ‘Loyalist paramilitaries were intent on retaliation but were stopped by the words of Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was killed in the blast. “I have lost my daughter, and we shall miss her. But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge,” he told the BBC. “Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life.” He said he forgave her killers and added: “I shall pray for those people tonight and every night.” His words were seen as a fitting memorial to his daughter and to the other ten people who lost their lives because they encouraged a spirit of reconciliation in the area.’

Since then, over the years, I have taken note of other such reactions. They are always from people of faith. Just recently, a 15 year old lad from a catholic family, Jimmy Mizen, was murdered in a cake shop. He was attacked by another young man and had his throat cut. His mother arrived on the scene minutes later and fainted with the shock. Her words three days later: “I just want to say to the parents of this other boy,” she said. “I want to say I feel so, so sorry for them. I don’t feel anger, I feel sorry for the parents. We’ve got such lovely memories of Jimmy and they will have such sorrow about their son. I feel for them, I really do.” After Mass she said: “People keep saying ‘why are you not angry?’ There’s so much anger in this world and its anger that’s killed my son. If I am angry then I am exactly the same as this man. We have got to get rid of this anger, we have just got to.” She said that instead her son had left behind a ‘legacy of love’ that was shared among his family and friends.

This is not morality, this is ‘super-morality’ which can only come from God. This forgiveness along with illimitable love such as that shown by Mother Teresa, defies all reason. No, you can’t deduce or reason to God, he is a personal revelation. But you can see his fruits, the special sort of grace he gives his people, and that is the clearest sign of his presence here in the world. It makes me very humble that I display so little of this grace in my life. God, help me to walk in your ways, lose myself in you, give to others as you give to me.

For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations. Psalm 100:5

I have often wondered whether there is someone in my past family whose faithfulness is still having an effect on my life. I wonder about this because, although my mother was a Catholic, she married an atheist and neither I nor my brother ever went to church as children. Religion was never discussed or even mentioned. My father thought the whole thing was nonsense so it was not even worth the discussion. There was no embargo on religion; it was just considered an irrelevance. Cricket, education and making ends meet were far more important. Nevertheless, as time went on, I had a sneaking suspicion that I ought to have been Catholic. Did that simply make me more likely to search out the faith? Was it a sort of nominative determinism but with religion? Just as somebody called Mr Bun is likely to be a baker, was someone who knew her mother was catholic likely to feel drawn to the faith? I suppose it is quite likely but it didn’t have that effect on my brother who remains totally unmoved by religion. For him it is football as well as cricket which fill those empty hours between birth and death. Was their some reason why I was drawn to the mystical and the otherworld whereas he was quite happy with the here and now?

This is where my first experience of prayer varies with that of my husband. In my third year at junior school, when I was aged about ten, I had a really horrible teacher – I will not mention her name I will just call her ‘Teacher’. She was vicious – in fact I think she was sadistic. She took every opportunity to dent the confidence and self-esteem of every child. Despite this, she was the only teacher I remember having a little fan club of girls who actually seemed to idolise her. This was very confusing for me because I simply couldn’t imagine anyone liking this woman and it was the first time I can remember really doubting my own judgement. I think this experience was fundamental to my ongoing doubts about whether anything I think is correct. It is also one of those formative experiences which shape the core personality for the future.

Her other effect on me was to make me exquisitely aware of the way that I speak and that it should be grammatically correct. This wasn’t difficult for me as I was already in the ‘middle class’ culture due to the influence of my mother even though I was living in an economically and socially poor area. Her positive effect on me was unintentional on her part but it worked. After I had come to the conclusion that I hated this woman and began to doubt my judgement due to her little band of admirers, I thought that perhaps they could see something in this hateful woman that I was missing. One day during class I decided to join them and hang around with teacher. They were talking about something – I can’t remember what – but I can remember getting Teacher’s attention and trying to get her to like me. I joined in and said “We used to have one of those books at home but we chucked it away”. Well, she rounded on me with a look at disgust and snarled “You threw it away. We don’t say ‘chucked’. Speak properly when you speak to me”. I was mortified and decided, for the preservation of my mental health, to do my utmost to avoid this woman. I never joined the fan club again but nor did I use the verb ‘to chuck’ or any other slang.

The term had started in September and it was very soon after this that I decided that my school life had become hell due to this teacher. My greatest horror concerned the times-tables tests which took place once a week – I think on Wednesday’s. The night before the dreaded test was due I would go to bed and start to cry in misery when I thought of the following morning and the horror that would ensue. However, very occasionally, she didn’t have the times-tables test and I was never sure in advance whether I would have a totally miserable morning or not. So, I started to pray. As I had never been to church I can only assume that prayer time at school had given me the template for this activity. Sometimes I would pray that we wouldn’t have the tests and sometimes I would pray that the teacher wouldn’t be there. I do not remember the success rate of postponing the test but an amazing thing happened with regard to Teacher.

Just before the end of the autumn term I had the most wonderful Christmas present. It was suddenly announced that Teacher was exchanging with another teacher in Australia and she would be spending the rest of the school year down-under. I could hardly believe my ears and I can still remember my joy. I can certainly say that I had the strongest conviction that this strange event was an answer to my prayers. I had never heard of anyone exchanging with an Australian teacher and I couldn’t understand why it would happen part way though a school year. Not only this, but no Australian teacher ever turned up at our school. We had a succession of agency teachers for the next two terms which was far from ideal but I didn’t care. My education suffered but at least I kept my sanity.

Teacher did arrive back at the beginning of the next year but, by then, I was in the hands of the loveliest and most competent teacher I ever experienced – Mrs Pratt. She put me back together and fostered a growing confidence in myself and my abilities. She was the sort of teacher who made sure that my absolutely useless artwork occasionally went on the wall because ‘the colours were so interesting’. I knew the picture was rubbish but I appreciated the thought and her kindness! One final piece of information came to me some years later. It turned out that Teacher was eventually suspended and then sacked for throwing a heavy wooden blackboard rubber at a child and seriously injuring them. It may have taken years to find out but my judgement was right after all! What is more important to the current argument is that I had the conviction that prayer worked.

On the other hand my husband had a different experience. When he was nine years old his mother died from breast cancer. For eighteen months he, his bother and sister were passed around the family staying with relatives and friends. His father had a sister who was a teacher and, quite suddenly, he married his sister’s best friend. He hardly knew her and it was obvious that married to get the family back together but it turned out that he married as close as anyone can get to an angel. She was the daughter of an Anglican vicar, a primary school teacher and the sweetest woman you can imagine. When she eventually died, her best friend who had known her since the age of eighteen said ‘I never once heard her say an unkind word about another human being’ which I thought was the best epitaph I had ever heard. Anyway, after the marriage, the family got back together; the new mother devoted her life to the family and life went on as if nothing had ever happened.

However, there were unaddressed hurts still lurking in the background. For years I never understood why my husband got so upset when things didn’t work – especially brand new items. I can understand that it is irritating that we have to do the quality control for retailers but, at the same time, consumers are well protected by law and my husband’s anger was always out of step with the seriousness of the problem. Then one day he and I were talking about prayer and my husband suddenly became very upset.

“You think prayer works but it doesn’t. The first time you come to use it, it doesn’t  work. I prayed that my mother would get better and she didn’t. She died. So don’t talk to me about prayer”. As you can imagine I was lost for words. I had no idea what to say to him. However, the next day he had an amazing change of heart. He suddenly said ‘I suppose that if, for whatever reason, my mum had to die – that she couldn’t be healed – the best thing that could possibly happen is that my step-mother took over. I suppose it could have been an answer to prayer after all”. This was obviously a God-given illumination and the beginning of healing for a hurt which had been eating away at him for thirty years.

So, my first experience of prayer was positive but my husband’s was negative. It does beg the question – what effect did your first experience of prayer have on your faith? What is your story?

 Forgiveness has been an issue for me on several occasions. Holding onto feelings of hurt and anger can be a very real blockage to spiritual growth. So, how do we forgive when we really don’t feel like it? What do we actually do with the hurt and anger? I struggled with this for a long time until I realised that  first step is an ‘act of will’ and not a feeling. That intellectual decision to forgive enables God to start the  forgiving process which is achieved through His grace rather than something which comes from within us. We are very complex creatures, not robots, and sometimes the healing process takes time.

A few years ago my neighbour did a great hurt to my family. She was elderly, frail and had dementia so she didn’t really know what she was doing. Nevertheless I couldn’t forgive her even though it all turned our right in the end.  I found that I couldn’t even bear to think about her let alone see her. This was a problem since she lived next door and we had adjoining gardens. I finally told myself that I still felt really angry with her but I would intellectually forgive her even though I didn’t feel like it. The anger didn’t disappear but it enabled God to begin to deal with it. A few days later she knocked on my door to ask me to change a light bulb and I could hardly refuse – even though I wanted to! I could barely look at her let along speak to her but I changed the light bulb. The next step was to say hello to her over the garden fence and so on. It took a long time but eventually worked itself out. She died a little later and I would have felt very unhappy if she had died and I hadn’t made any attempt at reconciliation.

 My guide in this is my lovely patron saint Jeanne-Francoise de Chantal. Her beloved husband was killed by his best friend in a freak hunting accident. He took a while to die in agony but he forgave his distraught friend on his death bed. However, Jeanne-Francoise could not feel forgiveness because the grief and hurt was just too great. So she did it in little stages. First she saw the man in the street, then she greeted him and so on. It took several years but they were eventually reconciled and she even became godmother to his children.

 I had a friend who was told by an evangelical Christian who had prayed over her that she was healed from depression and her problem now was that she hadn’t accepted that healing. Well, she wasn’t healed from the depression so can you imagine the extra burden that put on her? Now she thought it was all her fault because she wasn’t a good enough Christian to be healed. Ironically, this actually blocked God from healing her. She struggled on for years with the depression until it was explained to her that she is a very complex person with a complex problem. God is gentle and respectful and it would take time for God to heal the effects of years and years of the violent abuse she had suffered which had caused the depression in the first place. As soon as she was released from that added burden she started serious Christian counselling which enabled God to begin the healing process – and I can tell you it was successful.

 If we make an intellectual decision to forgive, God deals with the process. Please be kind to yourselves – you are probably being a lot harder on yourselves than God would ever be.  Forgiveness is a process rather than an overnight happening. We are wondrously made and it takes a time to unravel all the complicated strands that make up a problem!

Give God the time He needs and put it in His hands. I promise it will work out.

I am the only Catholic, indeed Christian, in my family. I find it difficult to share my faith and experience with my family, I suppose, for fear that I will be considered …… actually I don’t know why I find it so difficult I suppose that my relationship with Jesus is still superficial and I put my sensibilities above my faith. Sometimes I feel that my faith is a guilty secret. I think that the fact that my husband is not a believer is one of the main reasons. It is very difficult to have such a difference with one’s life partner and I often feel I am being torn apart. However, this is no excuse and it is obviously hindering the work of the Holy Spirit in his life. Anyway, I recently had to attend a medical related to my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was asked how I spent my days. I was unable to share – even with a stranger – that I went to Mass most days and spent a great deal of the day in prayer and Bible reading. I was just unable to share it.

 I had to go into London for the medical and I went on to Westminster Cathedral for midday Mass. The cathedral is not to be confused with Westminster Abbey which remains in the Church of England. The Catholic hierarchy was re-established in 1850 after the last Penal Laws were repealed and the Catholic cathedral was finally consecrated in 1910, fifteen years after the laying of the foundation stone. I was a little early for Mass so I took the opportunity to have a more detailed study of the chapels.

 For some reason I was drawn to the chapel of St George. Although St George is the patron saint of England, I do not feel drawn to him personally. He is a rather mysterious figure adopted by the crusaders and, although he does seem to represent the headstrong and pugnacious character of the British, he doesn’t have anything particular to do with our history. I looked at the list of the Catholic war dead in the chapel and read the appeal for financial aid to add mosaics to the chapel and then I noticed the body of St John Southworth. Of course, I had noticed his body before as it is difficult to miss, but I had never before taken any interest in it. With time to kill I read his story and then realised that the chapel was also dedicated to the English Martyrs as well as St George. I had been reminded of the English Martyrs a few days before on a visit to The Friars in Kent so this time they caught my interest. Mass started, and I didn’t think any more about it until a little later when I began to compare my inability to mention to a stranger that I had been to Mass with the sacrifice of the lives, often in brutal circumstances, of so many of my Catholic predecessors. How I take my right to practise my faith for granted! How I take the blood spent by our predecessors for granted and how I devalue it by my lack of respect for what they have done to give me my freedoms!I began to read some of the stories and, when I read the story of St Alice Line, I found tears coursing down my cheeks.

Anne Line was hanged on  27th February She was executed immediately before two priests, Fr. Filcock and Fr. Mark Barkworth though, as a woman, she was spared the disembowelling that they endured. At the scaffold she repeated what she had said at her trial, declaring loudly to the bystanders: “I am sentenced to die for harbouring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.” Fr. Barkworth kissed her hand, while her body was still hanging, saying, “Oh blessed Mrs. Line, who has now happily received thy reward, thou art gone before us, but we shall quickly follow thee to bliss, if it please the Almighty.”

I felt Jesus’ disappointment in me. I know this is an answer to my prayer to help me to speak out for my faith and I am being told to remember the English Martyrs every time words stick in my mouth.

 A few weeks ago my daughter started to suffer with terrible headaches. I realised something was very wrong, although she didn’t share just how ill she was because she didn’t want to worry me! However, I started to pray and ask Our Lord, Our Lady and St Jeanne-Francoise de Chantal (my parton saint) to care for her. The headaches became so extreme that she was unable to lie down, she couldn’t close her eyes because she thought her eyes were going to pop out of their sockets and she could feel the pressure building and building inside her skull. She had double vision and also was unable to speak on a couple of occasions. Despite this she was turned away from the Accident and Emergency Department of the local hospital twice and also by her GP. Each time she was told that she was suffering from a migraine. Eventually she found a doctor willing to refer her to a neurologist and it has just been confirmed that she had a blood clot in her brain which ‘cleared spontaneously’ and she is ‘very lucky’.

I have just been listening to Radio Esperance, a French Catholic station. During a talk on prayer, Fr Jacques Philippe said:         ‘Christians who do not pray are Christians in danger.’

The point he was making is that it is through prayer that God is able to work in our lives; to pour his healing, forgiveness and love into us and enable us to become more like him. It is through prayer that this happens. Without prayer we can become discouraged and distant from Our Father. I think about how difficult it is to get my son to answer his phone! It is so easy to lose touch with him compared to my daughter who calls for a chat several times every week. I love them both the same but cannot have the same close relationship with my son as with my daughter because he does not keep his side of the relationship as active.

However, my daughter’s illness also proves that Christians who do not pray leave others in danger. I was not told the gravity of my daughter’s health until after she was better and yet prayer for her was laid on my heart.

The more we pray, the more God is able to ask us to pray. The more we pray, the clearer and faster the connection between Him and us becomes. The more we pray, the more we will be able to make a difference to our families and the wider world.

Thank you Jesus, Our Lady and St Jeanne-Francoise de Chantal for your care of my daughter. I leave her and my son in your arms.

I would love to do great work for God. I would love Him to be able to use me in some way but I know that the barrier to this is my human self. I would feel smug, self-satisfied, perhaps better or more spiritual than others and that would be a heinous, sinful way of being. The root of evil is found in thinking oneself better than others. It is that belief system – that some are better than others for whatever reason (race, ethnicity, ability, intelligence, physical appearance etc) – that underpins poverty and injustice in the world. It is that belief system that ultimately leads to genocide and it is the absolute opposite that Christ teaches us. This is what makes Christianity so revolutionary – it goes against the intuitive ways of the flesh. It goes against natural selection and the survival of the fittest. The earliest Christians brought slaves, masters, men, women, Jews and Gentiles together to share in the love feast. There was probably no more revolutionary act in the history of the world and it remains totally revolutionary. What sort of world would we live in if we had the technology available today without a foundation of Christian principles on which to base our ethics? Thank God for God!

I remember a silly little incident some years ago. I was unloading my basket at the supermarket check-out. When I looked up a woman walked past me and stood in front of me in the queue with her back to me. I felt a surge of rage unusual for me as I am not the most assertive person in the world. I got her attention and told her that she had walked in front of me and that I was ahead of her in the queue. She looked at me disdainfully and said that this was a basket only queue and I had too much on the conveyor belt for one basket. I was furious and piled everything back in my basket to prove my point. I looked somewhat ridiculous doing this as, by the time I had achieved my aim, she merely looked at it said, ‘I don’t know how you even managed to carry that’ and went through the check-out. I then had to put everything back on the conveyor belt defeated by the situation. I was still furious and took some time to calm down. I left the shop wondering why that little incident had so upset me and the answer soon came. She only had one item. If she had spoken to me, acknowledged me and asked to go ahead I would have been delighted to let her pass. It was the fact that she walked past me and turned her back as if I didn’t exist, as if I were beneath her contempt, that so upset me. I realised that this was one end of a continuum that takes a long road ending at genocide. How can a little incident at a checkout end in genocide? You must think I have lost my marbles this time! But I am convinced that it is that tendency in each of us to think ourselves more worthy than another that is the foundation of evil – the anti-love – and it is something we must identify and quash.

 As individuals, we are constantly striving against that fallen part of our nature that wants to make ourselves exploit others and feel superior to those less fortunate than ourselves. The first Christians shared everything – that is made clear at the beginning of Acts – and St Paul collected alms from richer regions which he took to the church at Jerusalem. We wonder why the early church was so powerful!!! I wonder what the world would be like if we, today, shared everything with our brothers and sisters in the Lord throughout the world. That is the way to make poverty history – for us to show an example and prove to the world what it is that makes Christianity the revolutionary force for God that it used to be and still is in some places.

I remember a talk by a healer who came to our church. He recalled the first time he healed someone. Both he and his wife prayed and laid hands on this person who was then cured. The healer told us that his first thoughts were ‘I hope it was my hands and my prayers that did it and not my wife’s’. How human! How frank to admit this. However, it was his realisation of the evil of that thought that made God able to go on with him, change him and continue to use him. So, as I am aware of my fallen nature is this enough? Can I crucify this part of my nature? Certainly not without the grace of God and absolute commitment from me. We will see.

Every week-end our towns are plagued by drunken, violent, lewd and abusive behaviour. Alcohol is now so cheap that even young teenagers – thirteen and fourteen year olds – are boasting that they are drinking twenty plus tins of beer in one evening. Alcohol abuse fuels these teenagers who hunt in feral packs, picking off anyone vulnerable they come across.  This affects us all, but is particularly devastating for the poor, vulnerable, deprived, uneducated and those with mental health problems. Here are some recent statistics:

 ‘Schoolchildren as young as eight are turning up to lessons with hangovers, fuelling a wave of violent behaviour, headteachers revealed yesterday. And the effects of binge-drinking have been blamed for a catastrophic decline in discipline and an explosion in classroom assaults. Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s acting accident and emergency consultant Paul Leonard recently revealed that the hospital had treated a seven-year-old for alcohol poisoning. Alcohol abuse experts warn the experience in primaries reflects trends in wider society as children copy heavy-drinking relatives.’ Mail Online 2006 14 July

‘The murder rate among young men in England and Wales has almost doubled, according to a report published today.  Alcohol is the key factor in half of the killings of men by other men.   People in the poorest 10 per cent of electoral wards were six times more likely to be murdered than those in the wealthiest 10 per cent, it found.’ Times online October 17^th, 2005

‘Binge drinking is being blamed for a steep rise in violent crime.The problem stems from the rapid growth in pubs and bars opening in city centres across the country, police warned yesterday.Assault and woundings rose by 70 per cent in some parts of England last year, Home Office figures show. Critics say changes to the licensing laws – with the possibility of 24-hour openings – will lead to more new outlets and an increase in round-the-clock drinking. Such a trend would turn some town centres into no-go areas, senior officers fear.’ Mail Online August 4^th 2009

‘One in three rape allegations involves women who have been drinking before the alleged offence, a study shows. Of 677 rape complaints made in London in April and May, 235 (35%) were alcohol-related and 85 (13%) said they were uncertain if they had been raped. Criminology professor Betsy Stanko, working with the police, said a third of all cases was “incredibly high”. The review also showed 17% of female rape victims and 28% of male victims had mental health issues. Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick said   ”We are going to look at all the issues relating to alcohol and mental health because these groups represent more vulnerable victims.” ‘21^st September 2005   BBC news

‘A child under ten is admitted to hospital to be treated for alcohol-related problems once every three days in England, according to Government figures revealed today.   The figures come from within a parliamentary answer revealed by the Liberal Democrats ahead of the launch tomorrow of their strategy to tackle underage and binge drinking. In the 16-17 age bracket alone, they revealed, around 12,500 teenagers were admitted to Accident and Emergency for alcohol-related conditions, marking an increase of 95 per cent between 2002 and 2007.  To qualify as an alochol-related admission, the diagnosis must mention one of: mental and behavioural disorders due to alcohol use, alcoholic liver disease, or the toxic effect of alcohol. ‘Times Online November 9, 2008

 This is not a new problem – we have battled against it before. However, we never seem to learn the lessons of history. We seem to think that the past is not relevant to present day decision making. However,  the academic discipline of history is our shared memory. We all know the phrase by George Santayana ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ So, when we look at our social history we see that we have been through all this before:

 In How the Poor Live , George Sims explained why he was a supporter of the Temperance Society (1889)

‘Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to be wondered at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes are made out of men and women who seldom know where tomorrow’s meal is coming from.

Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to those people; drink gives them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to live in such places.

The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell of their pestilent homes. A copper or two, often obtained by pawning the last rag that covers the shivering children on the bare floor at home, will buy enough alcohol to send a woman so besotted that the wretchedness, the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost their grip. The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp edge from sorrow, and leaves the drinker for awhile in a fools’ paradise.

It is not only crime and vice and disorder flourish luxuriantly in these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort bred of intemperance of the inhabitants, but the effect upon the children is terrible. The offspring of drunken fathers and mothers inherit not only a tendency to vice, but they come into the world physically and mentally unfit to conquer in life’s battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen child-object one comes upon in these localities is the most painful part of our explorers’ experience. The country asylums are crowded with pauper idiots and lunatics, who owe their wretched condition of the sin of the parents, and the rates are heavily burdened with the maintenance of the idiot offspring of drunkenness.’

 It was the Church who stood up against this evil problem – where is ‘the church’ now? In the nineteenth century Christianity was a force to be reckoned with. Have we now become so irrelevant? Isn’t it time that we began to concentrate on the areas of ignorance, violence and deprivation in our midst and start to show the world that there is another way – a way of decency and respect?

Although we often equate the nonconformists with the temperance society, the Catholic Church was at the heart of the movement with Irish priest Theobold Matthew establishing the Teetotal Abstinence Society. Lloyd George famously said during January 1915, ‘Britain is fighting Germans, Austrians and drink, and as far as I can see the greatest of these foes is drink.’ Well, we are no longer fighting the Austrians and the Germans so perhaps we can concentrate on drink. Young people need to know that there is nothing anti-cool about respect and decency for others.

 So, who is going to lead the way? I am quite sure that there are wonderful, individual initiatives trying to fight individual fires but we now need to open an all-out assault against the degradation that is stalking our streets and society.  Are we frightenned to stand up and be counted? Perhaps we need to ask the help of Father Theobold for help to launch another battle in the war against  alcohol and the misery its abuse causes.

Last week a woman, her husband and two children were in a local cinema watching the new Harry Potter film. A group of teenagers were making a noise and so the woman turned round and asked them to be quiet. After the film, two of the group followed the family into a nearby restaurant and threw bleach over the woman’s head and back, leaving her needing hospital treatment for burns to her skin and possible permanent damage to her eyes. These types of senseless, vicious, feral attacks are becoming more and more common.

 In secular Britain the wish to do good, show respect and value others is becoming more and more irrelevant. As fewer people identify themselves any sort of force for good, the force for evil takes hold – and yes, evil exists. How else can we explain the holocaust in which the murder of millions of men, women and children reached industrial proportions? How can we explain the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda where people who had lived side-by-side peacefully suddenly started hacking each other to bits? 

 There are some people who emanate love and goodness but they seem to be a rare breed. Our towns are plagued by loutish, drunken, lewd behaviour.  Rage, foul abusive language and violence are a common consequence of drug and alcohol abuse every weekend in towns across the country. More and more young people have lost their way and are roaming in feral packs. Those of us who want to lead decent lives have lost our voices because of the fear of violence such as experienced by the woman in the cinema. Here are a few examples from the last few months – just the ones which have stuck in my memory. They are the tip of an enormous iceberg:

• THREE teenagers were today locked up for life for murdering a young dad who had the courage to walk outside his home and ask them to be quiet.The court had heard how the trio had been roaming the streets of Sunderland downing vodka and wine in  the hours leading up to the attack. “They then showed a complete lack of remorse for what they did, although they were happy to boast to their friends and family about their activities that night.

•  Mr Wass, 39, was attacked with a brick, golf clubs and pieces of wood in the frenzied beating on a quiet cul de sac. The youths launched their attack just a few yards from Mr Wass’s home in Loxley, Sheffield, after he came out of his house at 11.30pm on Saturday night and asked the gang to be quiet. “He just came out of the house to tell them to be quiet and they started beating him up. One had a golf club and another had ripped a plank from the fence. Then I saw one of them pick up a brick and he just hit my uncle at the back of the head. He fell down in the road an didn’t get back up.”

•  ‘Two teenage boys have been jailed for life for the murder of a woman who was killed for dressing as a Goth. Sophie Lancaster was kicked and stamped to death by Brendan Harris, 15, and Ryan Herbert, 16, in Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancashire, last summer. The pair turned on Miss Lancaster, 20, in an act of “feral thuggery” as she tried to get them and three other youths to stop attacking her boyfriend. Passing sentence at Preston Crown Court, Judge Anthony Russell QC described the attack as “feral thuggery” which raised serious questions about the “sort of society which exists in this country

•  A shy girl of 16 with learning difficulties was raped by up to ten men who then burned her with caustic soda, a court heard yesterday.  The teenager, who has a mental age of about eight, had skin peeling off her face, chest and genital area because her tormentors poured water on her, intensifying the burning, jurors heard.As the unnamed girl screamed, the gang laughed and ran away, said prosec­utor Rosina Cottage. One defendant, Bradley Daley-Smith, apparently later told a friend: ‘She was a ho and she deserved it.’

 ‘…the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour’ (1 Peter 5:8b).

He seems to have plenty of choice.

This year in Britain, we have our first atheist summer camp for children. This has sparked a great deal of debate and it was the subject for a BBC Radio Phone-in which posed the question ‘Would the world be better without religion?’. Of course, the thinking of many of the people calling, both for and against belief in God, was confused and sometimes incoherent.  However there were several themes.

One of the striking aspects was quite obvious. Those who were believers spoke of their personal experience and about the love of God and the difference He had made in their lives. Those who were not believers spoke in more abstract terms. They said things like:

• Religion causes wars.
• Catholics are intolerant because they don’t accept gays or women as priests.
• Religion is all about control. I was a born-again Christian and people in my church were arrogant and manipulative. We were not allowed to question anything.
• Religions fight amongst themselves – even Christian denominations don’t get on with each other.
• Religions say ‘I am right and everybody else is wrong’ which is arrogant and dangerous. You are saying that you know better than all the 6 billion other people on the planet.
• It takes away democratic ways of decision making on moral issues such as voluntary euthanasia, and homosexuality where religious leaders are at variance with what the public want and what the public believe to be civilized.

 One comment particularly interested me:

• ‘There isn’t enough evidence for God. If he wanted us to believe in him he would exist. Religion is just people wanting and needing to believe just as people want and need drugs and alcohol. It is escapism.’

It also echoes Professor Dawkins who says on the BBC website (5 minute interview) ‘There is no reason to believe in anything for which there is no evidence’ and it also fits in with the phrases ’blind faith’ and  ‘blind leap of faith’ which is often banded about and was mentioned by callers to the programme. This ‘blind faith’ phrase is fixed in the public consciousness as a necessary stage of religious belief. In other words, otherwise rational people suddenly believe in something for which there is no evidence?

 We know it doesn’t happen like that. I was once told that there are more Christian believers in the sciences than in any other academic field. I can understand that because I have always found the path to God as involving an empirical process. You say ‘my hypothesis is that if God exists I can find evidence of him’. Well, you can look around you and try to deduce his existence from what you see and many people have come to faith that way. One caller to the aforementioned radio programme said ‘If there were a God what would be the evidence? The fact that we have information that we can understand about the world is evidence – for instance, the understanding of DNA. Information like that doesn’t come about in a random way.’ Yes we can argue like that but it doesn’t get to the crux of the matter because faith isn’t belief in something – it is a state of being’. It isn’t so much ‘I believe in God because…’ but ‘God lives in me’. ‘I have met God and continue to meet up with him regularly.’

 How does this fit in with scientific deduction. Only that you have to find some way of meeting him and the way to do that starts with the hypothesis ‘If God exists I can find evidence of him’ and the way to do that is to ask: ‘If you are there, show yourself to me’. Isn’t that how we come to faith? He reveals himself to us so that we are simply then unable to disbelieve. And, faith being a state of being, the more we spend time with him the more he reveals himself, the more we believe.  

 However, the beauty of it is that the revelation is personal. It is to an individual alone – we each have to find our own personal revelation. So when the caller says: ‘There isn’t enough evidence for God. If he wanted us to believe in him he would exist. Religion is just people wanting and needing to believe just as people want and need drugs and alcohol. It is escapism’ we can say that there is plenty of evidence for the existence of God but it is given to individuals. Ask, and you will be given the evidence for yourself. What does this sound like?

 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”  Luke 11: 9/10 (NIV)

 I think we Christians are using a hammer to crack a nut. We preach and argue and try to reason people into the kingdom. If we accept that it is a very individual process and that God will lead the individual into the light Himself we only have to provide that little chink in the person’s anti-faith armour to let God in. OK, we say to our secular friend, if you have no evidence for the existence of God, just ask him to reveal himself, wait and see. Then we step back and leave God to do the rest – that is faith! For, if someone asks him that question he will never fail to respond and He only needs the tiniest way into a person’s heart to start that process.

 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”  Luke 11: 9/10 (NIV)

 ’One of the tasks the children have been set is to disprove the existence of two invisible unicorns they have been told are roaming the camp. Miss Stein says: “We have told them they can’t be seen or heard or sensed in any way but we all have faith that they exist. So far no camper has been able to prove they don’t exist.” ‘ (From a newspaper report on the atheist summer camp)