Letter to Jay 14/11/2002

My father, Colin, was born in Shanghai, and at an impressionable age was sent to preparatory school at Chefu in the North of China. The journey had to be made by sea, and on one occasion, the boat was pirated. On hearing this news, my grandmother was distraught. My grandfather simply told her: “Colin’s a bad penny. He’ll turn up”. And so he did, with yet another traveller’s tale to tell. It had in fact proved a welcome diversion on what had become for my father, a regular journey to Hell. For the school at Chefu, where the brutal regime was in the hands of a religious order, was to cast a shadow over much of the remainder of his life. It was not just the way in which the pupils had to smash the ice in the water jugs to wash in the mornings: he could never forget how the monks savagely beat him and his contemporaries. In contrast, the pirates, with a singular disregard for our contemporary notions of Political Correctness, had locked all the female passengers below, and had handed out masses of oranges to the boys. My father never became a practising Christian, although he remained deeply interested in religious matters. Such was the effect that Chefu had on him that his parents decided to send his younger brother, Ronald, to a school in England.

The Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, once wrote that nothing is apt to mask the face of God so much as religion. And certainly for too many people today, the Church is seen as boring, moralising, and half-dead. Anyone who attempts to evangelise will soon discover how many people have had negative experiences of institutional Christianity. Some may have more intellectual objections. The sixteenth century was an age impregnated with religious fervour, but it was also a time when a devout and humane man like Sir Thomas More could actively persecute – seek to kill, even – a devout and humane man like William Tyndale. Of course, some of the objections we encounter are simply excuses for people to ignore the Word of God altogether – we should not forget that only some of the seed ever falls on fertile ground. Yet we should not underestimate the damage that is done to the image of Christ in the world by those of his followers who abuse their influence.

We need to realise the obstacles that we set up for those who would follow Jesus. Often people are deterred by all the complexity of the religious life, and fear they will never be able to take on board such things as credal propositions, never mind the whole ecclesiastical structure. They worry that they are not up to it, or are not good enough. They are often turned off by the vicious debates over contemporary religious issues such as the ordination of women to the priesthood. Despite all this, Jesus continues to make friends with those in the world at large, among people of all races, and all walks of life. People find themselves drawn to this figure – both mysterious yet also so absolutely human - and in many cases their lives will be fundamentally changed as a result. God, through his Son, has the capacity to catch up with people. How can we help in this process, rather than obscure or even hinder it?

We need to recognise the importance of simple dialogue. For all the obvious success of Alpha courses and other methods of teaching, for many people the journey to faith begins with and is sustained by personal encounters. The wise Men were brought to Jesus by the power of reason, but other journeys can begin intuitively. The woman of Samaria in John, Chapter 4 found her life totally changed by a conversation with Jesus and she went on to be a most effective missionary. Dialogue is implicit in Scripture, whether it is between God and Moses, or Jesus and his followers. We have to meet people where they are, and share our experiences of Jesus with them in a spirit of humility. Liturgy and teaching are important matters, but they are only going to make sense if people come to recognise that the love and compassion of Jesus is with those who speak in his name.

There are several areas where the Words of Jesus have much to offer the world of today. The first is in the area of healing ministry. Not only is there great interest in “alternative” medicine, but there is a growing awareness that real healing is not a technological process, but involves the interaction of body, mind, and Spirit. Last Autumn, I did a course on the basics of Counselling, where the tutor laid great stress on the need for those seeking help to find a way of exercising forgiveness. Jesus frequently emphasises the connection between healing and forgiveness, as with the man who was sick of the palsy in Mathew, Chapter 9. As Father Francis McNutt remarks in his book on Healing: “Too often we impede God’s healing through our coldness, our resentment, or our lack of forgiveness (F. McNutt, OP. – Healing, p175). He cites the case of a woman whose own physical healing was blocked by her refusal to forgive her brothers. It was only when she had done so, that the healing was effective. Fr. McNutt believes this shows why St James encourages confession for the sick. As with those who seek healing, the healer must be careful not to become the obstacle through his or her own feelings.

The other important area is what I would describe as “dynamic peace”. The economist, Ernst Schmacher, once proposed that “the amount of real leisure we enjoy is in inverse proportion to the number of labour saving gadgets we use”. He based this argument on a comparison of a Third World country like Burma, where despite great material poverty people seemed relaxed and spiritually healthy, with the United States where life was frenetic, and nearly everyone had their personal analyst. There is little doubt that the pace of life has speeded up, certainly in the developed world, yet Jesus can bring real peace to us in the midst of all our fear and busyness as he did to his disciples in the Upper Room (John 20:19). Those Christians who are really able to focus on Jesus and live in his way can often be a means of transmitting that peace to others. In many instances this can be most easily effected in the simple act of listening to one another.

The Wise Men, like much of the secular world today, were searching for the truth. It has been argued that the gifts they brought reflected the issues that concerned them most deeply: gold, frankincense and myrrh, can be seen as symbolising respectively politics and economics, the Place of the Divine, and death itself. Be that as it may, the Wise Men came to see - as we do almost two Millennia later - that in encountering Jesus there was an effective conclusion to their journey of spiritual search. They came to him in all humility and so must we. In that way – and in that way alone – his power can come to rest upon us. Then we can truly say, along with St Paul that “when we are weak, we are strong” (2 Cor 12:10).