John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

After Mateen and Mair: Overcoming Legion in our village

Jesus’ healing of the Gerasene demoniac ... is a vital guide to us for these times we are living through. It invites us to consider our own society’s hidden fears, those things which drive us to scapegoat others. It encourages us to ask the difficult questions about who we are demonising and what that demonisation is doing to them and to us. In this week when we are invited to vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union we would do well to read and re-read every day the story Jesus’ healing of the Gerasene demoniac, for the perspectives on human behaviour it offers us, and the encouragement that we can break free from the oppositional way of the world which creates demons and contributes to the madness of us all.

- my talk today, After Mateen and Mair: Overcoming Legion in our village.

 

 

Do you object to being a subject? (Queen Elizabeth 90th Birthday version)

... We are subjects to each other, to whom we are tied in a network of desires. Facebook puts it out there - we now publicly list - as ‘Friends’ - those we most keenly associate with, whose values and lifestyles influence at a very deep level, the people we are, those - in other words - who we subject ourselves to.

Do you object to being a subject? Well, get used to it, because at this fundamental level, we are all subjects, without noticing it much of the time. And though we may dislike the idea that we are shaped and formed by others, face it, it’s true: at school you were either in the gang with the playground bully or you were one of the bullied ones, but either way you were subject to the power of the bully; or if you now believe that there’s a price for everything and everything has its price, then you’ve subjected yourself to the values of the market, and live with the moral consequences of that. In a more positive frame, the good bits of us are there because of the good people we’ve subjected ourselves to over the years - the good parents, good teachers, good colleagues and friends whose influences have rubbed off on us.

Now, if you’re still with me on this, I hope you can see that if we’re all moving around in a web of subjectivity then we might as well be conscious about how that web works, and if we’re going to subject ourselves to the influence of others then we may as well make conscious decisions about who those others should be - to try to ensure that those influences are good, positive, empowering ones for us....

from my talk today, Do you object to being a subject?