John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

In search of leadership in a time of darkness

... Today our post-truth society and our splintering social and political world needs good leaders. People who will not shrink from difficult decisions in government and economics, in local neighbourhoods and in business; people able to deal with conflict constructively, who will embrace the realities, grapple with the complexities, eke out reconciliation - people of all generations who can help and influence others along the way. You and I are called to be people like this. 

Especially we need leaders (parents, grandparents, friends, neighbours) who can teach deep values to others, especially the young, who may be in the dark about such things: in a recently-published book on just war, the former defence advisor and leading public Christian David Fisher argues (along with General Lord Dannatt) that many modern soldiers have had little prior education in religion or morality: he says that "It was striking how Lynndie England, one of the participants in the Abu Ghraib abuses, claimed in her defence that she had assumed the abusive practices were acceptable because no one had told her otherwise." ...

from my talk today, In search of leadership in a time of darkness.

Remembrance: no heroes or monsters on this holy ground

It is our way to want to make heroes of people who would rather we didn’t. If this was the case for General Edmund Allenby (who symbolically liberated Jerusalem in 1917 not on horseback but on foot) it was also the case for many of those we know, who returned from war in silence and spoke about it hardly at all. The writer and Anglican priest Rachel Mann describes becoming fascinated with the war as a child, loving magazines like The Victorand making models of WW1 and WW2 aeroplanes. She knew that her Grandad Bert, a farmer, had fought in the Great War, ‘and yet,’ she writes, ‘I knew it was something we did not, as a family, talk about. Or if we did, we did not do so in his company.’

Even as child, then, Rachel recognised that when it came to this territory, the family were tiptoeing carefully on holy ground.

‘Yet,’ she continues, ‘I remember once asking him about his experience in the war. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t seem angry. He spoke quietly about being wounded on the Somme. I was excited. I’d heard of this place. I’d read about it in magazines and books. It made me think of heroes and courage and glory. I asked where else he’d fought, with the childish and insensitive passion of the child who thinks only of glory and doesn’t yet appreciate the pain. He mumbled some places I’d not heard of, finally mentioning another familiar place, Passchendaele. I asked him what it was like to have been a soldier. He looked at me sadly, and, with a finality I could not challenge, said, simply, “Passchendaele was the worst.”.

There are those we too-easily call ‘heroes’ who would never describe themselves that way. For those like Bert it was sufficient to have survived being in that war and remained a functioning human being.

- this story from Rachel Mann's Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God forms part of my talk today, Remembrance: no heroes or monsters on this holy ground.

The saints: signs of contradiction

"I needed to recover words like 'saint', the 'righteous' and 'prophet' from the religious ghetto where they mean long dead people who weren't ordinary like me. They did magic things, and God spoke to them in magic ways and theologians had buried them under mountains of words. I decided that the real, breathing men had to be like us if they were to be of any use to us."

- Jim Hart describes his struggle, in my All Saint's Day talk, today in Sparkford and last week on the Isle of Mull, The saints: signs of contradiction.