Welcome to Our Church?

While waiting for Markus I visited St Nikolas’ church in Guildford. Although it was 11.30am on a Sunday and there were people inside, the doors were locked. I wandered round to find that the somewhat elderly congregation was having coffee in a smart hall at the back.

Interesting, this. What sort of welcome would I receive? I am old (ish!) and dressed as an itinerant scruff – old trousers, a half eaten baseball hat (thanks to our dog Moses), a fluorescent yellow jacket and my big toe showing through my boot, so my fashion suggests “Salvation Home for Destitutes” rather than Hackett, if you know what I mean. What sort of welcome would I have? So, in I walked and the crowd parted like the Red Sea … everyone ignored me, including the vicar, and went on talking to their chums.

My barren visit was saved by the finance chairman called Patrick, who was welcoming, and he gave me coffee.

However, I feel that If I had been an ex-prisoner or black or under fifty I would have not felt welcome.

When I went round to the front doors again there were four young people trying to get in. I told them the bad news… that is that the church has lost the plot and is as dead as the dodo. They smiled and went on their way.

I understand that the vicar is “very spiritual”… that’s nice, then. But it would be even nicer if he had the courtesy to greet strangers because I have always understood that this is vital part of a vicar’s job.

There was a large sign saying “Welcome” on the front of this church, but I have learned that this is only symbolic!

I walked away, sadly…

Pretty Politics

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus never declared, “blessed are the nice” – though it seems all too many of our countrymen want to be thought of as just that. These people don’t want actually to have to do anything in particular to prove their niceness, virtue and political correctness, and they reckon talk will do. They have long since learned what George McDonald Fraser’s great creation Harry Flashman knew: people take you at face value… they don’t probe or think much. So if you can talk the talk, you don’t have to walk the walk. What do I mean?

Talking the Talk

I listened to another vicar the other day, a substantial lady, holding forth to a small group with her “Christian” views on politics. It seems today that clergy talk of little else: they know it’s less offensive and rather easier to discuss, for example, the alleged iniquities of the growth in the number of food banks than preach the Gospel. She talked about “her journey” and then her “vision” for a better society. Then she claimed she was “passionate” about and really “believed” in the NHS, and the plight of the poor to whom she had been “called to serve”. She said, in particular, that she advocated a higher minimum wage.

Why should this lady care that if the minimum wage rises too high, low-skilled workers, whose abilities simply cannot command a high minimum wage, become unemployed? That would of course not be her problem. She was effortlessly indicating to her audience that she was holy, generous and warm-hearted. She was showing that she cared deeply about her fellow man – or woman. All she had to do was talk and send verbal signals. I told her that it was my view that the “Christian” communities held no monopoly of such views, and stances she claimed were “Christian” were surely shared by Muslims, Hindus, Jews and secular humanists. She looked hurt, for all she wanted to be was “nice” and I was complicating things.

PC World

This faux niceness is everywhere. One of our young friends claimed at a recent supper party she had voted “Green”. Everyone said what an interesting choice that was; oh yes, what a sensible move. No one asked how the nation could afford, for example, the £45bn bill they were proposing for insulating everyone’s lofts? Or even commented that the scale of their proposed financial profligacy was breathtaking. No one asked why was it considered wise to run down our defences and drop our nuclear defences in a dangerous world? It would seem, rather, that voting Green is considered to be a “nice” and acceptable option.

At another function, one of our other friends announced he had voted UKIP. There were sharp intakes of breath from the other guests for he had unwittingly stated that he was fundamentally rather nasty, that he did not hold liberal media-approved opinions – one of which of course is to loathe UKIP and all its works. The other guests wanted to demonstrate by their disapproval of UKIP they were not racist. Now, I hasten to add that I am not a UKIP supporter, but the fact that the UKIP manifesto was a paragon of common sense when compared to the Greens’ was not even mentioned. Then one of the other guests said, presumably in order to indicate what a nice person she was and how much she cared about the poor, how much she loathed the Daily Mail. Then, in case that message had been missed, she announced how much she despised Murdoch. I asked her why? Silence fell. I presume she was convinced that her views – prejudices really – were for parading, not debating. In other words they could not be challenged in polite company. I asked if she read other papers, and of course she answered that yes she did. Then I told her that if it hadn’t been for Murdoch courageously taking on the print unions in the 1970s, then there would not today be any other newspapers to read. She stared at me silently because parading an acute dislike of Murdoch is a totemic statement indicating “political correctness”.

Signalling how “nice” you are crosses party boundaries. For example, the Conservatives always have to prove that they are not the “nasty party”. This is one of the reasons they have to hammer off-shore havens and tax avoiders. They were about to name and shame a few avoiders when it was pointed out they were in the process of destroying some of their most generous supporters.

Then why do you think that the Tories ring-fenced the expenditure of 0.7 per cent of our GDP on foreign aid? The efficacy of such expenditure on foreign aid is irrelevant: it was to prove the party is nice and caring. When Cameron claims he is a “passionate defender” of the NHS – note the “passion” – he is declaring he also believes, along with everyone else, in what passes for God in the UK. This triggers the other parties to declare they passionately believe in the NHS even more than Cameron, and that they are therefore even more “compassionate” than him. The virtue lies in the wish. The use of the word “believes” shifts the argument away from evidence about which health care system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of voters, to a visceral demonstration of compassion. Then the other parties angrily shriek that the terrible Tories want to “privatise” the NHS and – despite the NHS’s manifest inefficiencies, that will bankrupt us all in the end – that anyone who seeks to change it in any way has to be another Stalin. “Gosh”, we are meant to think, they must be virtuous and ever so “nice” to be so angry and to shriek so loudly.

Then I know of two people who are core capitalists through and through, and with all the trappings of wealth, who claim always to be “Old Labour” because it signals they are concerned with the plight of the poor. But the reality is somewhat different. There is a poem by the great late Bernard Levin that sums their attitude up:

“The working class can kiss my arse,

I’ve joined the bosses class at last”

Virtue is as Virtue Does

There was a time when Christians believed that to be virtuous you had to do something: help in a food bank, visit the sick, or look after your aging parents and not dump them in a care home. These things of course involve effort and sacrifice. How much easier is it just to talk about virtue and do nothing that is actually virtuous.

Christians hold that pride and parading empty virtue are core sins. This is surely why so many of us find empty verbal compassion and virtue signalling nauseating. Perhaps some people are fooled into believing that those who do little – apart from publicly asserting their moral superiority by boasting they loathe UKIP, Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail – are somehow more virtuous than those who actually take action.

Today’s widespread sham boasting indicates that there is little shame and no real reflection: it’s all words and wind. I have just received an email from George, someone I hardly know. He ends it, “Have a really wonderful weekend, Tom, Warmest possible wishes, George.” (Note the possible!)

Gosh, what a far warmer and generous person George must be than the individual – whom I like a lot – who signed off his email, “Ever Henry”.

Last night we stayed with a dear friend Nigel Pollock outside Godalming. A lovely and relaxed time, much needed after one of our perennial encounters with dis-courteous drivers.

Something Fishy Going on Here…
I recall that a policeman friend of mine arrested a woman driver whom he saw swearing viciously at an inoffensive elderly man who had stopped briefly to allow a woman with a pram to cross the road: she had then given the driver the finger.

Back at the station the policeman deposited the woman in the cells and checked out her papers and the ownership of the car. Soon he released the very angry woman who asked him what the blankety blank he thought he was doing arresting her like that?

“Well madam,” said the cop, “I saw a fish sign in the rear window of your car and a banner saying “Jesus saves” and so when these signs contrasted with your behaviour I was convinced the car had been stolen. My apologies!”

A Day as a Lion

I have occasionally been asked what persuades Jane and I to continue walking for ZANE, and concerned friends wonder whether such an activity isn’t rather risky at our age? I suppose they think that at our stage of life, watching telly in carpet slippers would be a more appropriate way of spending time than staggering up and down the UK. 1,700 miles is a long way!

However, perhaps a single day as a lion is better than a thousand years as a sheep? So, on we plod.

Marshmallow World

Many people think our relatively risk-free and peaceful society is a normal state of affairs. However, we live in extraordinary and unprecedented times. Our strife-free life is a contributing factor to the fact that over 30 per cent of the population is so used to these marshmallow times that they couldn’t even be bothered to vote in the last election. With little sense of history, they are unaware that the essential freedoms we enjoy today – to vote and speak freely, the fact we are more or less an independent people (pity about the EU), religious tolerance, freely elected parliaments and fundamental democratic rights –have all been won in blood by our forefathers. It’s all too easy to just read the sports news and forget that 55 million people died in the Second World War – we take the benefits of peace for granted, and forget the terrible cost.

And while I am thinking dark thoughts, I couldn’t help pondering after we last arrived back from Zimbabwe – a country where people have no state benefits of any kind – what a risk-averse, cosseted and spoiled country the UK has become. In Zimbabwe they have nothing but God’s protection: in the UK we rely on the NHS.

Decline and Fall

The reality is that the seeds of decline lurk everywhere. Gibbon noted five characteristics that led to the fall of the Roman Empire: an obsession with sex and perversion; a celebration of affluence instead of wealth creation; meretricious rubbish posing as art; a desire for more and more people to live off the state; and last, a wide and growing divide between the rich and the poor. Recognise these symptoms anyone?

The banality of the last election frightened me – endless talk of spending money with no attention given to wealth creation. Then the left seeks to cut the armed services with the savings shovelled into either increased welfare in Scotland or our bloated NHS. Lenin would have called Sturgeon and her chums, and their wish to scrap Trident, “useful fools”.

And another thing. What irritates me witless is the lefties’ assumption that they are somehow “nicer” than those with differing views, and automatic occupants of the moral high ground. But the left has no monopoly on compassion. We all want to take money from the “haves” and help the poor. The question is how is the balance to be struck? The idea that the left is “kind” while the right unkind is drivel. Some of the most grotesque mass murderers and dictators had their roots on the left – think Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler.

A Modern Monster

In A.N. Wilson’s excellent book on Hitler, it’s chilling to read that despite the fact he was a monster, he was also a “modernist” (and much liked by his staff). What is fascinating is that most of our lefty friends today would have wholeheartedly agreed with many of his beliefs. Of course, he took his racist views to wild extremes, but he is not alone in this; today we have growing anti-Semitism, and racism is so prevalent in our society that our leaders rightly deem it necessary to implement sterns laws to prevent racial abuse (laws, of course, do not do away with racism, they just mask its pernicious effects).

Of course, Hitler’s racism led him to the ultimate obscenity of mass murder. But he was in fact a boring, commonplace little man with a very “modern” outlook in other areas. He believed in crude Darwinism, along with nearly all the scientists and “sensible” sociologists, politicians and political commentators of our time. Hitler – rather like Blair, who abolished the office of Lord Chancellor – swept away what he regarded as outmoded political structures. He embraced science, not religion, as the answer to life’s mysteries, and he condoned euthanasia and abortion; Hitler regarded himself as forward-looking. Oh yes, and he hated hunting and was a non-smoking vegetarian. In fact, as far as I can see, Hitler’s views were the embodiment of those of the average modern lefty person.

Hitler and his gang started a world war that by its end had killed 52 million people. Without proper defences and with our naive belief that the wars of the wicked past can never return because we are now more “civilised” and “nicer” than before, how can we ensure that the new lefty versions of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam can be spotted before they end the world as we know it? Next time it will be nuclear.

A Stellar Cast

We crawled through thick traffic to the ZANE conference on the second hottest day of the year and, considering Wimbledon is on, it was surprisingly well attended. My friend Paul Boateng – past High Commissioner to South Africa made an excellent chairman. The ambassador Catriona Laing was a star- it’s clear that the Zimbabwe job is highly sensitive and they choose their stars to serve there. We were lucky to have Richard Dowden- director of the Royal Africa Society- and my old friend and clubfoot champion Chris Lavy. All in all a very worthwhile day.
Back to the kind hospitality of ZANE donors.

Turning Heads

Whilst in the car on the way to the conference with Jane, I asked our driver Markus if he looks at women in the street.

“Oh yes,” he admitted, “I always have done!”

“So do I”

“Oh yes Tom,” Jane said sweetly, “do you think they are looking at you?”

Nice having a wife.

—

Shadowlands

Over the last couple of years, we have watched a sad procession of desperate men facing jail sentences and complete ruin for abusing minors. And we read of others destroyed by drink and drugs.

Before we set off this morning, my eye was drawn to yet another sad tale in the paper of a celebrity’s fall from grace – and it set me thinking. These “criminals” have been destroyed by their shadowlands overwhelming them; and there by the grace of God go I.

Something to Die For

We are all created to make a difference. Martin Luther King wrote that, “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, then he isn’t fit to live.” A rather extreme sentiment, but he makes his position very clear. Rather more gently, Sir Walter Scott said that to be productive we need, “a maiden to woo, a battle to fight and a cause greater than ourselves to live for.”

The ominous fact is that if we are unable to make a difference then we will find a substitute because none of us can live without some sort of purpose. It follows that unless we can find our God-given role, we are likely to find an alternative one that the Almighty did not mean us to play. What do I mean?

Occasionally I have had experiences that were so profound I can recall each moment as it happened with clarity: I remember exactly what was said and who said it.

Some years ago on a business trip I was persuaded to visit a “camp” in California for a week. The course’s purpose, I soon discovered, was to put its participants in touch with their inner feelings.

I am a fully paid up member of the church reticent with deep conservative instincts embedded in my DNA: I am English, RMA Sandhurst trained, and my default position is the stiff upper lip. So when it became clear that this place was completely outside my radar, I wanted out fast. But my hosts were insistent I participated and so I rather weakly stayed; in retrospect I’m rather glad, because the experience taught me a great deal.

At the outset we were sworn to secrecy (though, don’t forget that when I’m sworn to total secrecy, it only takes me a week before I forget quite how secret the secret was; in two weeks, I can’t remember that it was a secret at all; and when three weeks have passed, I can’t even recall who told me the secret in the first place.) Anyway, as all this happened many years ago now, I can relate the experience with a more-or-less clear conscience. (Note: be careful before telling me your secret!)

To get back to the camp, numbers were used rather than names, and to create a degree of anonymity, we were all obliged to wear green tracksuits. We were softened up by having to participate in various vigorous games, racing up and down hills and passing rocks backwards and forwards (performing many sits ups if we were too slow). Meanwhile, ramrod instructors screamed the sort of crude insults that I last heard way back in my Sandhurst days. The frenzy and shouting increased as the week progressed.

In the evenings, we were made to form a circle while our leader persuaded us to open our “inner selves” and talk about our feelings; this gradually progressed to exploring our deepest hopes and fears.

Then, on the last couple of nights, psychodrama was used to persuade us to consider our relationship with our parents…. And then we were encouraged to discuss our sex lives.

Quiet Desperation

I managed – just – to retain a sort of lofty detachment and I (thankfully) rediscovered an acute speech impediment from my childhood, so I sat there rather pink and more or less mute. However, several men began to talk brokenly of hidden sexual secrets and miseries. Perhaps this is something only Americans can do with relaxed fluency, although even they found mentally undressing in public difficult.

Then the mood changed… one man admitted that in the past month he had had sex with three women whose names he didn’t even know. Now the floodgates of revelation began to break all around me. Many of the men admitted that they were addicted to using pornography, despite the fact that doing so left them feeling disgusted and emptied. Others admitted – weeping as they did so – to secret drinking; another man was hooked on cocaine, and he saw no means of escaping.

I understood then what Thoreau meant when he wrote that, “men live lives of quiet desperation”.

The course leader told us we all have a shadow mission. Carl Jung wrote that each of us has a “shadow side” whose patterns of thought and actions betray our deepest values, and lead to misery, bad consciences and destroyed families.

I find the description of the “shadow” helps, as it explains my sense of secrecy, chaos and profound feelings of loneliness that my sin creates in me.

So just as we all have a mission in life – a way of using our talents to carry out the work God intends us to fulfil – we all have a shadow mission, our default position if we cruise along with our minds stuck in neutral. We were told that our souls are stained indelibly with the colour of our leisure thoughts.

The shadowland is where we can end up if we allow our natural temptations to lust and greed to dominate. To illustrate this point, one man stared fixedly at the ground as he told us: “My shadow mission is to spend afternoons with a prostitute and let the rest of the world go to hell. My life is so structured, I need some chaos to help me through.”

A few men giggled nervously and then fell silent: the man had no aspiration to be Saddam Hussein or Stalin, such a prospect would of course have appalled him, and so we contemplated instead this sad and all too mundane story of humiliation and degradation. We realised how easy it is to slide into negative and sinful pursuits that can easily become a way of life. It was the sheer hopelessness and utter banality of his shadow mission that gave it the tang of truth.

We reflected how shadow missions can take over our lives. Celebrities are imprisoned for sexual criminality with minors as their shadow missions first overwhelm and then destroy their careers and families.

Being clear about my own shadow mission has been hugely helpful to me, for I now see it for what it is. I realise I do not want to devote any part of my life to it. Shadow missions consume time, money and emotional energy: at the same time, they are wholly negative and replace creativity. They risk family happiness.

Wrestling our Demons

Shadow missions lead to the same destination: Satan’s broken wasteland of lies, disgrace and shuddering despair. Jesus was tempted by a shadow mission: we read in Hebrews that he was tempted like us “in every way”, but he rejected it. In the desert, Satan tempted Jesus to achieve his mission without hunger and without pain. “All the kingdoms of the world I will give you.” But Jesus walked away.

We are all subjected to temptation. In Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem, Sherlock Holmes wrestles with his archenemy Moriarty on a cliff edge wreathed in mist high above the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.

Just one tiny push, that’s all it takes, and Holmes will fall to destruction in his shadowland.

Temptation

Perhaps dear reader you might like to be a fly on the wall and listen in as I spend a little time bartering with the devil.

The man who gave us advice on how to negotiate the road to Alton was oh so kind and well meaning:

“Do watch the lorries as they sweep round bends…do be careful as drivers are known to drive really fast as they approach the town….” and on he went!

I was sorely tempted to put Him right with, “Listen sunshine, Jane and I have walked 1800 miles round Britain recently and there is nothing we haven’t already seen  on UK roads with cars tearing along so fast they make Silverstone look like a roller skating rink.  We’ve faced lorries and white vans that we’re convinced were trying to kill us…we reckon by now we know more about roads than Old Man Macadam ever did so keep your impertinent advice to yourself, and don’t tell Andy Murray how to hold his racket, do you understand?”

But he was trying to help us and was so kind and a supporter and donor so I thanked him for his great solicitude and kindness and we went on our way.

Devil 0, virtue 1

This time!

Hume Truths

Staying with Gordon and Sally Scutt I was reminded of the story about the charismatic cardinal of Westminster Basil Hume when he was headmaster of Ampleforth college. I was told this tale by a former pupil who said that after forty years he could still recall an electrifying encounter with Hume when a class of fifty boys, aged I suppose 17 or so, decided that the gospel was a tedious irrelevance to their lives:

” Look sir,” said one representative of his friends, ” Henry here is going into the city. George has a family business to look after him; Marcus will inherit an estate and I’m going into the army. What possible use is “religion” or the “gospel” to us?”

Hume answered quietly thus;

” Gentlemen there are fifty of you in this class. Statistically at least twenty five of you will have marriage difficulties that involve betrayal and endless misery. Sixteen of you will know the pain of divorce. Eighteen of you will suffer serious financial difficulties, six will go bankrupt. Twenty five of you will face serious issues with your children; two will go to prison (and you doubtless will be one of them Bloggins. Six will face the challenge of handicapped children; you will all know about sickness, pain and you will face death. At all these times I submit gentlemen you will be thankful for the gospel of Christ”.

Phew! No wonder he remembered it!

Hurry!

I am reading a biography about President Abraham Lincoln who was a great leader and achiever. He was responsible for the abolition of slavery and winning the American civil war. It is interesting that he never hurried. In fact when he was young, he read mainly Aesop’s Fables – which he more or less memorised – and the Bible.

Lincoln had to understand everything minutely and exactly, and it took him a long time. He would slowly chew over each new fact until it was memorised. And when it was lodged in his mind, he never lost his understanding of it. He often spoke of how slowly his mind worked. His law partner said that Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America. I read somewhere that today we have largely traded wisdom for information, and depth for breadth. We want microwave maturity. We should study Lincoln.

Oh Dear! I Shall be Too Late!

I oversleep and have to dress in a hurry. I can’t help wondering when the voice of God will announce to me: “From henceforth thou shalt be unable to put on thine own socks?”

But we are late. We have to catch up with our schedule so we rush to the start of the walk. Hurry, hurry and hurry!

We pass two cars with drivers furiously fingering their mobiles. Another sign flashes by advertising a credit card that will take “the waiting out of wanting.” The traffic slows to a queue and I can see road rage mounting in the driver nearest us, who by the agitated workings of his face and the honking of his horn appears to be growing somewhat impatient. We walk past a garage advertising “help to move you faster”.

What sort of a state are we in? We all have to move faster and faster. What instinct encourages me to speed in my car so often? We now have systems that churn out news 24/7. It’s not as if we can do anything much about the information we are constantly absorbing. However, people are continually staring at their phones and emails at meetings, during social occasions and even in church, in case they are missing something vital. Fast food and pizza houses tell us they don’t sell just food, they sell “fast delivery”. Even shampoos and conditioners are combined to save time.

Some time ago, a survey told us that because advanced technology is taking over mundane jobs, many people will be forced to cut their working hours. So, the weeks we work each year are bound to reduce so we can retire sooner. The question is: how are people going to spend the time they are saving? Watching video games and the telly? I hear that the two phrases most used in homes in the UK today are “move over” and “what’s on?”

This is ridiculous. Why are we all in such a hurry? As the red queen in Alice and Wonderland puts it: “… it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast…!”

Time-Poor

Hurry can destroy us and it keeps us from happiness. As Carl Jung once wrote, “Hurry is not just like the devil: hurry is the devil.”

The irony is that although our society is sated with goods, we are time-poor. Our friends in Zimbabwe are very poor indeed but rich in time. They are not driven or hurried. Hurry sickness is a continual struggle to achieve more things in less and less time, in the face of opposition real or imagined. And hurry can destroy family life. Busy people appear to have less and less time to talk to – and love – their families and their children. Charlie, a friend of mine, told me that when his bishop father died he received over 200 letters saying what a wonderful, kind, caring and gentle man his father was. Charlie told me with tears in his eyes: “He was always in a such hurry when he was with me. I did not know that man.”

It is because hurry lies behind so much of the anger and frustrations of modern living and is the great enemy of loving relationships and family life that perhaps we should take a look at how Lincoln operated – and just slow down.

Walks and Talks with Daukes

We walked from Avington to Medstead and we were joined by Clendon and Camilla Daukes. It’s always a joy to have them with us if only because we make each other laugh until we cry. Clendon is a force of nature, a man of boundless energy and goodwill who can’t see a good cause without wanting to take it up. He doesn’t just talk about things, he really gets them done.

We spend the night enjoying the kind hospitality of Patrick Mitford Slade, who I know well from his work with the services charities whom we are privileged to partner in Zimbabwe. We meet Julia from Cornwall, who is a loyal ZANE supporter and she plans to walk with us today.

The Bride Bomb

As I walk with my friend we fondly reminisce about a memorable wedding we both attended many years ago – one where everything went disastrously awry.

It takes a certain amount of courage to continue with an event after the wheels have completely fallen off, and we both agree that our friends deserved a medal. The bride’s mum was a formidable woman with the manor and bearing of a regimental sergeant major. She had arranged for two bands and three sets of singers to perform, and there were enough flowers in the church to make an annexe to the Chelsea Flower Show. There were eight bridesmaids and groups of appointed flower petal throwers, and they had all been drilled mercilessly. The grandeur was on a scale usually reserved for Trooping the Colour.

Just a Cheeseball or Two…

The wedding was unfolding according to plan until the moment of the processional. The bride had been dressed for hours (if not days). No adrenaline was left in the poor lady’s body. She had been left alone in the church’s reception hall, and while the organ went on playing bits of Mozart she walked nervously along the tables laden with delicious goodies. She absent-mindedly started to sample the delicacies on display, from a vast bowl of pressed nuts to a selection of little pink and green mints. Then she nibbled some pecans and a cheese-ball or two, before gulping down a few black olives. Now she swallowed a handful of glazed almonds, a few sausages with frilly toothpicks stuck in them, a couple of shrimps shrouded in bacon, and some cheese biscuits smothered in liver pate. She washed down the lot with the help of a glass of pink champagne given to her by her father. Just to calm her nerves, you understand.

When the bride arrived at the church door, what everyone noticed was not her dress but her face. It was white, tinged with a light-green sheen. For what was coming down the aisle was not a bride but a walking time bomb, ready to explode.

Just before she reached the church altar, the bride threw up. And when I say she threw up, I don’t mean a ladylike “urp” into her little lace hanky. There’s no nice way of putting it, for not only did the bride spray her mother but she hosed most of the chancel – hitting three bridesmaids, the groom, the best man and the vicar too.

Only two people were seen to be smiling: one was the mother of the groom and the other was the father of the bride.

The bride pulled herself together though, and afterwards there was a much quieter, less ostentatious ceremony in the reception hall. And everyone cried, as people are supposed to do at weddings, mostly because the groom held the bride tenderly and kissed her lovingly throughout the whole ceremony.

There was an action replay 10 years later to celebrate the disaster and the event was displayed on three TV monitors – everyone laughed until they cried. Even the bride’s mum had long been able to see the funny side. But how could they enjoy the event when it had all gone so disastrously wrong? Simple. Because despite the unfortunate chain of events, this was still a loving wedding full of laughter and great fun. The whole episode is now safely archived away in the family’s folklore.

Of course, that sort of wedding is well over the top, and we don’t have to spend loads of money to have fun and celebrate. But as I’ve said before, there are never enough good parties to mark the important changes in life. Today we apparently have a new way of doing things: more relaxed and less formal – but with fewer opportunities for chaos, laughter and tears. I wonder if the new ways are as much fun as those of the old days?

No More Shame

One of my friends told me that his daughter Muriel has morphed into a “relationship” with Freddie, where she seems to have been stuck for some nine years. No one decided when her single state ended and her new “couple” role started, it just seemed to happen – and, of course, there was no party.

The problem is that Muriel’s “partner”, Freddie, cannot make up his mind whether or not to commit to Muriel. Muriel is now 35 and lives in limbo land with her biological clock loudly ticking. She is desperate to have a family but no one knows what to say to Freddie to get him to face up to his responsibilities as the old lines of family authority have been eroded to dust. Is Muriel still “in” her old family, or out of it? If she is “out”, when did she leave? My friend (Muriel’s dad) has been bracing himself for some time to question Freddie about his long-term intentions, but he is told to shut up by his wife (who will do whatever she has to avoid confrontation). Muriel has come to realise that she is not as marriageable as she was nine years ago, and she is fearful that if she presses too hard she faces the risk of being traded in for a new model. The question she asks at four in the morning is whether her present insecurity is better than the risk she faces of potential loneliness?

If this is the new way of living, then who are the winners? Both sets of parents are increasingly flustered, and Muriel is frightened and miserable.

Today, we seem to have done away with shame. Once it was a very potent emotion and it governed people’s lives long after the ducking pool and the stocks were abolished. Shakespeare mentions “shame” 344 times in his plays and guilt, which is a far more personal emotion, only 33 times. A mere 100 years ago, society expected people to behave in a certain way and if they failed to conform then they were humiliated. Carl Jung calls shame a “soul-eating” emotion. It destroyed Oscar Wilde with hideous relish and finality; single mothers were ostracised and illegitimate children were stigmatised: unpleasant hypocrites and gossips had a great time. My grandmother was deserted by her feckless husband in 1905 and the family – lower middle class, southern Manchester – was traduced by the community for bringing shame on itself – an even worse social crime than ruining one’s own reputation. There was little allowance for redemption then. It’s easy to see why the British rejected shame in the second half of the twentieth century, for it was seen to be a singularly destructive and corrosive emotion.

But isn’t there a need for some shame? Perhaps we need to differentiate between good and bad shame; for example should the likes of Freddie be allowed to get off without critical comment from any quarter? All Muriel’s family want is to ensure that the interests of their vulnerable daughter are protected, for we are all more vulnerable than we pretend to be.

Poor Muriel thought it was so much fun when she started out on the relationship when there were no social rules to bother herself with. But it’s a cold, hard world out there and loneliness is peeping round the corner.

Moral Drift

Over the years, the default position of our UK authorities – both local and national – has been to create an atheist society, and they appear to be well on the way to succeeding.

Today it seems that social workers no longer work within a clear framework of right and wrong, or with reference to a higher power. Well we can see how this is working out in Oxford where underage girls were recently raped by a group of men. Although our local authorities as well as the police were informed of what was happening, they chose to do nothing to stop the abuse because they did not want to be seen as “judgemental”. So the rapes continued unabated for some time. It would seem that the police and the local authorities operate today in a state of moral drift.

It’s not as if we couldn’t see this coming. George Orwell, the author of 1984 was a noted atheist. Before he died, he pondered the loss of religious faith in Europe that he had once applauded, and he was honest enough to express dismay at the results. “For two hundred years,” he wrote, “we have sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than we had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded and down we came. But unfortunately there has been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all but a cesspool of barbed wire… It appears that amputation of the soul is not a simple surgical job like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.”

Oxford’s raped girls are a testimony to that. And don’t forget that Orwell wrote that 50 years ago. I wonder what he would be writing if he were alive today?

The Grand Old Duke

We walked like the troops of the Grand Old Duke of York, up and down the hills from Hursley to Avington through the middle of Winchester. We met a kind lady called Ruth in the cathedral refrectory who kinldy made a donation to Zane,

The sadness for Jane and me is that Moses is not with us. The poor dog managed to get a splinter jammed in his heel and when it was extracted it went septic. We hope he can join us again on Monday as we miss him bounding along. He is so trusting and full of innocent joy. I often recall the prayer: “Oh God, please make me the person my dog thinks I am.”

Nasty Game

We were joined by Simon who walks with us. Apparently he knew Zimbabwe well. He is engaging company as we spend part of the day taking rainwear off and putting  it back on. We discuss “Big Game” shooting,  not a sport I have ever wished to take part in. I was put off for life  after I visited a baronial home in Aberdeen when I was young.  We were shown around by the aged Laird who had apparently fought in WW1.  In the hall he showed us  a selection of heads of animals mounted on the far wall – you must have seen the sort of thing. MacDuff pointed out the head of a gnu, a wildebeest, a buffalo and so on. And then he announced with particular relish:

“And there is the head of a German soldier I shot in the war!”

And there ….hanging on the wall was a skull mounted on a board. Under it was the description:

“Fritz: Vimy Ridge 1918”

This disgusting little man had gone back with a shovel after the war and dug up “his prize”and hung it on his wall as a trophy! Can you imagine anything more horrible than that?

As I trudge, my mind turns to thoughts of politics, religion and society, as it often does.

Shifting Sands

We have just endured yet another election where the level of debate was deplorable. Our leaders apparently assume that the average voter is a moron – perhaps it’s true? For some months, we were obliged to listen to a Punch and Judy show where senior politicians were seeking to bash into the electorate that their party loved the NHS more than any other party, and take that!

But reality is usually a casualty in elections. I have actively participated in four elections and during each one the electorate was told: “This is the most important election since the war!” Does anyone still believe such exaggeration?

Politics in Action

Of course politics is vitally important for there are obviously certain functions that only a government can reasonably undertake. Only government can ensure that the currency is not debased (we have an appalling record); that the country is properly defended, policed and represented overseas; and that taxation is collected and that the poor are well provided for. Only government can ensure that vital services, such as education, the NHS and local government, are efficiently run and reasonably financed.

I reckon that politicians should not only be judged by what they do, but also by the things they don’t do. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was never accorded sufficient recognition for keeping us out of the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s. How sad that Tony Blair didn’t read Labour’s recent history.

Of course, not all that government does is in fact wise: some is destructive folly. What possessed Labour to allow gaming houses to flourish smack in the centre of our poorest cities, thereby allowing the greedy to suck welfare benefits from the poorest families in the land with cormorant efficiency? And why did the Coalition allow this wickedness to continue? This is an issue of the deepest shame and no party emerges well.

I suggest that we can help the democratic process to flourish in two main ways: first by resisting the impulse to offer lazy, ignorant and vicious criticism of senior politicians, which has the effect of weakening our democracy. It was John Kennedy who said that no one should judge any politician until he or she had seen the advice they were given and actually faced the issues. Such criticism is usually made by those who know very little about the relevant issues, and it carries the implication that if the critic were doing the job, he or she would do it better: unlikely!

The second thing we can do is to actually vote.

Work to be Done

But there are a number of vital things that politicians cannot do – and I wonder sometimes if they are aware of their limitations?

Politicians cannot affect the passions of the masses and they cannot change people. They don’t have the power to build families, mend broken hearts or transform shattered lives. Politicians cannot limit the acute spiral in drug and alcohol abuse or the level of suicide, and nor can they moderate the ghastly level of sexual exploitation that is everywhere a commonplace. They cannot stem the rising number of abortions, and they cannot stop many of those who have no real need of care homes from being shunted into institutional care (by families who often can’t be bothered to look after them). There is little politicians can do about domestic cruelty or the chronic loneliness that disfigures our society, and they cannot repair the collateral damage caused by abusive families. They cannot reduce the misery suffered by neglected children – and this is not necessarily due to lack of resources or money. Politicians can do nothing to correct the blight of materialism or pornography, nor can they offer grace or forgiveness. And lastly, they cannot build bridges of reconciliation between those who are hurting and those who are demanding vengeance.

In summary, politicians on their own cannot make people happy.

Some might ask if I am forgetting the MP William Wilberforce and his abolition of slavery, or the Clapham Sect and the eighteenth/early nineteenth-century reformation of manners? Of course Wilberforce and many like him wrought miracles to bring about the correction of monstrous evils. But Wilberforce needed the vicar and ex-slaver John Newton to convert him to the foot of the cross, before the veil was lifted and he began to undertake his life’s great work.

So there is work for our Christian community to do, which, with respect, politicians and secular humanists can’t even begin to undertake. And it does not need committees or councils to achieve great things. Let me tell you that Jane and I have walked up and down this great land of ours, and I have never seen a monument or a statue celebrating the achievements of a committee or a council!

The Seeds of Change

Often the most amazing changes come from tiny beginnings, and from the grassroots up and not from government down. For example, in 1935, two drunks sat at a table in Ohio: one told the other that he had just been converted to Christ and he was going to stop drinking. His friend told him he was a drunk and could do nothing to help himself, let alone others. “Leave it to the doctors,” he said, “and just drink and be happy.”

Three months later, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by a drunk with an idea in a dingy cellar. Today AA (and its 12 steps) operates round the world, and it has never needed a penny of government subsidy. There was no great government initiative operating here. Just an alcoholic with an idea. Great things often start from a kitchen table, a cellar… and a dream.

So there is great work to be done by the saints in fighting the evils of our time. With respect to Archbishop Sentamu, I would submit that the greatest evil is not inequality (although that of course is a terrible injustice), but the fact that for the first time in recorded history man is trying to create an atheist society here in the UK and across Europe. It will end in catastrophe.

To sum up, I quote the great and late Malcolm Muggeridge, who claimed that his chat-show career had come to a sad end because each time an issue was raised and he was asked for an answer, he would keep on replying: “The only answer is Jesus Christ.” The invitations dried up.

The issue is a difficult one for politicians, for as Alastair Campbell told us: “We don’t do God.” However, the reality must be Jesus: anything else is shifting sand.

Feeling Hot Hot Hot

Yesterday was said to be the hottest day this year and today was apparently forecast to be thundery, in fact it was even hotter than yesterday so the forecasters clearly double as election pollsters!  But how kind of the health authorities to warn us about high temperatures and the effect they can have if you don’t drink enough. What a nanny state we have become!  We have just sweated to Hursley where we devoured ice creams and where I told a pretty South African lady called Caryn all about ZANE.

And while I am feeling hot under the collar:

Je Suis Confused

In a free society we should be allowed to say what we like, and the right to offend is crucial. However just because we have that right does not mean that we should exercise it lightly; with rights come responsibilities, and one of these is not to offend people gratuitously.

Let’s make no bones about it: the freedom to speak our minds is precious. Once a government starts to erode freedom of speech, history tells us, there can be no stopping it: this is why our national press campaigned strongly against the extension of government censorship, however light and innocent it purported to be. You will recall the fuss surrounding Hugh Grant’s “Hacked Off” campaign a year or so back, and his attempt to get parliament to apply press controls.

I am *Not* Charlie

If you doubt the merits of a free press, just take a look at the wickedness that the likes of Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Stalin and Saddam got up to under their draconian censorship laws – and Mugabe still does today – and you’ll see what I mean. They imposed tough censorship laws in the name of protecting the state; under its dark veil, they murdered people, and they did it with impunity.

The not inconsiderable pain that freedom of speech is bound to bring to those offended by it is, I submit, the price we pay for living in a free society. Yet we already have censorship. It’s already against the law to make inflammatory statements about minorities and it is illegal, for example, to display placards on the windows of bed and breakfast houses stating, “No Jews, blacks or Irish”. Such notices are discriminatory: they can give rise to grave offence and may lead to violence.

Yet various prominent Bitish politicians showed solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo magazine that grossly insulted Muslims. I should add that when the magazine’s journalists weren’t insulting the prophet Muhammad, they were insulting Christians –particularly the pope – in disgusting terms, or anyone else they thought cared deeply enough about something precious to allow them a cheap headline. We were all encouraged to go around proclaiming, “Je suis Charlie”. I didn’t join in.

Yet recently, Christian Harry Hammond was prosecuted under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for wandering about with a placard proclaiming, “Homosexuals will go to hell”. Whether I agree or disagree with Harry Hammond, or what the Charlie Hebdo journalists were saying about the Prophet Muhammad or those placards that insult minorities is beside the point. My argument is this: if insulting minorities is forbidden by law and Hammond was prosecuted for exercising his freedom of speech, then why is the Charlie Hebdo magazine lauded for insulting Muslims?

None of this makes any sense to me. Does it to you?

No Solutions

I have just heard a true story. Swarms of birds were pooing all over the Lincoln Memorial – not only was the fabric of the stonework being degraded, but tourists were complaining.

So the powers that be tried to stop the birds by using nets, but that failed and it looked ghastly anyway. So they asked themselves why the birds were collecting in that precise spot in the first place, and after a great deal of investigation they discovered that the birds had an overwhelming appetite for the spiders that were also gathering in vast numbers.

Then they smothered the memorial with anti-spider juice and that failed too. So for some months they continued their intense investigations and discovered that spiders were crawling all over the memorial because thousands of mosquitoes were present. So they tried a special mosquito insecticide but that didn’t resolve the problem either.

Next, they asked themselves why mosquitoes were attracted to the memorial. After weeks of research they determined that it was because of the floodlights. So they turned off the lights and the problem seemed to be solved….

Then people started complaining because the lights had been turned off and they couldn’t see the memorial properly.

As Enoch Powell once said, “There are some problems to which there are no solutions.”

Stupid Boys

I have asked countless, intelligent women how many men ask them , say at dinner, about their lives and the answer is always:

“None!  They never do anything other than talk about themselves! They bore us rigid with their stupid views and stories about their tedious careers and they even yap across us to the man on our right or left.”

Let me tell you some more about my views and stories…

Icebergs on a Sunny Day

Walked from Brockenhurst through the New Forest on what must surely be the hottest day of the year. Yet again I try to outwalk my friends Anthea and Christopher Piggins, and once again Chris’ cantilever legs make mincemeat of me. Also in the party is a new friend from Zimbabwe – an escapee from illegal farm seizures – Nicky Millbank, and delightful company. We lunch at the New Forest Inn. I see above the cloakroom door a plaque that proudly proclaims that this inn was the last stop of Captain Edward Smith before he boarded the Titanic to command its only voyage. I don’t think I want to know that somehow, particularly when I see another sign in the car park wishing passengers a cheery “Good luck on your trip.”

Makes me think, we are always only a step away from tragedy.

There but by the Grace of God…

Along with millions of parents, I have always been desperately sorry for families whose beloved children suddenly disappear. The default position of some people appears to be to condemn parents of missing kids as seriously negligent. I disagree, for I cannot see how anyone who has ever been involved in bringing up children could do anything other than admit how easy it is to lose them.

Hide and Seek

We all have our own horror stories of near misses and lucky escapes. Here are couple of ours. At more or less the same time as the tragic case of Madeleine McCann was playing out in the news headlines, our youngest daughter, Milly, was visiting friends in Kensington. At the height of the rush hour, she led her two young sons, Isaac and Silas, down the teeming escalator and towards the crowded platform. Trains were coming and going and Milly was stressed. She arrived on the platform with Isaac in one hand, Silas holding the other – and then she suddenly realised with horror that two-year old Silas had let go and she could no longer see him. She called his name, but no reply. She then shouted with increasing tempo, as he failed to appear. The crowd parted as if she was carrying the plague, and then officials materialised. They tried to calm Milly down as she rapidly approached full-flowered despair.

The tube manager searched the platform, exits were closed and trains were stopped: station officials were sent up and down the tracks in case Silas had gone for a walk. The police arrived: by this time Milly was seated in the station master’s office head in hands, silently weeping and fearing the worst. Then – at last – a phone rang. The spokesperson from Gloucester Square Tube station (one station down the track) said that a little lost boy with red hair had been just been presented to the station manager by a kindly passenger. Silas had stepped onto the train just as its doors were closing and for the next few minutes had been walking up and down the crowded tube politely asking passengers for his mummy.

Last Boxing Day, my son Oliver and his French wife, Lois, were shopping in a crowded mall in Perpignon. After they left a clothing shop, four-year-old Amelie was missing. They called and searched, and as their anxiety levels rose they called again; then they shouted. The police were alerted. No Amelie. More police arrived, the mall was closed, and footage from various CCTV cameras was fetched. More shops were visited, questions were asked, and announcements made.

Half an hour later, the entire mall was at a standstill. Then as if by magic, a smiling Amelie suddenly appeared from the clothes shop. It transpired that as Mummy and Daddy were shopping, she had decided to play her favourite game of hide and seek. She thought that a clothes box sited under a counter where returned goods were occasionally collected was as good a place to hide as any, so she opened the lid and snuggled down. She grinned to herself when she heard Mummy and Daddy calling her name, then she had a snooze.

Amelie wasn’t in the least surprised by the throng of police and people. And she informed her parents, “You never found me, so I won. Can we go on playing?”

Well of course, all’s well that ends well, and now the stories have entered Benyon folklore. But all self-aware parents who read this may also reflect, “There but by the grace of God go I.”

Euro Visions

We walk from Freshwater Bay to Yarmouth keeping the sea to our left. The path leads through several miles of dappled tunnel lined with trees crouching to attention and nodding in the breeze to greet us like a parade of elderly veterans. On the outskirts of the port we meet a group of biking holidaymakers from Holland, the Dekkers, and a delightful lady with a wholly unpronounceable name. We swopped family gossip and thankfully kept away from Grexit and the Euro! Their English was excellent so good it puts us to shame.

Catholic Tastes

A generous lunch provided by my cousin Giles. a dear man who knew Zimbabwe – and indeed married in “Salisbury”. It was then in its glory days. We discussed how curious it was that our great grandparents suddenly converted to Catholicism in the eighteen fifties when Catholicism was said to be “fashionable”! Perhaps Cardinal Newman’s influence was to do with it. Fashion is a funny reason to change your faith but there’s nowt so queer as folk.  Anyway I don’t think they were very serious about it as I was born a Catholic and no one told me anything about it at all except I should feel guilty, which I duly did, for a while at least. Anyway I have long since ceased to be sectarian, but some people take the differences very seriously indeed. In fact when one of my conservative Presbyterian pals heard I had been baptised Catholic he said that if I was to be ever baptised an Anglican by total immersion, they would have to hold me under the water for at least ten minutes to get rid of it all! I hope he was joking.

Giles and I couldn’t help but compare the Zimbabwe situation then and now…

Exodus

Since about 1980, Zimbabwe’s greatest export to the developed world has been around four million of its most talented young workers. This exodus has been as much of a tragedy for Zimbabwe as it has been a boon to the rest of the civilised world, for few will return.

A One-Way Ticket

The UK’s National Health Service relies on a steady supply of talented Zimbabwean nurses and cleaners. Thousands of businesses and restaurants round the world find Zimbabwean waiters, managers and shop assistants a valuable resource.

Of course, millions remain trapped in Zimbabwe and today live lives of repression and destitution. But who left the country and why? Well let’s start with about 4,500 farmers whose land was stolen, followed by hundreds of senior farm managers who faced destitution; then there was a queue of politicians of the wrong stripe who feared that a single misplaced word might involve them in a fatal car accident, people of the wrong tribe who faced cruel persecution, and thousands of young who discovered that they were born the wrong colour to win jobs.

All these people did what humankind has always done when life has become intolerable; it’s what the Huguenots did when faced with religious persecution, it’s what the Pilgrim Fathers did in the early seventeenth century; it’s what the Scottish and Irish farmers decided to do when faced with land seizures. Zimbaweans did what escaping Jews did when facing Nazi genocide in the 1930s. They looked abroad for freedom to live free lives as people have always done throughout the generations.

They left.

Modern Entertaining

When Jane and I were young, we used to entertain a great deal. Although we still throw parties, the times we are invited back seems to be falling. I thought perhaps it was us! But my children tell me the same story – the Benyons are a hospitable lot, we all derive great fun from entertaining, but it seems that many people find it a strain. Perhaps their mothers did not like to entertain and so the tradition has never been passed on. My children tell me that when they are asked to dinner, nine times out of 10 they are asked to bring a course with them, or the wine for the meal or something. Why is this? Are we all growing stingier and becoming more inhospitable?

One of the most majestic sea fronts in the world and it’s deserted; miles of tortuous and heathery track with occasional isolated clusters of caravans. Then we walk through the most serious competition to the good old C of E and its Sunday services:  a full scale car boot sale where the burghers of Shanklin are selling the most extraordinary junk.

The spiritual aspect of possessions fascinates me…

Clumber

In John Huston’s 1948 film, Key Largo, Rocco, the grasping crook (played by Edward G. Robinson) is asked by Major Frank McCloud (played by Humphrey Bogart) why he is so unscrupulous and greedy? The unreflective Rocco hasn’t a clue why.

McCloud guesses, “Is it because you want more?”

“Yes,” snarls Rocco, “That’s it: I want more.”

Stuff and More Stuff

The greed of man (and women!) is timeless. A friend told me he hasn’t spoken to his sister for 20 years because he alleges she stole some Tupperware – worth a few pounds at best – from their mother’s house just before she died. My wife, Jane, tells me that when she was a practising social worker she became used to people stealing money from their aged relatives’ handbags.

One of my lawyer friends always tells me that greed is at the heart of his clients’ motives: “Where there’s a will there’s a relative!” and “say ‘cash’, and a corpse rises to dance”.

When Jane and I visited New York a few months back, we saw a window sticker in a white stretch Mercedes that read: “The guy who dies with the most toys wins.” We live in a deeply materialistic, money-grubbing society. Why are we all so greedy? Do we love things more than we love the people around us? In the early Church it was said, “there were no needy persons among them”. If they had stuff they shared it.

Still, of course, that was 2,000 years ago…

And still we want more stuff. Over the past couple of days, we have walked past several charity shops selling out-of-date stuff; then we trailed a stop-go rubbish van carrying discarded stuff. After that we saw a yellow sign offering to hoard stuff in “self-storage facilities”.

William Penn (he founded Pennsylvania) called all the objects we cram into our houses “clumber”: the word’s a mix of the words “lumber” and “cloying”, and it seems to sum things up perfectly. We all have clumber: we see it, then we want it, so we buy it; then we show it to our neighbours and silently compare it with their clumber, and then we tire of it and throw it away, and look for more. In this way we often end up buying things we don’t really need with money we haven’t got in order to impress people we don’t really like. We imagine that if our clumber keeps accumulating, we’ll feel safe and secure. If our head says that’s nonsense, our hearts argue differently. Recall the Black Friday shopping day in the run up to Christmas when hundreds of shoppers belted each other as they fought for the best bargains.

US psychologist Paul Pearsall has the following to say to people who find it hard to part with possessions that they haven’t used for years. “You may require a ‘closet exorcist’, a trusted friend,” he suggests, “who can help prevent the ‘re-stuffing’ phenomenon. Re-stuffing happens when in the process of clearing out junk we are stimulated to acquire new stuff.” And beware the stuff addicts who see your cupboard cleaning exercise as an opportunity to acquire more stuff for themselves!

Chasing the Wind

We are obsessed with houses. Comedian George Carlin said that a house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it – and some really quite successful people have managed to get by without ever owning one. Mother Teresa for starters, and what about Ghandi and Jesus?

I read about Hearst Castle recently. Apparently Randolph William Hearst was a “stuffaholic”. He built a vast house and filled it with antiques. He then bought chunks of the Californian coastline. And then… he died. Silly old Randolph.

When we die, we leave all out stuff behind – then our children (chanting how sad they are), pick over it like vultures and argue about what stuff they want to add to their stuff. Then they die and another vulture comes along to sift through the pile and so the process goes on. Nations go to war over stuff, and some families stop talking for generations because of it.

The book of Ecclesiastes has something to say about it all: “Meaningless! Meaningless!….Utterly meaningless… a chasing after the wind.”

For the Love of Money

Getting loads of wonga has its own problems. Recently I came across some quotes from some really rich people who found that out through bitter experience.

“The care of $200m is too great a load for any back or brain to bear. It is enough to kill anyone. There is no pleasure in it.”

William Henry Vanderbilt

“I am the most miserable man on earth.”

J.J. Astor

“Millionaires seldom smile.”

Andrew Carnegie

“I have made millions but they have brought me no happiness.”

John D. Rockefeller

“I was happier doing a mechanic’s job.”

Henry Ford

Consider the tragic end of billionaire Howard Hughes. John Ortberg tells us that he was “a gothic horror. Emaciated, only 120 pounds stretched over his six-foot-four frame…a thin straggly beard that reached down his sunken chest. Hideous long nails in grotesque yellowed corkscrews….Many of this teeth were black stumps and a tumour was beginning to emerge from the side of his head. ….innumerable needle marks in his arms. He was an addict, a billionaire junkie.”

Would even more money have satisfied him? Would more money have satisfied Philip Seymour Hoffman who was found dead some time ago with a needle sticking out of his arm?

It was Henry Vanderbilt who, when asked, “How rich do you need to be for you to be satisfied”, answered “just a little bit more.”

I suppose the last laugh about money has to belong to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Moore remarked that if he were Rockefeller, he would end up richer than Rockefeller.

“How will you do that?” asked Cook.

“I’d do a little bit of window cleaning on the side”.

Having and Being

When Malcolm Muggeridge was an old man he wrote: “When I look back on my life, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed to me at the time most significant and seductive seems now to be futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises, being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women….In retrospect, all those exercise in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal calls licking the earth.”

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf claims there are two kinds of wealth in life. “Richness of being,” and “richness of having”. Richness of having is an external experience and richness of being is an inner experience. We usually focus on richness of having. We think true happiness lies there. If only I had a dream house, fame, a bigger salary, financial security, a satisfying sex life – and so on – then I would be contented. We seek richness of having, but what we really want is richness of being. We want to be happy, joyful, contented, and free from anxiety, but in chasing “having”, the bottomless pit of our desires can never be filled.

Perhaps we should all try and get our priorities into some sort of perspective and not wait until we are old. I suggest that wealth, fame and possessions are gossamer stuff compared to Beloc’s philosophy: “There’s nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends.”

No Going Back

I learned a bitter lesson in not seeing and loving my mother more before she died. In fact, I can’t bring myself to read her later diaries, but I am told by family that she felt desperately hurt by me in many ways. I hope she found it in her heart to forgive me before she died.

There is a sad story about the historian Thomas Carlyle that resonates vividly with me and I am sure you will see why. He wrote beautifully and with great insight about possessions: “Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but at the heart of them what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, more beautiful, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so.”

But knowing the theory of love and folly is one thing; it does not mean that we live by this wisdom.

Carlyle married his secretary Jane Welsh and during their quite happy marriage she became ill with cancer. Carlyle was working hard and failed to notice his wife’s deteriorating health very much. Eventually she was confined to her bed. Although Carlyle loved her, he gave her little time. After some years, Jane died and then Carlyle was obliged to return to a house that was bleakly empty and shatteringly lonely.

Sometime later, he discovered her diary on a shelf. On one entire page she had written a single line: “Yesterday he spent an hour with me and it was like heaven. I love him so.”

He understood the shattering reality that he had been too busy really to see how much he had meant to Jane. When he was preoccupied with work, he simply failed to notice her suffering or her great love for him

Then he read the words he could never forget. “I have listened all day for his steps in the hall but it is late and I doubt he will come today.”

Later that night, friends found him weeping and crouching by Jane’s grave. “If I had only known, if only I had known,” he cried to a silent heaven.

Jane’s death terminated Carlyle’s writing career. His last years were lonely and sad, and he died a bored and partial recluse.

Poor Thomas. Of course the moments whirl by and there is no rewind button for any of us. Thankfully since my mother’s death I have cherished my family. I recall, for example, the precious occasions when I drove our two daughters to the church altar to marry good, kind and faithful men. I vividly remember saying to myself then that I wished I could freeze those treasured moments forever.

One day the end will come and we can’t control that date either. But it isn’t all bad news. Unless we are no more than walking plumbing machines, each day we live, and each act of kindness and love moves from potential good to realised good, and will stay fixed in eternity – and will never be lost.