Temple Church, London
Mattins, 2nd May 2004, 11.15 a.m.
Public Trust and the Life of Faith
Readings: Gen 9: 8 – 17 / Rev 21:1-7
The first (and I hope the last) time, that I handled an automatic pistol was when I was a boy. My brother and I were going through one of those phases when we wanted to know more about what father had really done in the Second World War. All our mates at school had fathers who were in the Royal Artillery, the Engineers, and there was even a Padre among them; and now that I am in Portsmouth, it is embarrassing that there wasn’t one sailor among them. All we got was the Intelligence Corps, and some vague references to Iceland and Stockholm, and Denmark at the end of hostilities. My brother and I were exploring in the attic. In a far corner we discovered father’s automatic, in its shoulder-holster. As soon as we were found out, the pistol disappeared. This, I can assure you, was long before the amnesty by the police about war trophies being handed in.
Being brought up by an ex-spy was a curious experience. He always knew when we were lying, and he always seemed to know the next question to ask in an interrogation session after one of our capers. Overall, he gave very little of himself away. It was all part of the training, of course. I have since been able to piece together some of the kinds of things he got up to. But whenever I think of that pistol, apart from shuddering that it should have happened at all, and how impossible it would (or should) be today, I invariably start musing on just how many things have changed since then in the areas of secrecy and confidentiality.
One area stems from the obvious fact that we no longer live in an age of public trust, as last year’s Reith Lectures made plain. We can make the distinction between secrecy, which is about deliberately keeping information from people, and confidentiality, which is about protecting other people from information that could be revealed. We can moan and groan about the decline of public trust, perhaps admitting that our own particular profession needs to keep its proper boundaries, whereas we still keep pushing at everybody else’s, because we always want to know more, and should be allowed to do so. Moreover, we live at a time when, in so many contexts, public trust has broken down to the extent that no one is allowed to represent anyone else; this goes some of the way to explain (to take one instance) why House of Lords Reform is in such a mess – though, frankly, I wish that some of its rhetoric was not based on the assumption that the Upper Chamber was the only part of the problem. This is the kind of world that we live in; and media training can help us to conceal as much information as we can, as well as to reveal as little as possible! In all walks of life which once had anything approaching mystique or deference, transparency is the new virtue, with or without the occasional bout of deconstruction. Everything seems ‘up for grabs’. And it has even been remarked of Michael Parkinson’s gentle style of interviewing on television that whereas all he wants to reveal is a little bit of flesh, the viewing public now wants rather more – namely blood.
And that brings me to another area, which may be described as ‘speaking the truth about the past’. This can be both painful and challenging, whether for communities, individuals, or the way history is written. The post-Perestroika nations that are joining the E.U. have all had to look into their pasts, and in so doing face up to some hard truths, like the extent to which there was active collaboration with the Soviet regime. This is a real issue, for example, in Latvia, the Lutheran Church included, just as the Museum of Occupation in Riga provides a twentieth century narrative uncomfortable not only about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia but about our country as well. At a more personal level, people who take important decisions, whether they are bishops or judges, have to live with those decisions. We sometimes have them thrown back at us, either immediately, or years later, because in a democratic society public discussion about everything is inevitable. This happens regardless of whether those inaugurating that discussion have the full facts before them, or even whether we did in the first place. And as far as history is concerned, recent research on the Peninsular War has revealed just how much the Duke of Wellington’s victories depended as much on good intelligence as they did on having a successful fighting machine.
If public trust is about shifting sands, and speaking the truth about the past a growing industry, a third area, too, opens up – how we communicate our public responsibilities. I suspect that this has never been straightforward – as the history of the Church and the judiciary makes plain. It becomes more and more important not just to say what we want to say, but how it is to be said. One thinks of the remark once made that ‘bishops are generally speaking, generally speaking’. Bishops, the judiciary, whatever, we all take great care over how what we say will be perceived and applied, or rather how it may be mis-construed and mis-applied. But mis-applied it often surely is. The Archbishop’s recent Cambridge sermon about public obedience was immediately seized upon as a wholesale attack on the Government in the public press, whereas in fact only a very small part of what he actually said made any explicit reference to the Iraq War. This is, I suppose, the risk that has to be taken by anyone speaking in public; and sometimes it may result in a good sound-bite, which may or may not reflect what was actually said.
None of these issues is going to go away, and a suitably bland gloss would be to suggest that we simply have to keep struggling with them. But I am not sure that that is good enough, nor that a preacher’s task is to open things up without providing some kind of critique. All three areas are abiding and problematic – because we are human beings, and not machines, who find it difficult to trust each other; we like to find the supposed ‘truth’ about something familiar, and discover that to our surprise it had clay feet all the time; and we are prone to misunderstanding from even the finest oracle. To use the language of religion, we are part of a fallen creation; and this explains the existence of many of our institutions, including the need for public justice and the need for public worship. Today’s two readings characterise that truth. First there is the covenant with Noah, with the rainbow a natural symbol of God’s abiding faithfulness, regardless of the circumstances. Then we have the new heaven and the new earth, where all things ‘are made new’ for ‘him that overcometh’, by the One who is ‘Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’; and the scene for this to start is heaven, which is the place where past, present and future meet. There we find no debris, nothing lost, for it is a place of promise, where our fallenness, with which we all have to wrestle on a daily basis, is somehow gathered together, made sense of, and transformed.
Such a hope must impact on our lives, our attitudes, our relationships. Neither scene is about a remote or romanticised faith, unengaged with what we know to be human life. Always to want to know more is a good and God-given instinct – but it can be taken to excess. Always to want to speak a new truth about the past, or the present, reflects a good and God-given desire not just for new facts but for new perspectives – but it can be taken to excess, and become, frankly, perverse. Always to want to interpret universal truths is a good and God-given way of applying theory to practice – but it, too, can become warped and taken to excess. There is much that is profoundly unattractive in a cynical dismissiveness of our security services, who clearly need to be given a new accountability, in a more open society. There is much that is profoundly unattractive in obsessively looking for the dirt in any given situation because life is made up not of glossy celebrities who can then be publicly humiliated, but of grey mixtures of good and bad, in fact just like the rest of us. And there is much that is profoundly unattractive about living with a media that sometimes predictably (and even deliberately) get the wrong end of the stick. We need to have a far greater readiness to live patiently with nuance, with complexity, as well as the sheer fact that life becomes much more challenging when we recognise that even those who are closest to us remain, at least in part, mysteries to us – including God himself.
In a world of violent language, violent behaviour, violent relationships, what we are really finding hardest of all is applying to so many areas of life what might be called the doctrine of restraint – which sits uneasily with the culture that says ‘I can, therefore I must.’ Being empowered does not always lie in doing everything one can, but sometimes in being prepared to hold back and not to do everything within one’s power. Restraint is about realising that life, including the life of faith, is about far more than what we can see, or immediately experience, or tick off in a box as having somehow been ‘done’. Restraint cannot, I know, be legislated for; and a litigious society therefore will find it a frustrating, and even an elusive, quality. But it is, I believe, a profoundly Christian virtue, which is about considerably more than being nice to each other, because it takes us into the heart of God, who has put each one of us on this planet, and is prepared to trust us, loving and redeeming us all along the way. If we take consumerism to its logical conclusion, we shall stop being disciples, for we shall see life not as a journey of faith, but as exclusively a focus for our own personal needs and desires.
Let me return to the attic scene with which I began. Like a megaphone public debate, a gun is neither patient, nor subtle, nor particularly trusting. So while I am thankful to have been brought up by a former spy, I am equally thankful that I never saw his automatic pistol again.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
