Martin Wroe

Good morning. There have been some notable anniversaries in the news recently. Fighter plane extraordinaire, the Spitfire – star of the Battle of Britain – turned 90 this year. One former RAF air controller described the aircraft as epitomising “the spirit, backbone and sheer bloody-mindedness of a tiny island whose people would not give up and would never surrender”. Rousing stuff. There have been other rheumy-eyed retrospectives too. Queen Elizabeth II was born 100 years ago this year, and it has plausibly been said of her late Majesty that she represented the very last stable myth of this nation. Beyond these shores, this year marks 250 years since the founding of the United States of America, and 25 years since the attacks of 9/11. Two very different kinds of anniversary, for sure. But both have come freshly into view over the last few months, since the war with Iran. The word “anniversary” comes from the Latin anniversarius, meaning “returning yearly”. It names those moments in the year when time circles back on itself. Originally, in medieval Christian usage, anniversaries referred to a death: an anniversary Mass. But arguably, even the most joyful commemoration is a kind of mourning, in recognising that something has now passed into history. Perhaps that sounds a bit bleak. But I make the observation with feeling, as someone who’s just turned fifty. I marked that personal milestone with a dinner that brought together loved ones from each decade of my life: earliest school friends; others from university, work, and beyond; my three daughters too, who are (to my slight astonishment) now grown up enough to help host. It was wonderful. But taking stock at my fiftieth, it struck me that all anniversaries, whether public or private, involve a curious kind of double vision. They obviously ask us to look backwards, which can be a heady business, given that even sharing happy memories may be a way of feeling sad, for reminding us of good times now gone. Less obviously, though, anniversaries invite us to look forwards. They’re more than an occasion for nostalgia or handwringing. Recollection is also about reckoning. By pausing our ever-hectic lives, anniversaries allow us to think about the future through lessons we have learned from the past: as individuals, a society, a whole human race. They might, in that sense, be seen as calendared response to the psalmist’s prayer: ““Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”. Remembering may fill us with gratitude or regret, but it also sharpens our sense of what’s still worth doing and preserving – as well as, what is yet worth striving for.

Good morning. This week will mark the centenary of the birth of Queen Elizabeth II and a new charity is being established in her honour. Its work will focus on restoring shared spaces in communities, based on her belief that ‘everyone is our neighbour’. She articulated this view in her 2004 Christmas broadcast, drawing on Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, which he told in response to a lawyer who asks with typical legal precision ‘Who is my neighbour’. The story is of a man who is attacked and left for dead at the side of a road. First a priest passes by on the other side. Then a Levite, another religious official, also passed by. At this point I think many in the crowd, listening to the story, had a knowing smile on their faces. They had heard this story many times before. Next would come the hero, a Jewish lay person who would help the man. This was an anti-clerical story and people like a story which makes a mockery of religious hypocrisy. But Jesus said a Samaritan came along, got his hands dirty by tending to the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey and booked him int the local hotel, breakfast included, for the next month. I think now smiles faded and mutterings began. ‘Did he say Samaritan? Doesn’t he know the historic hatred between Jews and those foreigner Samaritans. This preacher should keep out of politics!’ The late Queen commented that ‘the implication….. is clear. Everyone is our neighbour, no matter what race, creed or colour. The need to look after a fellow human being is far more important than any cultural or religious differences.’ I was working in the US last week, and in the midst of media and one to one discussions about Presidents and Popes, war and gas prices, and conduct in public office, I was struck by how an increasingly polarised culture uses religion and race to withdraw from shared spaces and to demonise the other. Yet, one evening I shared dinner with both a Jewish scholar and an African American scholar. Both spoke about their traumatic experiences of prejudice and oppression in racism and antisemitism. Both disagreed with each other vehemently on the current political situation and way forward. But both had faith in a God of justice and grace, and had discovered that in the shared space of mutual hospitality of meals together what it meant to be neighbours. It gave me hope and demonstrated to me that a broken world can be healed not only by big political solutions but also by one meal at a time.

18 APRIL 26

I found myself not long ago in a courtroom as a witness for a person claiming asylum in the UK on the grounds that they had converted to Christianity, and would be persecuted in the country they had been born in if they returned. I’d got to know him well, prepared him to be baptised and he was a regular member of our congregation. We had even eaten mustard seeds together as we discussed the meaning of Jesus’s teaching in the gospels about the kingdom of God. In court, he was asked to name the 12 apostles. He got to 5 before mistakenly mentioning Isaiah. The following Sunday I asked our own congregation, some of whom had been going to church for 50 years, to name the 12 apostles. No one could, and it was gently pointed out that the gospels themselves don’t quite agree on the precise 12 with a question over Thaddeus. Back in the courtroom, I was also asked whether I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read. Our congregation member was not literate. I refrained from commenting that for hundreds of years, nothing in Christian doctrine was written down until the formation of the Creeds in the 4th century, and simply answered yes, in my opinion I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read. The system was working as it should, the lawyers were doing what the state required them to do. The court had to determine whether this conversion to Christianity was legitimate or not. But learning the apostles’ names or being able to read was not, and could never be, the place where true and deep lived faith would breathe and flourish. The discovery that there is, in the words of the BBC reporters, a ‘sham industry’, providing assistance to people to enter the UK illegally on the grounds of sexuality or belief, is not very surprising. Enormous efforts are made by people trying to get around the housing or benefits systems for example, and huge sums are spent employing accountants to minimise the amount – legally or illegally - an individual has to pay in tax. For every bureaucratic system put in place to try to organise society for the good of the whole, there will be a shadow system, dedicated to get around it for personal gain. In such shadow systems, the state’s attempt at fairness, however imperfectly or carelessly expressed sometimes, is replaced with active cruelty towards the most vulnerable in our society: by traffickers, or any who exploit the desperation of those whose life circumstances have placed them at the mercy of the system. State instruments will always be blunt, and political fashions come and go as to which issues attract the most attention. But the collective commitment to compassion, fair judgement, mercy and care towards those who are most in need of help, will never, can never, go out of fashion.

16 APRIL 26

Good morning. They say that religion and politics don’t mix, but it’s impossible to separate the two when the Pope and the American President have gone head-to-head over the war in Iran. In a social media post, President Trump accused Pope Leo of being weak and advised that he should “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”. Pope Leo responded by insisting that he’s not a politician, but that the message of the Gospel, “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, is a message that the world needs to hear today”. This confrontation has catapulted the Pope onto the front pages of the world’s media, but he’s not the first modern pope to speak out against war. In 2003, when then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, was asked to comment on the Iraq war, he said that “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq.” He went on to ask “if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.” St Augustine gave a Christian interpretation to the idea of the just war in the early 5th century. He argued that, terrible though war always is, it is sometimes necessary to defend the innocent and preserve peace. However, it must seek the future well-being of the enemy, and be free from the lust for power or desire to dominate. These ideas were developed by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and they continued to shape western politics and international law long after Christianity ceased to be a major political influence. However ineffectual it might sometimes have become in the heat of battle, just war theory provided a restraining influence on the waging of war, especially with regard to the need to avoid the intentional targeting of non-combatants. Today, the nature of modern weapons and the bombing of densely populated areas means that civilian casualties, including children, usually far outnumber military deaths. This is the context in which the Catholic Church’s opposition to war must be interpreted. Pope Leo is continuing a tradition set by all modern popes since the 1960s. In his Palm Sunday address, he quoted the prophet Isaiah when he said that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.” This is religious language, but it holds politicians accountable for shedding innocent blood. How could it do otherwise, when Christians worship a crucified God?

14 APRIL 26

Good Morning. Resilience has been the watchword of the last few days, politicians across the parties choosing to follow up the Prime Minister’s recent focus on the idea. For some, the key dilemma is military resilience - how should Britain defend itself in an age when the USA is no longer a certain ally? For others, the question is energy resilience, shielding ourselves from the volatility of world oil prices. Both are important questions. But for me there is a deeper dimension to this word of the moment, one that requires urgent attention. Put simply, how do nations, including the UK, shore up, and indeed improve, their moral resilience? Moral resilience is the willingness and ability to hold on to core ethical values under pressure. In his passage on love, often read at weddings, St Paul enumerates some of the qualities that I see lying at its heart: patience; kindness; lack of rudeness, boastfulness, envy or arrogance; delighting in truth. Sadly, these are qualities I and many others now find lacking, not least at international level. Few, if any, moral constraints appear to inhibit the actions of those who have both unrestricted power and the willingness to use it. Meanwhile, within nations, the so-called Overton window, describing what ideas and opinions are considered acceptable in society, has shifted dramatically towards anger, hatred and abuse. Yet, despite institutions of all types falling short, there are examples to the contrary. I saw moral resilience vividly on a recent visit to Manila with the global Anglican Mission agency I chair. Over the last 125 or so years, what began as a small working people’s church has not only survived but thrived. At the same time, it has continued to speak up boldly against the abuse of human rights so endemic among the Philippines ruling classes. Bishops have been murdered, church workers imprisoned without trial, but the Iglesia Filipina Independiente has not only remained resilient in the face of all its trials but has grown to a six million strong denomination. From its motto, “Love our God and love our country”, emerges a theology that is fiercely inclusive of sexual and gender identities, alongside roundly rejecting the racial and social hierarchies it was founded to resist. Its social projects are among some of the most inspiring I have seen on my travels. If it sounds like Christian Nationalism, then it springs from a very different foundation from what those words often describe elsewhere. Faith is not the excuse to reject and demean others, but rather to embrace and affirm them. For me, this is what love of Christ and love of one’s country should be about. Well beyond churchgoers, this is the moral resilience that I believe Britain as a nation now needs more than ever.

11 APRIL 26

Good morning. The strike by resident doctors highlights the severe tensions faced by the National Health Service. The tragedy of the dispute, and any disruption experienced by patients, is that all sides involved no doubt very much want health services to improve. So as resolution is sought can this also be a moment to ask again an increasingly pressing question. What exactly is health? The issue often came to the fore when I worked in the NHS. My role was as a psychotherapist in a psychiatric hospital. We worked with older adults who had often suffered for not just years but decades. Their pain was substantial and entrenched. What could be offered to such folk? What did we mental health professionals think we were doing? There were no easy answers. Suffering is hard. But a light might flicker in the darkness when a patient felt heard. They realised, even momentarily, that they were with someone who didn’t have any immediate remedy but did appreciate the depth of their torment. Many doctors will know such moments. There is a glimpse of connection that is potentially healing and powerful. But why? The answer provides a clue to a notion of health that is not only about an absence of symptoms, valuable though that most certainly is. With a patient who feels heard, you together enter a field of existence that is wider than the previously isolated, suffering soul knew was possible. A dimension of life, not determined by having solutions, is discovered as a release or expansion. The word “health” itself recognises the possibility as it comes from the old English for “whole”. Believers in God will recognise that wholeness as an intuition: our existence as individuals is actually a sharing in the existence of God. We are as many reflections of the one divine light. A shift of perspective, a kind of conversion, is required for this transcendent awareness to become a steady part of life. The difference with this fuller notion of health or wholeness is that you don’t privately possess it, let alone control it, but rather it holds you and you might collaborate with it more fully. The NHS will likely continue to struggle with the demands it faces, even as - and perhaps because - remarkable improvements in treatments will continue, too. In this context, a cultural and spiritual conversation about the wider nature of health is crucial. Like the patient who feels better because they are heard, a more expansive vision of what health entails, and indeed what it is to live well, will alleviate stresses on us all.