Epiblog for 20 February 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Winter stubbornly refuses to release its grip on field and fold. If it’s not frost, it’s snow. Chugging up the winding road out of Jackson Bridge, up onto the roof of the world, or so it seemed, with high pennines all around me, on Wednesday morning, there was snow everywhere, all over the fields, and, more startlingly, all over the road, which had not been gritted. So it was a case of playing “grandmother’s footsteps” and following very carefully in the guy in front’s wheeltracks. Steady as she goes, we’re not out of the woods yet. I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.

Tuesday had been a subdued day, thinking about Greenjewel’s funeral taking place in Dublin. I have been trying to comfort someone else I know who has suffered a recent family bereavement, and the issue has once again been thrown into sharp relief by the death of Greenjewel. My observation that perhaps it was all part of some plan, some pattern that we are not privy to, was of little help, only provoking the observation that God must be cruel, if his plans involved premature and pointless death.

Thinking about it, I concluded that maybe part of the answer is that God’s ideas of what is cruel and what isn’t aren’t the same as ours. Plus of course, if there really are such things as multiple universes, other dimensions where in some way the person that was Greenjewel carries on, then maybe it’s all the same to an impersonal God – he, she, or it doesn’t really care what dimension you are currently in, it’s only us that feels the loss.

I was struck by a sense of the power of such an impersonal God, huge, universal and restless like the sea, and I found myself recalling Donne’s Holy Sonnet

“Batter my Heart, Three Person’d God”

With an image of the sea battering the land, huge waves crashing, with all the impersonal force God can muster, and woe betide anything that gets in the way. Scary, but also a source of potential comfort, if you know that the force in question is on “your” side, like the slaves used to sing to comfort each other in “Mary Don’t You Weep”

“Pharoah’s armies got drownded”

So, that was Tuesday, And then came Wednesday, and the snow.

Well, I made it to the office, obviously, and back again, and several more days too, or I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this on a bright, almost Alpine, Saturday morning with the sun glistening on the ice in the bird-bath. Yes, the sun is shining, but we’re not out of the woods yet.

Nor is the economy. Wednesday was a day of contrasts. Barclays have made record profits. Thanks largely to the fact that the entire banking system was propped up by the likes of you and me, when it looked likely to fall off Canary Wharf and into the River Thames in October 2008. True, Barclays actually refused Government help directly, largely because if they had taken it, it would have come with strings attached, or so they thought at the time. The ”strings” have been shown since, by the actions of other banks, to have had all the actual restrictive force of fine black cotton.

But, directly helped or not, Barclays has still benefited from the fact that the banking sector was propped up by taxpayers, however indirectly. As a former Barclays customer who still has an outstanding grievance against them, I was not best pleased by the news. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask. My mood was deepened by reading a post on one of the online forums I frequent, concerning animal welfare, from someone who fosters stray cats, who had been at the cat sanctuary and had seen the heartbreaking spectacle of a family having to come in and surrender their pet cat for adoption, because they were about to be made homeless as a result of the credit crunch.

This cannot be right. This cannot be allowed to happen, and to those who say it’s just the system, well the system is wrong, and it needs changing. Where is the compassion, where is the humanity? If all we are is ticks in a millionaire’s ledger, then we might as well give up now and turn our faces to the wall.

We look in vain though, for any spiritual leadership, any sign from the heads of the various denominations that might tell us there is more to life than getting a new sofa from DFS. The church is too busy riving itself to pieces over whether there can be women bishops or gay clergy. As if there were not a hundred thousand more important things it could be concerning itself with.

One group of people who won’t be getting new sofas from DFS, or anywhere else for that matter, is the 1700 workers laid off from the Corus Steel Plant at Redcar, which has been mothballed this week because of lack of orders. This is going to cost the taxpayer gazillions of pounds in benefit, and the whole place will become an economic wasteland for three generations, if what happened to the coalfields after MacGregor is anything to go by. It would probably be cheaper for the government to pay the workers to keep the steelworks open. Apart from anything else, we need a source of our own steel, and we need, as a nation, to feel that the words “Made in England” can still be stamped into some metal object, somewhere.

We need something to raise us up. We need some comfort, some direction. We need to see some justice. We need to see Pharoah’s army get drownded. We need to rediscover what is right, and what is wrong. What matters. We need to see the poor and needy comforted, and if this means that those who can afford it have to give a little bit more, so be it. We need some spiritual leadership. We need to find that family, and give them their house and their cat back. We need to house the rest of them, and quickly. Time is short, the nights are cold. We need something to raise us up, and it needs to be Made in England, made to last, and made soon.