Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Spring seems to be happening, stealthily, around us. Each morning when I’ve looked out of my bedroom window there seems to be a few more fuzzy catkins open on the branches outside, that have been bare and cold all winter. I even saw an early bee, bumbling and fumbling around on them, the other day. I also evicted a bee (the same one?) that had somehow gotten into the house and was trying to escape by head-butting the window. Maybe it was from Scotland or something, who knows, anyway I eventually caught the benighted creature and let it go, out of the conservatory door, where it promptly buzzed off without a word of thanks. It had taken 45 minutes to manoeuvre it into a cup and cover it with a piece of cardboard, a process complicated by the fact that one of us could fly and one of us couldn’t even walk.

Even the grey mornings this week have eventually turned to sunshine, albeit pale and watery in some cases, but enough to tempt Kitty away from her cat-bed (or `bin-bag’ as they are more commonly known) in the hearth, and onto Zak’s (formerly Tiggy’s) fleecy dog bed in his chair in a sunny spot in the conservatory.

The badger has been active as well, coming most nights for the food we leave out for it, although it seems to have definite dietary likes and dislikes; we were told badgers like bananas, ours doesn’t, but he does hoover up nuts and raisins with gusto and relish. Sadly, my attempts to photograph him have only met with limited success, part of the problem being that we never know precisely when he’s going to turn up, and of course it’s always, er, dark, when he does. I want to explore setting up a badgercam, and I have already rigged up a power point off the one that runs the TV in the conservatory, now I just need to find out how to set the web cam for low light and motion sensor settings, and then we’re in business. I might have a crack at it later on. God knows, it will come as welcome relief from the dreary tasks that have been stacked up for me next week, most of which involve people persecuting me, or trying to, over money.

Debbie’s still gargling gallons of carrot juice, yesterday I made her another batch, using about 3 kilos of carrots to produce three bottles of carrot juice and spending about 90 minutes cleaning the filter on the juicer afterwards. As an activity, it’s right up there with watching paint dry. Still, if it gets her through to the Easter break, I guess it’s time well spent, she’s been running on empty for weeks now with all of this damn teaching stuff.

As for me, I am usually glad at this time of the year, “Bytuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to springe”, but this spring has been tinged with a bitter-sweet sadness for me because Tiggy’s not around to feel the growing warmth of the sun on her back or sniff the flowers in the garden. The daffodils are out by Russell’s grave, as well, but I’ve still not seen any crocuses, I don’t think they’re going to come up this year, maybe the badger ate the bulbs. This year, though, these days at any rate, I feel more and more like the deranged creator of some rambling old ruin, maybe even part of the ruin itself, looking at the broken down walls and the fallen pillars and the faceless statues and trying to make some sense of what used to be, and what is, in the same way that W B Yeats viewed the wreckage of Ireland after the civil war and incited the bees to return and build in the empty starling’s nest by his window:

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We’re still no nearer getting another dog, largely because I have no means of transporting Pepper, the would-be dog in question, from Carmarthen to the Holme Valley. My problem is that organising such a transportation requires energy and commitment, two commodities in scarce supply in my life at the moment, and I have – of course – no means of travelling independently. So I wander around like a hermit with the clap instead, curating the museum of my own downfall.

The news from the wider world, such of it that reaches me, is no cheerier. In the budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has managed to cock a snook at the poor and the disadvantaged by reducing the tax bill for millionaires while simultaneously mugging old grannies of their pensions, while the unannounced, un-manifesto-ed Health and Social Care Bill has been railroaded through in the teeth of medical opposition, to dismantle the National Health Service. You expect this sort of sneaking, conniving, lurking yet blatant evil from the Tories of course, it’s what they do, but I am constantly amazed by the behaviour of the Lickspittle Democrats who prop them up – they must be so desperate for power that they’re happy to say, along with Groucho Marx, “These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others!”

Still, at least the Christian community in the UK can take comfort from one thing that’s happened this week. TV Chef Delia Smith has weighed in on the side of the religious and started a campaign to fight back at attacks on the church by militant atheists. Those of us who have heard and seen her half-time tirade at Norwich City via the public address system, at a time when she was allegedly troubled by the addition of small quantities of trifle to her sherry, know just what a scary prospect this development represents, but really it can only make matters worse. The problem is that the entire debate is bedevilled (oops, no pun intended, you can have that one for free) by the tendency of the media (and hence White Van Man in general) to draw GENERAL inferences from PARTICULAR instances.

So you get some sort of whirly-eyed "Christian" who wants "the right" to re-paint his council van with a fresco of the last supper, wear a six inch bling crucifix on the outside of his overalls, and hand out tracts in work time, and when his employers say, er, wouldn't it be a good idea to sort of mix in some er, work with all this proselytising, somewhere along the line, suddenly the Jerry Springer the Opera Rent-a-mob are out in the streets with their pitchforks and tumbrils, giving Christianity a bad name. Do these people really think that God, with a mind capable of supporting the weight of the entire infinite cosmos, cares about whether two gay men sleep together in a bed-and-breakfast?

But of course, there is always a tiny vocal media-savvy group of loopy fruits who are happy to get offended on everyone else's behalf and object to gay marriage, and it only takes one or two mainstream clergy to fall (or jump) into the same soup and there you have the perfect recipe for Richard Dawkins, another media-savvy equally unrepresentative anti-Christian (I nearly stopped short when typing that last word!) to use the platform gleefully afforded him by the BBC as Darwin's prophet on earth, and rubbish all Christians, and all religion, off the back of the actions of a few misguided individuals who would be better employed picking up leaves.

Exactly the same thing happens with Islam, you get some benighted fool, the fundamentalist equivalent of Citizen Smith (Freedom for Kabul!) who thinks it's a merry jape to burn a poppy on remembrance day, and suddenly the media is all over him like a rash, which of course makes it a slam-dunk for the EDL, the BNP, UKIP, and the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph, to claim that the country's gorn to the dogs, etc etc etc chiz chiz, continued p 94, until they start foaming at the mouth and fall over backwards.

I am not saying that the Church shouldn't speak out on social and moral issues, but it's the dogmatic insistence on morality being applied in a doctrinaire fashion inflexibly across all situations, just because it says so in a mouldy old heap of goatskins somewhere, a heap of goatskins which can be interpreted several ways in any case, which, as a moral relativist, I find regrettable, and which plays into the hands of atheists and fundamentalists alike, and which makes me tend, if anything (I am not a member of any Church, and described myself on my hospital surgery form as a `Lapsed Agnostic') towards the Church of England, which used to, at any rate, be more of a hobby than a religion, and the chief harm it caused was that you might occasionally get a dry sherry when you asked for a sweet one. But even the Church of England, bless it, has been getting its cassocks in a twist about gay marriage, which is probably why Rowan Williams has finally decided he’d prefer to be cleaning the juicer, and I don’t blame him.

It’s the inflexibility of extremism which sits ill with me alongside my own perception of the awesomeness of what God must be. Do I believe that Jesus died for me, personally? Sometimes, sometimes not. Some days, I think `why would he bother?’ But the problem is that people get obsessed with the idea of spreading the good news, even if you don’t want to hear it, or are quite happy with your own version of good news, your own path to God. It’s like the over-zealous Boy Scouts, helping old ladies cross the road, even if they didn’t want to go, and while they’re there, will in any case probably be mugged by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Supposed Christians behaving in an uncaring, unGodly, unChristian fashion is not the exclusive property of the Church of England, of course, or indeed of the UK. Over in New York another prime example is occurring. Fr Lino Gonsalves, at St James’s Church in the city has decided to get rid of a colony of feral cats which lives in the church grounds by starving them out, ordering the caretakers not to feed them. This despite the fact that local feral cat welfare groups have been managing the colony, trapping the cats, neutering them, and returning them to the wild. Refusing to put out food for the colony will only destroy its stability and even if it is dispersed, new feral cats from elsewhere will move in, and the whole cycle will have to start again, only this time the feral cats will be once more capable of breeding, so in fact the outcome will be worse. Plus, the feral cat groups argue, if the caretakers at St James’s are allowed to get away with this (albeit under duress, there is evidence that in some cases they have been ignoring the Church’s stricture and feeding the cats anyway, apparently) then this would set a precedent over the whole city of New York, causing distress and suffering to many more colonies that at the moment exist in a kind of uneasy stasis, fed by volunteers.

I cannot pretend to understand the mindset of the Church on this matter. Of course, according to official Catholic doctrine, animals don’t have souls, and all I can say to that is that anyone who’s ever been owned by a cat knows this to be patently untrue, and to echo whoever it was that said if there are no cats in heaven, then I don’t want to go there.

As I write this, more than 700 people have emailed the church, the Archdiocese of New York, and the Vatican, to complain about this. I was one of them, and if you’re interested, you can be one of them too. At first, the Archdiocese were trying to make out that they had agreed to meet with the feral cat welfare groups, whose policies of trap-neuter-return have been endorsed by the Mayor of New York and the ASPCA, when this was not the case. This is the text of my most recent email to them:

Dear Archdiocese of New York.

I am surprised not to have had even an acknowledgement from you about my previous email concerning the inhumane treatment of the feral cats at St James Church by one Father Lino Gonsalves, who is apparently attempting to kill them by starvation. I am also concerned to learn that you are apparently telling callers who ring you to express concern about this matter that you are working with the Mayor's Programme to resolve the matter, when this is not the case and you haven't even agreed to meet with them. Could you kindly point me out the bit in the Bible that says it's OK to lie through your teeth when you are caught out doing something bad, to get the heat off for a bit? Only I thought Jesus had a downer on that sort of thing.

As for the animals, I don't have to remind you, surely, of Humphry Primatt's 1776 work Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, where he says:
"pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or beast, and the creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible of the misery of it while it lasts, suffers evil; and the sufferance of evil, unmeritedly, unprovokedly, where no offence has been given; and no good end can possibly be answered by it, but merely to exhibit power or gratify malice, is Cruelty and Injustice in him that occasions it" [capitalisation as in original text]
He goes on to say, in the same book:
"Now, if amongst men, the differences of their powers of the mind, of their complexion, stature, and accidents of fortune, do not give any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of these differences, for the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man."
In short, animals - and this includes feral cats - are all God's creatures and are placed in our trust and stewardship. And abuse of that power (as in the case of the behaviour of Fr Gonsalves) is evil. I'm sorry, but there it is. Primatt ends:
"We may pretend to what religion we please, but cruelty is atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity; but cruelty is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy, but cruelty is the worst of heresies."

So - given that the Catholic Church isn't exactly brimming over with positive PR stories at the moment, worldwide, are you happy that one of your churches seems to be in the keeping of someone whose actions would seem to make them, if you accept the views of a distinguished theologian, an evil atheist heretic? I hope not, but since you don't acknowledge or reply to emails, I have to assume you are.

I accept that you might have trouble struggling with Humphry Primatt, so I can make it even simpler:

"The righteous person regards the life of his beasts" - Proverbs 12:10
"His tender mercies are over all His creatures" - Psalm 145:9
The Bible gives several instructions on animal welfare:
• A person must feed his animals before himself (Deuteronomy 11:15)
• An animal's suffering must be relieved (Deuteronomy 12:4)
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. - Matthew 6:26
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God - Luke 12:6
Anyway, you are probably thinking well, he's 3000 miles away, what can he do about this? So here's what I am going to do:

a) stop at once any donations to any charities connected with the Catholic Church and tell them it is because of this situation and tell all my contacts to do likewise
b) start a tourism boycott of New York because of this situation. Don't think this is an empty threat, by the way, I have done this before over hedgehog-culling in Scotland, badger-culling in Wales, and seal clubbing by the ignorant Canadians. It tends to get media attention, if nothing else.
c) write about you in my blog. You won't like it.

Oh, and of course, continue to pray to Almighty God and St Francis of Assisi that St James Church New York suffers a lightning bolt of such proportions that the clergy decide to see sense, instead of behaving with stubborn, uncaring, unChristian stupidity.

So far, no reply. I mean it, though. The Archdiocese have since, slowly and grudgingly, agreed to a meeting on Tuesday with the feral cat workers, and we will see what ensues from that. George Bernard Shaw, no less, once memorably said that `man’s inhumanity to man begins with man’s inhumanity to animals’, and I guess that means that, as of now, St James’s Church, the Archdiocese of New York, and the Vatican, all stand this day in favour of man’s inhumanity to man. I could go on and quote other subtle and distinguished theologians such as Andrew Linzey, to point up the paucity of the Church’s stance on this still further, but it’s much easier (and shorter) to come out with it and say they are behaving like a bunch of arses and deserve to be punished, if not in this world, then the next. Meanwhile, Big G, how are we doing on that lightning bolt? Better make it three!

Still, that’s enough Bible-bashing for one week. I don’t know what the Collect is for today, I haven’t looked it up, and if that makes me a bad person, so be it. Next week it is Palm Sunday of course, and the start of the process of Jesus’s betrayal and painful ordeal, two subjects I do know something about. Meanwhile there is work to be done, accounts to be written up, words to be knitted together, books to be laid out, herbs to be potted, carrots to be juiced, dead wood to be gathered up, mosaics to be glued, paintings to be varnished, stones to be carved, and wives, dogs, cats and badgers to be fed. Not necessarily in that order, though. Honey-bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.