I took my 90-year-old Mum to church today, first time she’s been since before lockdown and she was so happy to be there. Unlike Mum, I’m not a regular Sunday church-goer. More like weddings, funerals, the odd Midnight Mass, and tourist jollies such as Eucharist at one of the Four-Weddings-And-A-Funeral venues, or at Wells Cathedral, where my great-grandfather learned to play the organ back in the 1880s.
However, I used to go to church every week when I was younger, so some prayers, psalms and hymns I know by heart, even now. But today, while reciting one of those familiar litanies, I had an epiphany. I was reciting the Penitential Rite that includes the following:
…we have sinned against you
and against our neighbour
in thought and word and deed
through negligence, through weakness
through our own deliberate fault.
We are truly sorry and repent of all our sins …
Do I have to spell it out? OK, I will. The Church of England already has a means of repenting for all our sins, including racism and other forms of discrimination. If we are truly sorry, then God will forgive us and show us how to make amends.
If I were Archbishop of Canterbury, I would be banging that drum for all it was worth, not pandering to fashionable diktats, a.k.a. mob rule, and obsequiously agreeing, for example, that vandalism of statues that most people ignore was the way forward.
And if I were Archbishop of Canterbury, I would be kneeling before God and God only, not tacitly supporting the kneeling before anything else, which is tantamount to worshipping someone or something other than God, and therefore in breach of two of the Ten Commandments:
• Thou shalt have no other gods before Me
• Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
So if I were Archbishop of Canterbury, I’d be asking myself if I were up to the job.
No comments:
Post a Comment