From the Vicar

Dear Friends,

COMPROMISE

  Personal choice, the god of the age, is symptomatic of the current era when it seems that our rights as individuals are prized above any sense of corporate or common good. We do what suits us on a daily basis, and churchgoing for example can become just another leisure pursuit. (Indeed, the consumer surveys use ‘religion’ or ‘church’ in just that way, alongside watersports or whatever.)

The Book of Revelation (of St John the Divine), the last in the Bible, wishes that the young church in Laodicea was not lukewarm, but rather hot or cold, and while we often crave that sense of being definite about something, we need to draw on that very English sense of seeing both sides of every argument, which can be a curse, but which at its best gives the benefit of the doubt to both sides and rejoices in the middle ground, where compromise is the solution.

The result is often messy, which in an increasingly tidy and neat colour-supplement world doesn’t fit well, but which is often the way of making progress. The government’s health-care and education policies perhaps exemplify this well, where the old public/private battle-lines are merged and we have begun to stop throwing metaphorical hand-grenades from behind our sandbags. We see benefits to the system, in each case, of a mixed economy, which ultimately serves us all and maximises resources.

With best wishes for the summer,

Yours sincerely,

Your Parish Priest, Mark

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