After a bit of a blockbuster about clergy bullying, with some very interesting comment, something profoundly relevant caught my eye yesterday at our senior staff Eucharist. We were in Christ Church Cathedral, using the millennium Altar commemorating George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, supporter of resistance against Hitler and courageous opponent of saturation bombing during World War II.The Altar is from a single huge oak, blackened. Renewed humanity is hewn out of, and emerges from, a charred and defaced reality. It carries this quotation from Bell, framed in the context of calls for reprisals in 1945. Today, from parish breakdowns to Iraq, there’s a simplistic sense among otherwise intelligent people that we are OK and they are evil. Bell exposes the root of the matter. In reality, we are all complicit, and in need of redemption:
No Nation, no Church, no Individual is guiltless. Without Repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.
