As the great man's guest must produce his good stories or songs at the evening banquet, as the platform orator exhibits his telling facts at mid-day, so the journalist lies under the stern obligation of extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table.
Cardinal J. H. Newman, Preface to The Idea of a University, 1852

Friday, April 6, 2012

Good Friday


I'll be joining the Church of Christ the Cornerstone for the Good Friday midday service in Midsummer Place in the Milton Keynes Shopping centre today.

Good Friday has been an irreducible core of Christianity for me. The thing that remains when I stop believing anything else.

Standing among all the shoppers thinking about the suffering of the world, our - my - material wealth at the expense of other people, the poverty and injustice that need not exist, the destruction of the planet, the mind-bogglingly incomprehensible inequalities. For this and for so many other reasons, being human is, or ought to be, unbearable. I think it would be literally unbearable if we could truly conceive it. Somehow Jesus's death on the cross acknowledges all this, and, well, it doesn't make it OK, but it allows us to acknowledge it and hold on for the hope of Easter.