I set off at 20 minutes to midday and I must admit I had not said the General Thanksgiving or read the readings of the day. I had an agenda. And not a particularly commendable one at that. Would the bell of St Anselm’s ring? I reached Cleaver Square and had time so I began my circuits. In the middle of the Square sitting on a rug, in the sun was a woman reading a story to two boys, two year old twins. I know because I called out and asked. They made a Wonderfully peaceful picture.
Then, of course, the two-year-olds got bored with the story but the woman had tennis balls for them to play with and when they were bored with that they sat on larger balls and ended doing a two-year-old version of Pilates. Two year olds get bored quite quickly so I had plenty of time to reach St Anselm’s before noon and to be in position not only within hearing distance but also within sight of the bell.
Came noon and not a sound not a fraction of a movement. Rather piously I stayed there and said, actually sang in my head, the Regina Coeli. It’s easier to remember the words singing it. Last time I’d been outside St Anselm’s for the non bell I’d forgotten we were in Eastertide when the rule is we don’t do the Angelus and we do do the Regina Coeli. And I thought that maybe the bell rope is broken, or maybe the rope is inside the church and no one’s allowed inside.
Then I wondered whether it might be another sign of that strange phenomenon that when we’ve written we will do something we think we’ve done it. Or intend to do something and …‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ To be fair perhaps the poor vicar has the virus and hasn’t been able to ring the bell or take down the notice. It’s still there. I checked. ‘The church bell will be rung at 12 noon each day to remind us of God and of each other.’
Governments and Councils and all sorts of groups think that if they pass a law, make a rule, they have solved a problem. Well they may have taken a step towards doing something and it may eventually lead to something but there’s still a long way to go. It’s the whole business of feeling you’ve done something when you haven’t. One of New Zealand’s great Prime Ministers, Norman Kirk, he was a sort of family friend was in Singapore for a conference. I was working there and he invited me to his hotel for an early morning swim and breakfast. He mentioned then that the easiest thing for Governments to do was to pass legislation and to measure success by the amount of legislation passed. He said his greatest achievement and one of the most difficult was to get something removed from the statute book. The something was to do with farmers not being allowed to repair gutters on woolsheds.
Incidentally, at that same time, in the swimming pool of the Goodwood Park Hotel, swimming around, he said to me, ‘You know, Simon, I find it very difficult to see how a Christian can be anything other than a socialist.’ He was Laour Prime Minister .
‘What makes you say that, Sir?’ I said.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘ You only have to think of Matthew’s Gospel Chapter 25 verse 40.’
I swam underwater thinking, ‘Matthew 25.40, Matthew 25.40.’ I didn’t have a clue what it was. When I came up he was grinning from ear to ear and said, ‘Ah Simon, it sometimes pays to have been brought up by the Salvation Army!’
Be all that as it may. In the business of saying, or writing, and not getting around to doing the same thing often applies to feelings of guilt. I remember when I was a curate living next to the Vicarage and every time I saw the Vicar’s wife she would say, ‘Oh Simon, I feel so guilty I haven’t had you to dinner’. And again, ‘Oh Simon, etc’ and again and again. Eventually I could stand it no longer and when, for the umpteenth she said, ‘I feel so guilty’, I interrupted her and said, ‘Now look Georgina,’ actually we got on well and I liked her, ‘Now look Georgina, you don’t have to have me for dinner. So either have me to dinner and get it over and done with. Or don’t have me to dinner. But stop feeling guilty about it!’
A complete aside. My system with these updates is that draft one I dictate into my iPad. I click the microphone at the bottom of the screen and I’m back in the studio at Radio New Zealand and away I go. And of course the first draft needs editing and sometimes the machine can’t cope with my New Zealand accent. But I was surprised when the last sentence of that last paragraph came out as
either have me to dinner and get adulterous or don’t have made a dinner you don’t have to feel guilty about it no one has said that you must have me to dinner feeling guilty
Well!
And then, on the business of feelings of guilt, I came across the text of this broadcast from 2001
THAIPUSAM 2001
Last year I went to the Hindu Festival of Thaipusam at the Batu Caves just outside Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. This is a Hindu festival of thanksgiving. The inner purpose of Thaipusam is the total surrender of the individual’s faith to God. On the day of Thaipusam Hindu devotees are reminded to banish their egos and purify themselves and there are many different ways they choose to do this. Hindu teachers make clear that it is the inner devotion that matters.
What thousands of tourists who flock to the Batu caves come to see is the outward way some Hindus choose to give thanks and purify themselves. They pierce themselves through their cheeks with skewers and put hooks in their skin and flesh.
Before the festival those who make vows spend time in prayer and fasting – devotions common to many religions. On the day itself many break coconuts – the coconut symbolises self centerdness – so the breaking of a coconut is the destruction of one’s ego.
The day before the festival I met, Rajhu. He and his family had been on a strict vegetarian diet for forty days. They had prayers together twice a day and once a week at the temple. Rajhu had decided to perform his vows of thanksgiving and purification with a kavadi.
Now a kavadi is a great wire or bamboo structure, from what I could tell, about four feet high, looking almost like a temple, and decorated with peacock tail feathers. It’s also heavy. On the morning of the festival the Kavadi was put on Rajhu’s shoulders with prayers and chanting and dancing and then the kavadi was attached to Rajhu with hooks – like big fish hooks into his skin and flesh on his back and on his chest. He was in some sort of trance and he didn’t bleed at all.
In the procession to the Batu caves I saw hundreds of men like Rajhu, pierced but not bleeding, carrying kavadi. Some had assistants pulling on cords tied to the hooks imbedded in their skin and flesh. Some parents carried babies in hammocks making a thank offering for the birth of a child. Others carried urns of milk on their heads. Some were covered in dust or coloured powder and had skewers through their cheeks and there were drums and chanting and dancing. And this great procession of thousands of people climbed the 272 steps to the shrine in the Batu Caves.
I found the whole thing bewildering and disturbing. Usually I can recognise some similarity between religious practices in different cultures. Perhaps there was something here of the Good Friday rituals in cities of Spain and Mexico or in what seem to me to be the strange religious excesses of Orthodox Jews or Fundamentalist Muslims. But that’s still pretty distant from me.
Then it was a friend in Geraldine, in South Canterbury, who put her finger on a similarity. Might this not be, she suggested, this piercing with hooks on the outside what is almost common in the liberal west, putting in the hooks of guilt on the inside, believing that as long as you feel guilty about the wrongs and injustices of the world you have made a difference.
But I’m not sure whether it has much to do with Georgina and her feelings of guilt.