Â鶹Éç

Good morning. Like all of us, I have been disturbed recently by the amount of violence there is around at the moment. I don’t just mean the terrorist murder of the much loved Sir David Amess but what we have been hearing from MP’s about the abuse and threats they receive, the aggression on social media and the bitterness in some public debates. There seems to be so much simmering anger just below the surface waiting to erupt.

We’ve heard that security for MP’s is going to be stepped up. They deserve that protection because they are essential for our whole political system, a limb in the body politic. I was interested in the reaction of my daughter, who lives in France, to the death of David Amess. She said that in France it would not have been seen so much in terms of the death of a valued individual, but as an attack on the state and the values it stood for, and many here would agree with that. Representative democracy with its elected parliament, freedom of speech and freedom to demonstrate peacefully took centuries, millennia to achieve. It’s a precious heritage but a fragile one- as we know from the number of countries that are still dictatorships of one kind or another or moving towards autocracy.

One of the interesting features of the New Testament was how often people were urged to value and pray for the political system of the time, brutal though it was by our standards. How much more is our own system to be cherished. It cannot be taken for granted. It always has to be safeguarded and improved. But Christians went further than this in relation to violence. It not only has to be prevented and contained by the arms of the state, it has to be overcome spiritually. One of the most remarkable women of the 20th century was the French philosopher Simone Weil. She wrote. ‘All the criminal violence of the Roman Empire ran up against Christ and in him it became pure suffering…The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.’ It is a powerful statement which requires a very great deal of thinking through-but at the least it suggests that when we feel hurt or angry - and there are some things we are quite right to feel very angry about -righteous, not self-righteous, anger - this is not to be expressed even by verbal aggression but in constructive action or a reaching out to the other in some way; and this involves a certain amount of bearing any hurt we might feel. There are many in public life who have to do this day by day. They need our understanding.