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Rector's Letter, September 2005 Dear Friends, ‘Travel broadens the mind’. So they say, and for a lot of folk I think it’s true. Sometimes, though, it just seems to harden people’s prejudices. Sitting in a café in Ljubljana (why couldn’t they call it something easy to spell, like Edinburgh?), we became conscious of a couple with a Midlands-type English accent just along from us. The woman asked the waiter for coffee. When it was brought she sent it back for him to add more hot water, regarding the espresso with disgust. She looked across at me and sighed – “these foreigners just don’t know how to make decent coffee” was written all over her face. She then noticed the yellow chrysanthemum heads floating in small saucers of water on each table. “What are these dandelions for?” she enquired of her husband. “They’re not dandelions,” replied the fount of all knowledge. “Dandelions have stalks.” It brought back a conversation I’d had with a Nigerian chap in the Anglican Church in Milan. He was very cheerful, as his Italian wife had a week back presented him with a son. We got to talking about culture differences between Italy and Nigeria and the misunderstandings that could, and did arise between him and his wife and her family. He had come to the decision that different ways were not right or wrong, just different. Sometimes, on reflection, one way might be better than another and so one learnt, but normally they were just different ways of looking at and doing things. If you look at another culture in the firm conviction that your ways are best, you will see nothing good in that culture. You certainly won’t learn anything or broaden your understanding. I once listened to someone from the Middle East running down western civilisation. Much of what he had to say was true – the decadence he saw all around him was there right enough, but the tirade lacked the humility to also acknowledge that his own culture was just as far from perfect, in different ways, and that there was also much that was good in western society. Humility is one of those Christian virtues that our world needs so badly – not the cringing self-loathing that sometimes passes wrongly for humility – but the kind that can listen and learn from one’s critics and can accept that others just do things differently, not necessarily wrongly. We can see all too clearly the evil that results in thinking we have the right to impose our views on others. Ultimately it leads to the idea that the ‘others’ do not matter and can be blown up. When ideology comes before people we have lost our humanity. No matter how good an idea might be, it will become warped and twisted, if imposed – look at Communism. It is the reason God does not, cannot by his very nature, impose upon us. God’s love in Christ is a free gift, to be accepted or rejected as one wishes. Love can never be forced without ceasing altogether to be love. I hope we’ve all had a pleasant summer and are willing to bring our different gifts and understandings together to work for the extension of God’s Kingdom here in St Mary's. Janice |