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Rector's Letter, October 2004 Dear Friends, Do you remember holidays in the sun? I know lots of people hate it, but I just love stepping out of an air-conditioned car and being greeted by a wall of heat. No jumping up and down, flapping one’s arms about in a desperate attempt to build up some body heat in order to withstand the onslaught of winds whipping off the North Sea. No frantic fumbling around for sweaters and cardies, or worse, for umbrellas or anoraks while one gets soaked in the driving rain. Just warmth. At present it certainly seems like a distant memory. It’s such an amazing thing, memory. It can be so comforting or so devastating, depending on what one’s store of memories is. Some things can never be wiped from people’s minds; they must somehow learn to live with bad memories. For others, all their memories seem good; they have kind of filtered out anything unpleasant. As they say, memory is selective. Hence history, like Christianity, has to be reinterpreted for every generation. I cannot begin to guess what future historians will make of our age. There are times when none of us can make much sense of the actions of human beings in the world, of whatever creed or colour they may be. But to return to my pleasant holiday memories: it was butterflies that were going through my mind. To be honest, this is often the case, but in this instance I was thinking of real butterflies – large ones, small ones, in a great number of colours. Where we were on holiday they were everywhere. Perhaps they once were in this country and it is just one of the many things we have lost in our damaging of the environment. On one walk I was enthralled by a particularly lovely butterfly that was sitting on an equally lovely flower. Also on the same flower was a large fly-like insect. How ugly, I thought. Why? What is beauty and what ugliness? Sometimes we are in no doubt of the difference, but at other times I wonder if we are too selective, too conditioned, to decide. The fly-like creature was just as much an amazing work of nature as the butterfly. I remember reading about the eyes of a fly – a bluebottle, I think, which most of us dislike – and how amazingly adaptable they are. We do have a habit of judging creatures by how useful they are to us and by their looks. I’m not suggesting we allow ourselves to be overrun by malaria-bearing mosquitoes and the like, but many of the things we dislike play an important part in the wider scheme of things. We can so easily judge humans in a similar way. Just as we have a preference for cuddly, furry animals or colourful insects, we also prefer handsome, pretty people. It’s even been suggested that attractive people get lesser sentences in court than plain ones – a sobering consideration. It’s a far cry from the Bible’s insistence that we should not judge by outward appearances, but treat all equally, as children of the same God. Indeed we are told not to judge at all as that is God’s prerogative. Our judgements are clouded by our particular culture and personality. We all too often condemn what we do not understand. This is not to say that crime should not be punished – it is not judgement in the legal sense that we are told to abstain from, but from the subtle everyday distinctions we make between people who are ‘not one of us’ or whom we just don’t understand or like the look of. As autumn comes and we take delight in the variety of its colours, let us also appreciate the variety of people, and not jump to too hasty conclusions about any, because we’d probably get it wrong anyway. Janice |