On Sunday 15 September, 1963, just at the end of Sunday school and just as the main Sunday service was about to start, a bomb warning was telephoned in to the Sixteenth Street Baptist church of Birmingham, Alabama. The congregation were given less than three minutes warning. When the bomb exploded, four children were killed: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14, and Denise McNair, aged 11. They had all been standing near a mirror, brushing their hair and adjusting their white dresses. Of course, all four girls, like the rest of the church congregation were black. The bombing had been perpetrated by a faction of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. It took fourteen years before the first of the bombers, Robert Chambliss, was arrested; 37 years before Thomas Blanton, was jailed, and Frank Cherry wasn’t convicted until 2002.
The atrocity was reported throughout the world, and, perhaps surprisingly, in the small Carmarthenshire village of Llansteffan, a man decided to do something about it. He was John Petts, an artist. Many years later he recalled: “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children. As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those stained-glass windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?”
Petts’s idea was to set up a fund to replace the windows of the Sixteenth Street Baptist church, a fund to which the maximum contribution could be half a crown: “We don’t want some rich man as a gesture paying the whole window. We want it to be given by the people of Wales.”
The idea took on a life of its own, and money flowed in. There were pictures in the local and national press of children, black and white, queuing to hand their pocket money over. But what form should the window take? Petts puzzled about this:
Then it struck him. A verse from Matthew 25:40
that spelt out the Christian message of brotherly love: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Petts employed the last refrain: “You do it me”. Once the words were in place, the image followed. The window was installed in 1965. It showed a black figure, his chest thrust out and arms outstretched as though on a crucifix, the right one pushing away hatred and injustice, the left offering forgiveness. A rainbow, representing racial diversity, arcs over the head. Christ. As a black man. In the South. In the 60s.
The most impressive thing about the whole story is Petts’s justification for what he did:
An idea doesn’t exist unless you do something about it. Thought has no real living meaning unless it’s followed by action of some kind.
There is a profound triviality about the way in which most Christians approach Lent: observing the holy season is limited to questions of “What I’m going to give up”, and discussions of what you couldn’t bear to live without— chocolate, beer, or Facebook. Every time this conversation takes place, the devil wins, because it is part of the devil’s always successful approach to human sinfulness and fallenness: make it a bit of a joke.
The Church has long recognized the way in which humanity’s fallen nature gets in the way of us taking our fallen nature seriously. This way the Church has developed practices, customs, disciplines, that allow us to do what is right without letting our selfish and lazy selves get in the way. Lent is the time in which the ascetism of the Christian life is most clearly expressed. To live an ascetic life, which is to say, to live a disciplined Christian life, means to take seriously the three-fold practices of almsgiving, prayer and fasting described in the Ash Wednesday Gospel (Matt 6:1-18). This three-fold practice covers all the bases, in a Christian ‘triangle’:
- prayer means focussing on God
- almsgiving means focussing on others;
- only fasting focuses on yourself.
How can these three disciplines be the antidote to human fallenness? Let’s take them in reverse order:
- Fasting means that we recognize our true needs, and don’t confuse “want” with “need”. It helps us to align ourselves away from thinking “Go on, you’re worth it”, and towards our commitments and relationships.
- This outward commitment is continued in Almsgiving. This is not just “giving money to charity” (although that is good and necessary, for your and for the charities). Almsgiving is any practice of loving compassion and justice-making. It helps us to admit to our standing in the world and demonstrates what we truly value— not our possessions, reputation and achievement, but our involvement with others.
- Prayer, which includes all the other “acts of the virtue of religion”— adoration, devotion, sacrifice, study and meditation— sustains our relationship with God and helps us understand fully what it means to say that it is in God we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
In Lent we undertake these disciplines in the hope that the benefits they bring will take deeper root in our hearts and lives. It is important that we observe all three, for only then are we living within the reality identified by Jesus in the great commandment: you must love the Lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself.
John Petts said:
An idea doesn’t exist unless you do something about it. Thought has no real living meaning unless it’s followed by action of some kind.
Lent doesn’t exist unless you do something about it.
Your Christian faith had no real living meaning unless it’s expressed by action of some kind.
To follow a holy Lent, a Lent in which the ascetic practices of the Church are taken seriously, gives you an opportunity to do this, to live as a disciple of Christ, and not as a hypocrite. God give us strength and grace to do so.
In a wise and wide-ranging disquisition on the development of cultural norms, the difference between “secularism” and “freedom of religion”, and the meaning of “teaching” (as opposed to “indoctrination”), Judge Bonello concludes with “An Aside”. He mentions how the Court was once asked to judge on the pornographic intention and/or effect of Guillaume Apollinaire’s novel Les onze mille verges (the case was brought by the Turkish government). While recognizing that Apollinaire’s novel was pornographic, the Court defended its place within the European cultural tradition. Fair enough— but Judge Bonello’s authority was whether the novel was pornographic was WIKIPEDIA (which definition he helpfully footnotes!1)
