Black & Grey

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 09 September 2008 21:13:26

When I was in school we had a deputy headmaster who was also our head of sixth form. He was one of those people who are considered to a "decent" person. He often told us that he believed in the basic goodness of humanity.

This would bring a laugh from many of us as we were cynical teenagers. many of us believed in the basic inhumanity of humanity. We were aware that life is not black and white but several varying shades of grey. As I've grown older I've realised that grey is the way of life.

Looked purely through a religious lense life is indeed black and white. You do right or you do wrong; you cannot do right by doing wrong. Lying is never a good thing to do either. Really? Not in any world I live in!

Would the truth have helped those 6 million who went to their deaths in the holocaust? Their fate wasn't always a secret but many chose to believe the Nazi lie to the reality. Would the knowledge of the fate of loved ones have easied the pain at selection? Would you want to tell your children or parents that they were heading fdor their deaths?

As Christians we sometimes forget that we live in an imperfect world and that we can't always change that, no matter how hard we try. We cannot judge others on criteria that we don't use in our own lives. That is one of the problems between life and religious expectation; we always seem to forget the forest that is in our own eye.

The benefit of maturity (in years if not reality) is that I no longer expect that life will change for the better without a great deal of effort, not just personal but collective. Yet I see a society around me that has lost its way and has become too indolent to crave change, let alone achieve it. That's not to say that we give up trying; just remember that we need to be realistic about our achievements and not dispirited when it doesn't happen quickly enough.

History Today:

1513: King James IV of Scotland is killed, and his army defeated, by the English at the Battle of Flodden.

1776: The Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, changes the name of the America from the United Colonies to the United States.

1850: California becomes the 31st state of the USA.

1876: The first race takes place between greyhounds chasing a mechanical hare.

1911: The first airmail service is operated in England between Hendon and Windsor.

1914: The German advance on Paris is halted at the Battle of the Marne by the British and French counterattack. That as near as they'll get until 1940.

1943: General Mark Clarke commands the Allied invasion of mainland Italy at Salerno.

1950: Soap rationing ends in the UK - and you thought that those miners were covered in coal in those old photos.

1976: Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tong as we used to call him) dies at the age of 83. His early achievements on the Long March, the war with the Japanese and the Chinese Revolution. Later he launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution which saw China go backwards and become less Cultural. One of history's great bastards.

1993: Israel and the PLO agree to officially recognise each other.