Doing right, doing wrong

“When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand”

Whether they are the best days of your life or days best forgotten, pretty much everyone who is no longer subject to the tyranny of the school bell, retains memories of their time in education. Not alas what the teachers would want you to remember, but all the other stuff, less useful but more memorable. Times change and the contents stuffed in the memory drawers vary but for all generations school-day recollectionswill be random and strange. You quickly forget how to do quadratic equations but will be able to remember the girls’ monotonous skipping rhyme on your deathbed. Playground incidents, falling out, making up; random horrors— summer’s sour milk, sandpaper toilet roll, and carbolic soap mouthwash. The times tables wriggle out of your recall like a mouse dipped in Swarfega, but with the slightest nudge some year 5 music ditty trips off your lips even now. If you went to church schools there’s a whole extra layer of weird on top of the teacher with halitosis, music and movement in your vest and pants or the boy from form 3c who tried to cut his toe off for a dare.  There was nothing good on TV that day.  The extra layer of strange for the church educated is of course the religious one. Just to be clear, for the faint of heart, I’m not going near convent schools today– no nuns will feature in this sermon.

So. Church school. The Apostles Creed every morning. A bit over zealous but not terribly odd. Also every assembly the ‘fight and not heed the wounds‘ prayer of St Ignatius of Loyola, that well known Anglican Jesuit. The hymn ‘Hills of the North’ sung all year round rather than just in Advent, clearly a sort of national anthem for God’s own country. Or the only tune the music teacher could play. The Mexican waves of incense-induced fainting at the half-termly Masses. The time a visiting vicar led collective worship, removing his cassock to reveal he was wearing a leotard and proceeded to do a liturgical dance. To absolute silence. We were too horrified even to laugh. You’ll know I’m just acting out my childhood trauma if I ever do it here. The assembly based on a tale from Dostoevsky— went right over everybody’s heads that one: I only got it 50 years later. The one where the curate made someone scream just by producing a tent peg (actually, that was me that was- the curate not the screamer, so someone else’s school-day memories. Sorry to intrude).

And then,  RE lessons which were entirely based on the book Actes and Monuments, popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. If it was the 21st century, with a title like that you might expect something dumbed down with a comic strip fox, but alas not. It’s Fox with an ‘E’ not some cutesy cartoon vulpine. You quite likely have lived your life thus far blissfully unaware of Foxes Book of Martyrs– it’s been a good while since it’s been on anyone’s Christmas list-and if you have heard of the tome you are still unlikely to have read it, but for centuries after the Reformation it was a best seller in Britain second only in popularity to the Bible itself. It was also the set text for Religious Education at St James the Great Church of England Middle School, Leeds in the 1970s. You’re not horrified, I hear no incredulous gasps, but that’s because you’ve not read the book. You should  be disturbed because what Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is, is a description of the sufferings of Protestants under the Roman church— page after page of executions and tortures minutely described and every other page provided with a ‘faggots and flames’ illustration of someone being done to a crisp. Now, children love gruesome— the body count in your standard fairy tale far outnumbers that of the combined Die Hard series after all; this, I presume is why our RE teacher chose Foxe as our guide to the Christian faith, because, basically, everybody in it comes to a hot and sticky end. It certainly is relentless in its butchery, page after page of lovingly described, lavishly illustrated tortures and executions. The danger of course is gore fatigue: when you’ve read the fiftieth loving description of one of Blood Mary’s bonfire of the heretics, your brain turns off. Either you’re bored— you know what to expect now: erm, let me guess, was this one burned at the stake?— or you become blasé to the carnage. A bit like playing a shoot em up video game but with woodcut graphic. Or, for sensitive souls, not common at the age of 9 but there are some, you are overwhelmed by the sheer unabating horror of it all.

Here’s a bit of local interest for you from the Book of Martyrs. 493 years ago to the day, John Frith a preacher from Westerham and Andrew Hewitt, a  Surrey–born tailor’s apprentice from London were executed for being Protestants. Foxe, a little terse this time, but there’s a lot of burnings still to get through at this point in the book, Foxe writes:

When brought to the stake in Smithfield, [Frith] embraced the faggots, and exhorted a young man named Andrew Hewit, who suffered with him, to trust his soul to that God who had redeemed it. Both these sufferers endured much torment, for the wind blew the flames away from them, so that they were above two hours in agony before they expired.

Even when Foxe is being concise, it’s not an easy read. I don’t recommend you rushing out to buy a copy of Acts and Monuments, but it’s should probably be compulsory reading for those ‘Christians’ who claim persecution because they might now be prosecuted for subjecting LGBT people to spritual and mental abuse.

To be fair to the RE teacher, this was the 1970s when nobody thought it odd to screen mini horror movies like ‘Spirit of lonely water’ and ‘Keep off train tracks’ just before Jackanory.

And to be fair to Foxe, there were a lot of Protestants killed by the church authorities. In the interests of balance, we should also note that there were a lot of Roman Catholics killed by Protestants. And Protestants killed by Protestants. And… well you get the picture.

“When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”

The judges, the legislators, the prelates and preachers, the executioners and the gore-glutted spectators behind every   execution, every cruelty, every burning: they all believed, passionately that they were doing the right thing, obeying God, preserving their communities from harm and, the ultimate perversion serving the best interests of their victims. They believed they were doing what is right, yet they were doing evil. 

“When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”

Those words of St Paul are in all Bibles, Protestant ones, Catholic ones, Orthodox ones, Coptic ones. The warning should be engraved on all Christian hearts. And yet, how hard it has been to understand that Paul is pointing out not so much that we must resist temptation, but that there can be a peculiar, almost symbiotic relationship between moral fervour and doing evil. Beware when you want to do what is good. Because when you have the best intentions in the world, filled with the sense of doing good, doing God’s work, that’s when you’re least likely to be paying attention , least likely to be aware of temptation, least likely to consider just what you’re doing and you don’t notice when evil has you hooked. You are, as the cliché goes, your own worst enemy, and no more so than when you are trying to do the right thing.

We should, of course, goes without saying, always be trying to do the right thing; but that good intention doesn’t mean anything we do in its pursuit will be good.

On balance, of course, Christianity has been and continues to be an enormous force for good in the world. If you can weigh and compare such things then its influence has been overwhelmingly positive. 

But. That’s not the way to measure these things: it’s not a one measure scale, more good means less evil. You can do evil at the same time as doing good. And doing good doesn’t make the evil done go away.

The bloodier results of not paying attention to the evil lurking when we want to do good are, at least for Christians, mostly in the the historical past of our religion. That doesn’t mean that wrong isn’t still happening in the name of doing good.

There is still a regular drip of scandals in the Church of England– bad enough for an Archbishop of Canterbury to resign– where evils have been ignored or explained away because the person doing them seemed to be doing so much of what is good: getting young people enthused about Jesus, increasing the number of people attending a church, creating a successful children’s choir. These are all good things, and the vast majority of times when they happen the evil lurking close at hand slinks away.  But not always.

“When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”

We should, goes without saying, always be wanting to do what is good. But we must be aware that we’re vulnerable to doing wrong when we really want to do what’s right.

So, wrapping up. Church safeguarding can be a chore. But it can stop evil in its tracks.

Something that is wrong isn’t right if it happens in church. 

And golden rule of thumb. It’s not infallible, nothing is. But it’s simple enough that all of us can understand.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you 

Nobody would want the abuse they have undergone passed over or ignored because the abuser is also doing good things for the church. Nobody would want to be forced into a life of loneliness because of the way God created them. Nobody would want themselves burnt at the stake.

It’s only a start, but when wanting to do good, at least

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you