The Manifold Letters

10. On The Law and The Spirit . Dearly Beloved, A few years ago my wife and I were returning home on top of a bus to west London. When we turned into the stop by the Westfield Shopping center in Shepherd's bush we were surprised to see about forty bodies lying on the ground. In the middle of the bodies stood a rather bored looking policeman. This was a protest that had crossed the Atlantic and marked one of the frequent police shootings of an unarmed black person in the USA. I was disquieted that somehow there was an implication against the UK police force too, despite that force being largely unarmed. Only a couple of weeks ago four people were acquitted of criminal damage for pulling down and pushing into the dry dock in Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston who was a generous benefactor to the City, but who had made his fortune on the back of the slave trade as an investor and officer of the Royal Africa Company. Bristol has a large black population and there was a general f...

9. On Founding Fathers Dearly Beloved, Forty years ago I was working abroad when after a leisurely seven year courtship Josephine and I decided to marry. As I was not attached to any Parish. that meant that it was necessary to conform to a law of 1533 and obtain a special marriage licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury's Faculty Office. It turned out to be a relict mediaeval document written in beautiful script, the first page was dominated by the promising greeting “Health” in enormous letters. We were married by Cannon Dick Herrick. He was introduced as a family friend but there were more profound reasons for his role. The Cannon had founded the Chelmsford Cathedral Centre for Research and Training in 1969, and Josephine's father, Pierre Turquet, was the first consultant to the Centre and they worked together on Church Leadership. Pierre was head of the adult department at the Tavistock Clinic and specialised in the psychology of groups, especially large groups. The work...

8. Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer Right to Conspire to Kill and Adolf Hitler. Dearly Beloved, Some questions pursue one like a faithful dog. One of mine is “Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer right to conspire to kill Hitler?” Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) a Lutheran theologian, was a follower of the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church, which declared that Christians should not follow the rules and laws set out by the German Nazi government as it moved to coordinated both church and state by promoting the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche. The Nazi Party was remarkable for being in power for only 12 and a half years, yet provoked a war in which at least 70 million people died and was responsible for the Holocaust. Bonhoeffer confronted the political reality at that time, arguing that following the example of the Crucified Christ, 'real innocence shows itself precisely in a man's entering into the fellowship of guilt, for the sake of other men.” (Ethics (Eng. Trans.) 1955 p.210). We are now at ...

7. On The Exigencies of a Zoom Funeral in a Time of Epidemic. Dearly Beloved, In May 2020 I experienced the Funeral on Zoom of Jill, the second wife of my brother in law. The service itself took place in New Zealand but was contributed to, on screen, by mourners in Paris, London, Cambridge, the East Coast and Mid West of the USA. The first question was how to dress. Wearing a suit prevents you looking on screen as if you are lounging around at home watching a football match rather than mourning someone's death and participating in the final goodbye to a beloved friend or relative. As I was changing into a dark suit, tie and white shirt.   I thought at first "why am I doing this, it's ridiculous?" But finally I realised that I was suitably dressed to enter what was still a formal and a religious space although it was only experienced on a computer screen. Jill was widely praised for her "style" in dress and attitude to life . And when her son said ...

6.  In Pursuit of Happiness and Virtue . Dearly Beloved, Aristotle (384 -322 BC) took the view that h appiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. He associated happiness with being virtuous. Aristotle's ideas stimulated the thought and writings on happiness of two very different characters. One was the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) and the other was the author Ayn Rand (1902-1985). Ayn Rand wrote: “My philosophy, in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his absolute.” This appears to echo Socrates except for the inversion that happiness is the moral purpose, it is not that pursuing a virtuous life based on morality leads to happiness. She also wrote a book entitled The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). A friend challenged me to read the two most important of her books, Atlas Shrugged...

5. On the Foundations of Religion. Dearly Beloved, One day, when attempting to play with my five year old grandson, he said to me, with only a slight hint of desperation, “It's a game; you have to pretend”. His words showed that he had reached that stage in human development which occurs at four to five years of age when we humans become aware for the first time that other people have minds and that their thoughts and emotions may differ from those which we ourselves posses. When we only know our own thoughts it is called first order awareness or first order intentionality. My grandson was showing a second order awareness because the implication of his words were “I know that you have to pretend in order that you may play this game”. He might even have been implying a complex third order of intentionality, i.e. that he was aware that I had the capacity to pretend and that I knew that he was aware that I had that capacity . Robin Dunbar was one of my fellow postgraduate...

4.   On the Negative Halo and its Impact. Dearly Beloved, For once the main political story of the month of March 2021 challenges the reality of our compassionate thoughts and actions. That story is the one about the Astrazenaca/Oxford vaccine against Covid-19. The problem seems to be the result of this vaccine being produced at cost rather than at a price that would enrich the company, as other vaccine producers are being enriched. The fact that this vaccine is easily transportable and cheap gives it huge potential to save the poorer people of the world from the virus and its production may be seen as a compassionate series of actions by a commercial company. The reception of this vaccine has been to say the least hostile and irrational. It has ignored or even misrepresented the basic data which shows the vaccine to be both safe and effective. I love psychological puzzles and the unexpected antagonism that has greeted the Astrazenaca vaccine has fascinated me. Surely the...

3. On Escaping Epidemics and Endemics Dearly Beloved In late 1976 I was in Oman with a group of local wildlife wardens searching for populations of a rare goat antelope known as the Arabian Tahr. We had to first visit the local Walie, the Sultan's representative in the area, for permission to go into the local mountains. We arrived at one village to find it totally deserted; not a soul could be found. At last, after half an hour, a man emerged clutching his head. There was, he said, no-one who was not suffering from malaria; so the Walie's office was closed. Thus it was another village we visited that week.This was not so much an epidemic as a seasonal endemic illness; every winter people were re-infected through mosquito bites, or they suffered spontaneous eruption of the plasmodium parasite into the blood stream from the liver in which it had lain dormant since the last infection. It has proved very difficult to counter because the plasmodium is a single celled organism, too ...

2.  A Meditation on The Bird's Nest Orchid.                                                                                                              Photo: Paul Munton  A Bird's Nest Orchid ,  Neottia nidus-avis,   growing in a very shaded woo d   Dearly Beloved Recently there has been huge progress in the biological sciences. One of the consequent revelations  concerns the evolution of cell organelles. There are chloroplasts – best known as the green  bodies in plant cells which produce oxygen and starch, help generate nitrogen and use it  produce most of  plants' amino acids. There are mitochondria found in animals, plants  and fungi, which, amongst other t...

1. On Thomas Tomkins, a Survivor in difficult times. Dearly Beloved The two things I have missed most since the start of the Covid 19 lock down are not  being able to sing at the Mass at St Clement's Church and the regular evensong at St John's  College's chapel just across the road from St Clement's. I had heard a lot of good notes until lock down was imposed in March 2020. It is strange to  hear music composed for evensongs four hundred and fifty years ago still being sung in  the liturgical context for which they were written and I have taken to looking up the  histories of some of these ancient composers after hearing their music. During the difficult time surrounding Brexit (my wife's family comes from France) and  Covid-19, I was especially comforted by the music and history of Thomas Tomkins (1572 to 1656). As with so many church musicians he was to the manor born: his  father a Vicar Choral or Song Man at St David's Cathedral. Tomkins appears...

The Manifold Letters. These letters were produced as part of a brilliant project managed by the Rev. Robert and Sarah Van de Weyer. During the Covid-19 pandemic, letters were written every day for two and a half years by both ordained and lay members of the congregation of St Clement's Church in Cambridge (England) and distributed to others both in the congregation and people outwith St Clement's as Dearly Beloved letters. (DB letters). They dealt with manifold issues including psychological survival during the pandemic, personal stories and experiences of life, philosophy and theology, music, secular and church politics, the mysteries of the Christian faith and the exigencies of the pursuit of a Christian life. The Rt Rev. Rowan Williams was a contributor for six months whilst he worshiped and officiated at the St Clement's during his last months as Master of Magdalene College, just a stone's throw from St Clement's. He later published his letters as a book entitle...