Unlike my admirable successor as leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, I do believe in God. But not much in churches. I heard too much hate from them in my Northern Ireland youth.
But Christmas is the exception and begins for me at midnight on Christmas eve in our village church known locally as the “the jewel of Somerset”. I love its honey stone light and its slender pillars and its perfect proportions and its cleanly latticed roof, just high enough to give the impression of something separated, almost celestial above us. And I love the company of my neighbours and friends lustily celebrating the magic, and gently steaming from the moisture of the night, like cattle in the manger.
“Peace on earth goodwill towards all men” we enthusiastically sing – even though there is little enough of it around at the moment. Perhaps we forget that this is not so much a carol as a commandment – and by the way it is the supreme commandment of all the great Abrahamic religions who have, for a thousand years and more slaughtered each other in the name of a common God – and are at it still. I once heard that great Arab, King Hussein speaking at the funeral of that great man of Israel, Yitzak Rabin, begin his speech, a single Muslim amongst ten thousand Jews, with the words “Our father, Abraham…”.
Our problems lie, not with Muslims – but with fanatics and they are not to be found just in the religions to our East. You can (or could until the recent miracle of Irish reconciliation) find them aplenty in the pulpits of Northern Ireland and in the little clapperboard churches of middle America, too. My old Dad used to say (quoting, he claimed, the Koran – though I have never found it) “There is one God, but many ways to him”. And it is true – we Christians have far, far more in common with Islam and Judaism, than separates us from them.
Here is another version of the nativity story. “When Mary withdrew from her family to an Easterly place, thus did she seclude herself from them, where upon we sent to her Our Spirit….that I may give you a pure son…Peace be the day I was born and the day I die and the day I am resurrected”. Recognise it ? well our Muslim readers will, for it is the story of the birth of Jesus as told in the Holy Koran, where you will also find all the great stories of the Old Testament, only one chapter dedicated to a woman – Mary the mother of Jesus and in which we are instructed that Jesus was the Messiah, was crucified and rose again. Not many Christians know that. Just as not many of my neighbours on Christmas eve would have recognised that the wonderful light lines of our quintessentially English church nave and the gothic arches which line it, were originally inspired by the Muslim architecture which the crusaders found in the great Mosques of the East and brought back home with them in the middle ages.
The truth is that, in our increasingly interdependent world, our peace rests on us building on similarities, not exaggerating differences. What to that great poet and preacher John Donne was a moral precept “send not to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” is for us, a strategy for survival. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore put it like this:
“We are all the more one, because we are many
For we have left an ample space for love in the gap where we were sundered
Our unlikeness shines with the radiance of a common creation
Like mountain peaks in the morning sun”
“Ah!” you may say “but that’s about morality. Which has nothing to do with the hard realities of the world and the tough choices of politics”.
Not so. My great Liberal predecessor, William Gladstone was elected Prime Minister in a General Election at a time of war – a British war in Afghanistan as it happens – with these words:
“…remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can ever be your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilization, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope.”
Indeed.