In the days following the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales two issues struck me as particularly interesting. First is the issue of responsibility. The media treated us to a spectacular display of passing the buck. Everybody blamed someone else. It was the paparazzi’s fault! No, it was the driver’s! It was all down to Camilla or Charles or the Queen or the SAS! It was the newspaper editors’ fault for paying vast sums for an endless stream of paparazzi pictures! No, it was the public’s fault for wanting them!
Passing the buck is almost a national pastime. The sense of responsibility has slipped away from our culture. President Truman kept a sign on his desk saying, ‘The buck stops here’. It’s now more a matter of what poor mug gets landed with something when the music stops. To be more precise, it’s the idea of my personal responsibility that has gone, not responsibility in general. Someone is responsible – but never me.
Our culture has not just lost the sense of personal responsibility but also respect for authority. There is a connection. Authority always carries responsibility. Those in authority have a duty of care to those under them. Part of that duty of care means accepting responsibility when something goes wrong – the ones under authority need to be confident that those over them can be trusted. It affects everyone: if I don’t respect those in authority, why should I own up when I’ve done something wrong?
What’s the root cause of all this? The answer is complex but part of it lies with us, the church. The church in Britain has lost confidence in the authority of God speaking through his Word. Even evangelicals are too often ashamed of its uncompromising stance on a number of issues. Yes, our message is hugely unpopular but we have been given a responsibility: to be salt and light, helping to prevent decay in our society and clearly showing the authority of God at work in our lives.
The second issue is how people handle grief. Diana’s death resulted in a vast and ‘unprecedented’ (the favourite word on TV) outpouring of emotion. Millions were apparently grieving for someone they didn’t know yet whom they felt was a part of their lives. But this wasn’t genuine grief. The real thing is much more intense – as some of us know all too well. People were shocked and experienced a real sense of loss. They struggled to know what to do with those emotions.
What does it mean when people leave millions of flowers – not to mention champagne and teddy bears – outside Kensington Palace and on the steps of almost every town hall? What made people send flowers by Interflora and not even go themselves? Why did people queue for hours to sign books of condolence? It was a desperate attempt to express deeply felt emotions in a society where that can be very hard.
It clearly shows the extent of the spiritual need in Britain. Some people looked to God for comfort – though we might have all kinds of questions about their idea of God. Many were just looking to others. They were longing for a sense of community that crosses class and race boundaries and that surfaces at times of crisis. That seems like a very unreligious response. It is. But it also shows the depth of spiritual need. There is something in us that needs to connect with something beyond us. Some people can’t look beyond a mass of other people but it’s a glimmer of a desire for God that’s innate in humans made in the image of God. Society has turned its back on God, and no-one knows where else to look for help and comfort. In a society that has lost its Christian perspective on life and in which image counts for everything, Diana was a goddess – beautiful, glamorous, compassionate, rejected by the establishment. What a dreadful loss.
In Ezekiel 9, the women of Jerusalem sat by the temple gates weeping for Tammuz. Tammuz, in the Babylonian myths, was a shepherd who married a goddess and died. A cult of sentimentality surrounded him. The women of Jerusalem should not have been weeping for him but for the dire spiritual mess their nation was in. Should we not be grieving over the spiritual state of our country we’ve seen so graphically illustrated?
These posts may be related:
- Reflections on Movie Nazis Mike Hertenstein, ‘Movie Nazis & After the Truth‘, Filmwell, 28 April 2009 Mike Hertenstein writes a very interesting piece about ‘Movie Nazis’ over at Filmwell. Primarily it’s a piece...
