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Rt Rev Graham James |
Good morning.
St Paul’s Cathedral remains closed. Yesterday the usual two to three thousand worshippers had to go elsewhere. The cathedral authorities say the scale of the protest camp and the large numbers who come to St Paul’s create serious risks and dangers for both. While there is plenty of cynicism about our health and safety culture, the number of protestors and even larger number of worshippers and tourists may not co-exist easily in a small area. The Dean of St Paul’s has said there’s something profound about people defending the poor and campaigning against inequalities in front of a holy place. The cathedral clergy and the protestors may be more united than they appear but there’s more than one use for limited space.
All this illustrates the perennial difficulties of human beings sharing the same pieces of land in our world. It can be sheer numbers which create problems. More often it’s squabbles over whose land it is. While the longest running land dispute may be found in the Middle East, there are plenty of small examples in every locality. Quarrels between neighbours over small strips of land erupt when a fence is erected a foot or two out of place.
This weekend the future of Libya has been in all our minds. Without the unifying hatred of Colonel Gaddafi, will the different groups which have brought about his downfall hold together? Will they maintain loyalty to Libya as a single land? There’s certainly no lack of physical space. But there’s another sort of room the Libyan people will have to make for each other. Elections are promised within eight months. In any sort of democratic system the electorate’s general loyalty to the nation has got to be matched by room in its mind to allow a government to function which many voters may not favour. The concept of a loyal opposition is a sophisticated but essential one. Democracy requires both a loyalty to common land but an even greater loyalty to the toleration of difference.
Some of the critics of the St Paul’s closure have invoked Jesus entering the temple in Jerusalem and turning over the tables of the money changers as an ally in their cause. Jesus doesn’t seem to have regarded the profit motive as sacred. But something even more fundamental was at stake. He’s recorded as quoting Isaiah “my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations”. The bankers and traders seem to have occupied the one part of the temple reserved for the Gentiles. They didn’t give them space. But the real problem may have been that that they didn’t have room in their minds for those who were different from them. That’s still a challenge in Libya, London, everywhere.