The minute’s silence

As we prepared for our Challenge Walk at Pusey in Wiltshire, we were asked to stand for a minute of silence to remember the victims of the Manchester bombing of 22 May. The talking stopped. The drinking of coffee stopped. People stood with heads bowed, almost motionless. Only after a word from the organiser of the walk did the hall, which was our venue and starting point for the walk, come to life again.

It was a significant moment for me because it brought home what a crime victim had said in an interview some weeks before. I can remember nothing about the interview other than the person’s description of how they felt afterwards. It gave me a very clear impression of what such an experience must be like. “It’s as though you are frozen in time. Life stops from that moment on” (or words to that effect).

Frozen in time. Life stops. It is not so much as though you were caught in a photographic freeze frame. You still go through the routine of the day, each and every day. But that part of your life which was invested in the person that died has come to a halt. You will not wave them off to school or to their place of work the next working day. You will not watch them develop as people and personalities. You will not see how they are shaped by the various landmarks that occur in life. All that is placed on hold, never to resume – not in this life, at any rate.

Those involved in bereavement counselling will tell you that mourning, even though it goes on long after a person’s friends think they should have “got over it by now”, is in fact quite reasonable and natural. It only becomes toxic when the person, as one of my tutors put it, “gets stuck somewhere”. Somehow the person fails to move through the recognised stages of mourning to a point of acceptance. Queen Victoria never stopped being dressed in mourning after the death of Prince Albert. She never allowed any change in the rooms they had shared together – they stayed as monuments to the past. She, and in some ways her family and court and the whole nation and empire, suffered as a result.

But, certainly in the case of a bombing, who can you blame for grieving victims being frozen in time? Surely not them. It is, purely and simply, the bombers and their accomplices.

What can free us from being frozen in time, functioning like that word from the walk organiser which ended the minute’s silence? The Lord of time and eternity – Christ Himself. He came announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Before then, when the angel announced to His mother Mary that she would give birth to Him, these were the angel’s words:

“… you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:31-33 ESV).

Time may or may not have stopped for you. But you can come over to One in whose presence time will no longer matter.

Crown Him the Lord of years,

the potentate of time,

creator of the rolling spheres,

ineffably sublime!

All hail, Redeemer, hail!

For Thou hast died for me:

Thy praise shall never, never fail

throughout eternity.

Matthew Bridges, 1800-94 and Godfrey Thring, 1823-1903

The Curate’s Egg

It is always satisfying to find out exactly where a popular saying comes from. Often we are not sure, but in the case of this one we can be precise: “It’s like the curate’s egg - good in parts”.

Have you come across that expression? It is gradually fading from use, but was much repeated at one time. It came into being with the above cartoon from Punch magazine way back at the tail end of the 19th century.

A bishop has invited a lowly curate from one of the parishes in his diocese to tea. The curate is anxious to please. If he proves himself to be socially well adjusted - a good guest, in other words - the bishop may give him preferment in the future.

Problems arise almost immediately when the curate cuts through the shell of the egg. An objectionable sulphurous smell wafts across the room. The curate’s egg happens to have gone bad! The curate is terrified of doing the wrong thing. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones,” comments the bishop. “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you!” the flustered junior cleric replies in haste. “Parts of it are excellent!”

Audiences were still chuckling at this comical reply decades after the cartoon was first published. Indeed, the Curate’s Egg became proverbial in English usage. Perhaps we would be less comfortable about it if we realised what it says about our society to this very day.

A conference speaker mentioned the saying and mused, 

“How would the apostle Paul have reacted? He wouldn’t have said the egg was 'good in parts'. He would have exclaimed straight out that it was a rotten one!”

Why did the speaker come to that conclusion? Because Paul was never mealy-mouthed. He called a spade a spade, especially where the ills of the sick and sinful society around him were concerned. In 1 Corinthians chapter 6 he retorts,

“... do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” (ESV)

Paul did not express himself that way because he enjoyed condemning people. His aim was to warn. It was also to encourage those new Christians who had those things in their background in the pagan society where they lived. For that reason he went on,

“And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

You may agree or disagree about the various groups mentioned above needing to be washed clean spiritually in order to be right with God. But there is no doubting the fact that today’s society does not encourage us to be forthright. It conditions us to avoid making reference to “rotten eggs”. It would instead urge us to call them “good in parts”.

And all the while, the foul smell that envelops the genteel dining table makes its own clear statement.