Thursday 29 March 2007

In your face or in your eye


Sin and David Hicks!
If we need any more proof that the Hicks business is essentially about promoting a political agenda then the next phase in the process should convince us. Having pleaded guilty he is now required to state exactly what he is pleading guilty to!!!
Now doesn't that seem cart before the horse-ish. Surely if he was charged and invited to make a plea then the prosecutors should have at least felt that they there were clear what they were charging him with. Why then does the subject of the charge have to tell them what he did in detail?
It would seem that the answer to that must be that Hicks is the victim of a kite-flying exercise (which he was never going to win) and having once admitted that the kite does indeed fly, has to now tell the powers-that-be just why that might be so.
For what it's worth, I (and I suspect most other people) think that Hicks is indeed guilty of something relatively minor. It is easy to demonise him and paint him as second-only to Osama Bin Laden himself, but he is clearly not that.
He is not guilty so much of being 'idealistic', as being a fool who got caught up in some Boy's Own Adventure which turned out to be a whole lot more serious than he realised. By then it was too late.
He has become the pawn of powerful men's ambitions. The shallowness of these ambitions is exposed day by day. Oh dear dear!
But human beings are flawed....(here come a segue..."A what?" I hear you ask, seehere) Yesterday I had quite a strange conversation with one of my good lay people. She was complaining about Easter last year.
Apparently she took exception to the fact that it "was too much about sin". Now my radar always explodes in these sort of circumstances...usually a person thinking something is "too much about sin" is experiencing a conviction of the Holy Spirit about something in their own life. Maybe I rely too much on my own experience.
I could not believe that our lovely Easter service with an opportunity to recommit oneself to the Christian way, and the declaration of God's forgiveness accompanied with the splashing of water....maybe I love splashing water too much....was actually perceived as something negative.
This parishioner seemed to be inviting me to strip the Easter period of its "negative overtones". A man was crucified for heavensakes!!!


I know on one level what she was saying, but do we become so wishy washy that we don't want to explore anything of depth any more.
Segue 2...one two three....I don't want to suggest Hicks is an angel...I do want him to deal with his law-breaking, but he is being made a scapegoat for much more than that.
I do not want to suggest that he is Christ like. But the Crucified Man was a scapegoat too.
There will be sin this Easter. It will be forgiven. As it is every year, every day, every time we come ... we need to be a bit more robust, honest and open.

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