The Vicar’s Letter - January 2012

Dear Friends,
The first vicar I worked with used to have a discipline of changing the newspaper he took during Lent, so as to read things from a point of view less congenial to him than he normally did. As he was a committed socialist, this tended to mean that he changed to the Telegraph for six weeks, which had the added advantage of putting him in touch with the majority of his parishioners’ preferred reading matter, serving as he did in a very ‘true blue’ area of suburban Surrey.
These days, we may not rely so much on the print media to give us the news and comment we’re interested in – there are so many other channels of information available. Perhaps we don’t live in such a bubble of a fixed outlook, relying on our daily paper to cater comprehensively to our interests, whilst also confirming us in our prejudices. Or do we? I’m sure we’ve all heard of the internet news services which can be customised to give subscribers only the kind of news that interests them particularly, and we know there has been some real anxiety about the falling amount of interest in general news services on the BBC, etc. – many people preferring to choose among the plethora of available channels to feed themselves on a diet of constant entertainment. As a society, are we better informed than people were a generation ago? As individuals, are our minds regularly prised open to consider issues and points of view which are outside our ‘comfort zone’? Or has the news we receive itself been bowdlerised and trivialised, so that it is, in itself, merely a species of entertainment? These are serious issues, which should concern us all, in conjunction with the kind of questions about the press which the Leveson Inquiry is currently looking into.
As Christians, we follow a Master who looked at the world from a slant very different from that of his contemporaries. He frequently took people ‘outside their comfort zone’, and challenged their assumptions and prejudices. Like my first vicar, whose memory I revere, it would be no bad Lenten discipline for each of us to do something which might help us look at the world from a different angle than we usually do. If we achieve nothing else, we might at least become informed about things of which we’d otherwise remain ignorant, and understand better how other people feel. Our prayer and our actions might be affected accordingly.
Among the resources we have easily available to us are the information and viewpoints which come to us from the world church – brothers and sisters in Christ seeing things from different places and other perspectives. The issues which our ‘normal’ media don’t focus on, or move on from swiftly in their restless quest for fresh news, can be brought to us vividly if we read about the life of the church in other countries – the challenges it faces, the hands-on efforts it’s making to transform the lives of people and communities, whether they’re facing natural disaster, political corruption, economic injustice, or religious persecution. They’re all there for us to read and pray about, without too much effort. In the Narthex of St Mark’s we have a magazine rack on which there’s lots of material from various agencies and churches to give us food for thought. It concerns me that I rarely see anyone picking up a magazine and reading it (and I get a good view of the Narthex and what people do there from my kitchen window!). I would like to invite everyone, whether regular churchgoers, or those who just drop into St Mark’s now and then, not only to read those magazines in the Narthex, but to take them home if that’s easier - far better that one or two of them should ‘disappear’ because someone forgets to bring them back, than that they should languish unread for months on the rack.
This year, as you’ll see elsewhere in Seek, we’re not inviting people to study a particular book or course for Lent – instead, we’ve inviting you to a series of talks given on Wednesday evenings by distinguished speakers on themes from the Apostles’ Creed. You will find more details on page 12. This is in response to a suggestion from one of our ‘T’ groups in the summer. But it leaves each one of us, individually, to answer the question, ‘What am I going to read for Lent?’ You might like to try a special book, of which many are available (try the CLC bookshop on Regent Street); you might like to change your daily paper; or you might like to make a discipline of reading some of what we have available for free in the Narthex. It’s up to you!
Your local vicar,

Maggie Guite