We publish a Parish Magazine 4 times a year and in each Magazine there is a letter from Jonathan Smith, the Vicar at St John's. Here is the Harvest 205 letter:
The appalling bombings and near bombings in London during the month of July (please God by the time you read this there won't have been any more terrible incidents like that) have made us pull up short and ask some very serious questions about the way we order our society and national life. The fact that the perpetrators were young British men seeking, quite indiscriminately, to murder and maim their fellow citizens is deeply shocking. For us, in Harpenden, knowing that those rucksacks with their deadly contents passed along the railway line which runs through our town, brings the whole dreadful episode that much closer. The politicians of every hue and opinion have their analyses and prescriptions at the ready. It seems to me that there is a fine and delicate line to be drawn between maintaining the security of our citizens and surrendering our hard won civil liberties. I do not envy the government in their task.
Naturally, religion has come in for a fair amount of criticism as well. If religious faith led those young men to commit such an atrocity then it is a faith which has nothing at all to do with the God whom I recognise as a God of love. That which has the potential for great good has also within it the potential for great harm. That is a truth which adherents of all faiths and philosophies should constantly have at the fore front of their minds.
This year sees the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In that conflict there was great violence and suffering and the pacifists might argue that such cannot be justified. I believe that there is a moral case for using minimal force to contend with evil. I have been particularly struck by the images on television of the prisoners of war in the camps in the Far East. Their emaciated, pitiful bodies cry to heaven for pity as do the starving people in the European concentration camps. I was privileged to lead a short act of worship at a VJ Day Remembrance at Harpenden War Memorial back in August in the presence of members of the Burma Star Association. On Remembrance Day in November we shall, as we do year by year, hold an Act of Remembrance during our main Sunday Eucharist at St John's. Remembering is so important, for it is when we forget the atrocities of the past that they can easily spring up again in new guises.
Not a day goes by when I do not pray for the peace of the world. Perhaps experience might tempt one to deduce that such a prayer is futile wishful thinking and from a human point of view that is perhaps a reasonable deduction. But I pray to a God who can change human hearts from hatred to acceptance to reconciliation and with whom nothing is impossible.
