Wisbech Grammar School Prize Giving, 2011
Speech given by the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, the Bishop of Ely on Friday 21st October 2011
My niece has attended a creative writing class for a few years now. When she was nine she was asked to write a poem about happiness. She wrote that she was happiest shopping in Harrods. She then sent the poem to the proprietor, Mohammed Al-Fayed, listing the girlie items which pleased her most. After a short delay, a liveried person arrived at the door with a parcel full of the itemised goodies and a personal invitation to tea with Mr Al-Fayed. You will not be surprised that my niece wishes to be famous. I asked her whether she wanted to be famous for some achievement. No, being famous for anything will do, like a Big Brother housemate. UGH! Being made happy by fings and fame seems alright at first; but I want to suggest another way.
Another woman in my life is my late teenage goddaughter, Alice. I do not pretend to understand youth fashion, but she pretends to be a CHAV. I say pretends because if the term stands for ‘council house and violent’ she is fighting against the reality of being a vicar’s daughter in leafy Dorset. She tells me that I could be a chav, too, because of all de bling, man, innit…
More usefully, Alice has introduced me to some new music. It is not very chavv-ish because it is by Natasha Bedingfield. Have any of you heard of her? The album which I was persuaded to buy is Unwritten. The title song is very catchy indeed. It is a young person like all of you writing and singing about identity; about becoming the adult person you are meant to become. It is a long time since I was a teenager or young adult, so I will not presume to know what it is like for you as you work out what life is about. As the lyric of Unwritten says, “Feel the rain on your skin./ No one else can feel it for you./ Only you can let it in.”
Nonetheless, sometimes – no matter what age we are – we cannot always find the right language to describe who we are and how we feel. It really can feel like we are an unwritten page, waiting for a script to be developed. And we cannot do this on our own. The Bible describes God as a potter and human beings as his beautiful creation out of unpromising clay. Perhaps we can also think of God as being like our favourite novelist who has become so involved in his creation that the characters of the book discover that they have been given the freedom to change the story and he and they find that he becomes a character in the narrative himself.
A couple of years ago there was an experiment by some Christians in London who offered passers-by in the street a friendly hug without strings. One might have predicted that the embarrassed and stiff-upper-lip people of Britain would have stolen past without responding. In fact, 70% of people said, “Yes, please”. Of course, we should never hug people unless invited or unless it is to cuddle a member of our close family. But it is a sign not only of our love but of our paying attention. If Granny lives alone now, we know that a hug is very precious. Yet maybe we have to notice that Father needs at least a punch on the arm. I don’t know what the equivalent for girls is, but I seem to remember that for boys affection has to masquerade as controlled violence. Whatever the appropriate sign of affection, we need to let our friends know that we are paying real attention to what is going on in their lives.
I have read your Riverline magazine for 2011. I was very struck by a poem by James Thompson then in 2F called, “Love is…” James poem says that “You cannot go and disregard love… You need to grasp it and never let go”. This is a powerful piece of verse which goes to the heart of our life as human beings wanting to flourish. We all know what the consequences are when we do disregard love. Like Alice Wong and Polly Rosier of L6K, I have visited Auschwitz in Poland, not far from Cracow. It must have been very inspiring to meet Kitty, a survivor of the Camp. What was most harrowing for me was seeing great piles of suitcases of thousands of people who would never travel anywhere except to death. The camp is a very strange place, around which birds really do not sing. As a normally talkative person, I was struck dumb by the horror of what people can do to other human beings when they have, in James’s words, disregarded love. I was particularly moved when I visited the punishment cells where Christians as well as Jews were held. In the centre of a wall was a cross scratched into the plaster by a thumb nail, the sign of the suffering of Jesus, whom Christians know as God’s Son. Eli Weisel, the distinguished Jewish thinker, was asked where was God in Auschwitz. He told a story of a little boy who was executed for stealing a potato by being hung on the barbed wire. Jewish workers walked past this horrific spectacle and one asked, “Where is God?”. Another answered, “See, he is twitching on the wire”. This week we are very conscious that terrible suffering in Libya may be coming to an end after the final and violent removal of Colonel Gaddafi after more than forty years harming his own people and exporting suffering elsewhere.
The barbarism of Fascism or any totalitarian regime is partly comes about through a false sense of the past. The Nazis manufactured a past for the German people and the peoples in surrounding countries to justify their actions. One of things which is wonderful about this forward – looking community is that you know where you have come from. I enjoyed looking at the photographs from the ‘lost’ album of 1894 revealing how the Grammar School was under Mr Poyser. It all looks so different now, but there are living links with those days. What is really important is that you understand the continuities of values and aspiration from those days so that the school knows itself and ventures into the future with depth and confidence.
This is all about emotional intelligence. Prize Giving celebrates the application of cerebral intelligence as we make sense of science, history and literature. We use intelligence to be strategic about sport and making teams work. In addition, we need the intelligence which is also rewarded at any Prize Giving, which is the emotional intelligence behind making a school house into a mixed age community where people pull together in friendship and mutual responsibility. It is this ability to join up our thinking and our feeling which makes us whole human beings.
This kind of wisdom which connects the heart and the head is the pearl beyond priced which is worth everything we might desire. Keeping them in separate compartments is what leads to war and to the loss of the battle for true friendship, which is putting yourself in the shoes of a friend and anticipating how you can make life happier for them, even without a parcel from Harrods.
When I left school as the head boy so long ago, the Headmaster was not complimentary. He told me that I would probably end up as a helper of some kind. I hope that I am. I pray that you all might be, too - helping others to be happy by writing their page and expecting them to help you write yours. We are all aware of celebrities who have risen without trace. Fame may come to some of you – who knows – but we pray that it will be for some real achievement which has changed the world for the human good. Unwritten ends, “Reaching for something in the distance, so close you can almost taste it.” So, taste and see that the Lord is good. God will help you in all your endeavours.