The cat seemed normal – except that it kept grinning. After a curious conversation with Alice it disappeared – slowly by stages until only the grin was left. ‘It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life.’ So much for Alice’s encounter with the Cheshire Cat.
The disappearing cat is not all that unusual. After the lifetime of change we have gone through, our society has lost everything but the grin. From a way of life that was settled, manageable, ordered we belong to a civilisation that still has the name of a style that has been blown away. So much for Christian England.
It used to be the case that we embarked on a career in our youth and stayed in it until we retired. A girl would get a job in a bank and go on doing the job all her life. Now people retrain and move to other work maybe several times in life. Football clubs used to belong in the area where their supporters lived. Now teams are international. The larger picture has similar features. The default position for UK subjects was the Christian one. Now we have a level playing field for all the religions.
The Cheshire Cat prefigured this development. The animal itself disappeared but the identifying feature, the grin, remained. Our English body corporate has vanished or turned into something entirely different but the public appearance remains the same. We have the trappings – many of them feudal – that belong to the past: titles (dukes, earls, viscounts etc.) – and institutions that are very different from what those institutions used to be.
It’s not that people have rejected the Christian faith. It is that people and the Christian faith have drifted apart. The notion of a Creator, let alone a Redeemer, has dimmed. The traces that are left – cathedral funerals for celebrities, references to prayer in times of grief or anxiety, – are items that we have not managed to replace with anything else.
The presence of the grin is all very well but the body of the cat is of more consequence. Our task today is to reinstate the credibility of a Creator. It may have more than enough credibility for us. But we have to think of others. And the reminder during the last few months of our own fragility and vulnerability is making us think seriously about how far that credibility goes with our neighbours as well as with ourselves.
ALL, REPEAT ALL, WELCOME
St John’s, the parish church of Chester, makes it clear that everybody is welcome. Whether we sing like Andrea Bocelli ‘or like the Rector who can’t carry a note in a bucket’ or are over 60 but not grown up, and, of course, tree-huggers and junk-food eaters. You get the idea? The Rector, David Chesters, wants you to know you’re welcome.
If you have a comment on this post please send an email to Revd John King at johnc.king@talktalk.net Edited extracts may be published. To forward this to a friend click on the chain icon below.