18 January 2010 No Comment

That was the longest time I can ever remember of continual snow coverage in Britain ever (I am just toying with that as an album cover should I ever learn to play the guitar well, have any talent, be offered a lot of money to sign for a major label and appear, modestly, on chat shows). I loved it. I loved how people spoke to each other; unlikely people and how people helped each other out.

Of course speaking to each other about the weather is a staple of the British way of conversation. So for us, quite literally, snow is manna (or at least….erm… snow) from heaven.

Last week a notice went out in the school newsletter if anyone could help with clearing the drive. It was, to use the lexicon of local radio, a ’skating rink’ (if a skating rink was uneven, covered in frozen mud, with tarmac showing through and with loose slush). So 10 parents showed up.

Now here is the strange thing- 8 had faith connections: active members of churches, occasional attenders etc. Wherever I have been in Britain, the percentage of people involved in voluntary organisations/ community aid/charity etc who have an active faith or a faith connection has been disproportionate to their percentage of the general population.

I nearly understood that last sentence….depending on stats, around 8% attend a church on a regular basis and perhaps another 15-20% have some kind of connection. On my wanderings around Britain, I reckon around a third of all people involved in charity etc are active church goers and around three quarters have a loose faith connection.

My experience is not representative, but I remember an article in the Guardian- perhaps the most hostile of British papers to faith- from 12/09/05 by Roy Hattersley, himself an athiest, called ‘Faith does breed charity’.

He is talking about places and situations in the world that are far more in need than this corner of wealthy middle England, but this article made me think.

Here are two extracts:-

‘….Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and – probably most difficult of all – argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.

The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand…..

….The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army’.