Author: admin

I confess I was troubled by Theresa May's Party pleasing speech at the Tory Party Conference last Autumn. Amongst the more concerning statements was her contention that to be a citizen of the world was to be a citizen of nowhere. In my view this is ignorance verging on arrogance, and privileges narrowness over breadth in matters of personal, social and national identities.

First, that which every human being holds in common is humanity, not nationality and not even citizenship. Our common humanity is the starting point for understanding togetherness and otherness, sameness and difference. Yes indeed, as human beings our personal and national histories, our cultural formation, social and economic context and experience, life opportunities and life limitations, create rich and at times confusing and colliding diversities. But basic to human sociality, and indeed fundamental to human flourishing, is that recognition of, respect for, and concern to protect and enhance, our common humanity.

Only then am I prepared to think of national identity in a globalised world, social identity in a multicultural and pluralist culture, and personal identity formed and developed in a changing continuity within the overall context of my life. So when the Prime Minister tells me I cannot be a citizen of the world, that to claim such makes me a citizern of nowhere, she is wrong. What is more her own say so does not, thankfully, deprive anyone of their self-identity of belonging to this richly textured, multi-cultural diversity we call the world.

There is therefore some irony in the same Prime Minister, a few months later, insisting Britain wishes to be global, to be a global trader, enaged in trade and commerical relationships on a worldwide scale, but only so far as it furthers our nation's interests. Well, yes, trade is conducted for the very purposes of furthering a nation's interests. But usually to the mutual benefit of trading partners, and within the recognised protocols of treaties and agreements, which preserve the principles of fairness, mutual concessions and accepting that in those compromises there may be pluses and minuses, but overall a relationship that benefits all particpants.

But the narrow minded pursuit of international relations on primarily economic grounds is itself problematic. What about being a net contributor to the common good of the world, and often at our own expense? And that expense borne willingly in order to underwrite our commitment to those other people and peoples beyond our own increasingly grudging borders? Four brief points sharpen this question.

• The well known hostility of the Prime Minister to the European Convention on Human Rights is a threat to an institution and instrument that goes to the very heart of what we believe about citizenship, power and humanity in its vulnerability to abuse of that power. This negativity towards the European Convention is darkened by an equal ambivalence towards the European Court of Justice.
• Second, we have a political future post Brexit that is heading towards tighter borders, intolerance of immigrant people, economic reconfiguration around self-interest and significantly distanced international relations, all of which make any claim that our country is interested in global relations at best self-serving, and at worst deluded. 
• Third, the Prime Minister's insistence that she alone has the right to trigger the Brexit clause would mean that my own current status as a citizen of the European Community, can be rescinded on the say so of a Prime Minister not elected as such by General Election, without recourse to the sovereignty of Parliament, and as an act which is brought about by her own Party's inner enmities which brought about the Referendum in the first place.
• Fourth, at a time when the United States is going through a political reinvention with similar strains of isolationism, radically self-interested economics, driving forces of anti-immigration and right wing resurgence, and with overtures of encouragement to the UK to be and do the same, there is a real threat to the international political order such as has not been felt since the end of the Second World War.

So when I am told, without discussion, and from someone claiming a Christian heritage, that I cannot be a citizen of the world, that global citizenship is effectively a dangerous nonsense, I hear the drums of nationalism and exclusivism, the clang of claimed privilege and unself-critical pride, and the ignorance and arrogance of someone whose personal ambitions are made embarassingly naked. Ignorance, in the sense of lack of knowledge of what it sounds like, looks like and feels like, to have your Prime Minister tell you what you are and what you are not. Arrogance in the sense that those statements that disenfranchise and denigrate those with a global worldview are not the remit of any democratically elected leader in a country. No leader has the right to unilaterally disqualify my view of the world in favour of a narrow, exclusivist, self-interested view of our own country's place in the world.

My own understanding of a Christian view of the world is neither rose tinted nor shadowed by fear. The Christian church is trans-national, world embracing in its mission, open to sharing the good news of the Kingdom of God with every language, tribe, people and nation, made up of those who in following Jesus are ministers of reconciliation, peacemakers, members of a Kingdom of justice, joy and peace, teachers and embodiments of all that Jesus taught and commanded. Such a position does not allow me the "crabb'd and confined" view of the world currently being marketed as our future.

This is the first of several posts on the story of Martha and Mary. Regular readers here will know my interest in this story, with its exegetical history as a contrast between the contemplative and the activist, prayer and social justice, or loving with the heart as opposed to religion of good works. None of which do justice to the rich texture of this brief, potent biblical scene of loving and serving Jesus.

For some time I've been working on a study of Luke 10.38-42, the passage which tells the story. The contrast between Mary seated at Jesus' feet, listening to his every word, and Martha worked off her feet in the kitchen seems straightforward enough. Jesus confirms the reader's first if rather hasty assumptions and instincts. Mary is the one who gives Jesus his proper place and who has the right demeanour towards him; Martha is so busy doing the hospitality duties that she misses the opportunity to spend time with Jesus. Read the passage, and hear the background clattering of the dishes and the softer murmur of two people talking; and imagine the inner turmoil of Martha and the inner focus of Mary; the anxious worry of the one and the unconcerned calm of the other. 

But is that a fair reading of the text, and does it do justice to the emotional and relational undercurrents that swirl beneath this story? Reading a lot of the commentaries of the past 50 years, many writers draw the same contrast between Mary who got it right and Martha who got it wrong. John Nolland is steeped in the study of the Gospels compares “Martha who tells Jesus what he must say, and Mary who listens to what Jesus wishes to say.”

But there is a minority report amongst modern exegetes of this story. One of the questions to be asked is about the tone and motivation of Jesus words to Martha. There is no uncertainty about Martha's tone and words; she is complaining to Jesus about Mary skiving while Martha is doing all the work. But Jesus' words to Martha are worth weighing for their tone and intention. It's easily missed that Jesus words of address use Martha's name twice. This is an idiom of persuasion, an affectionate and defusing of the anxiety and upset Martha is feeling; the double name is a reassurance that Martha is heard, noticed, and understood.

Only after that gentle re-focusing of a flustered friend, does Jesus then speak of Martha's complaint and point to Mary as someone who better understands the priorities of welcoming Jesus. The food and comfort are important, but his words are of first importance. Serving Jesus is indeed the heart of discipleship, but hearing and loving Jesus is what makes that service even possible. All of this, says Jesus, is the better part, the primary thing, the priority. Disciples are called to hear the word and do it, in that order.

While studying the biblical text, I also spent time studying a number of paintings of this biblical scene. Some are unsparing of Martha and take the traditional line of prayerful Mary and practical Martha, with Mary's spirituality preferred to Martha's practicality. But some portrayals offer other persepctives, and they aren't entirely negative about Martha and affirming of Mary. Somewhere in the reading and interpreting of this story some writers and artists have sensed the danger of pushing Mary the contemplative so far that she displaces and devalues Martha's work of hospitality, welcome and care for others. And that contrast, at times becoming a dichotomy, points to the pendulum swings in how some churches emphasise the spiritual prayerful activities of worship and devotion, and others focus on the importance of justice, hospitality, care for the poor and social activism on behalf of the vulnerable. There is a built in either/or in these attitudes that I'm not sure Jesus' words mean, or that Luke's story intended.

Have a look at the Vermeer painting (if you are in Edinburgh you can see the original at the National Galleries). What is Jesus demeanour and body language? What is Jesus' tone, attitude towards Martha? That loaf of bread, central in the painting along with Jesus hand? This doesn't look like someone getting a row for spending time baking when she could have been doing something more worthwhile. The idea that Jesus would be unappreciative of bread goes against the entire Gospel tradition from his refusal to magic bread rather than trust God, to his feeding the multitude, his inclusion of a loaf at the centre of the Lord's prayer, his claim "I am the bread of life", all the way to the night he took bread and broke it in Eucharist. Vermeer has chosen an image that places Martha's work at the centre of the table. And both women are looking at, and paying attention to Jesus. If Martha is in the act of complaining, Jesus' relaxed and laid back body language couldn't be further from the anger and scolding some commentators have heard in Jesus words to her.

Next time, a couple of modern paintings and the perspectives they take in portraying two strong women, each in their own way, welcoming Jesus.

There is great skill in taking a good photograph. And to do it right you need a good camera and probably a lot of add on lenses, filters and a willingness to be inconvenienced, patient and sometimes just downright thrawn.

I have several friends who are very, very good photographers. I know what goes into the composition, framing and timing. For myself I use a mid priced Sony Cybershot which does most of what I want it to do.

Sometimes I don't have it with me and I have to rely on my phone if something happens and I'd like to capture the moment. So on a Sunday before Christmas, having attended the Malcolm Sargent Clic Carol Concert in the Beach Ballroom, at the Aberdeen front, we were walking back to the car when the moon appeared from the cloud cover.

The resulting photo was taken with my Iphone 5, and it is one of the loveliest, most atmospheric pictures I've ever taken. It's entirely untouched, straight from the phone, and more like a painting than a digital image. 

I have always liked the kind of blue that lingers just after dusk. Van Gogh's Starry Night, and his Cafe paintings for example. In my own imagination that same blue was in the sky the night the Psalmist poet wrote Psalm 8, about considering the night sky and being left wondering why on earth, or even why in heaven's name, God is mindful of human beings and this tiny floating planet. The soft glow from the right is from an out of camera street light, and that's part of the serendipity, the accidental intrusion, that gives uniqueness to that one moment of stopping to look, and take a chance on a picture.

"I like a good laugh." That phrase, "a good laugh", opens an interesting set of questions. Laughter is a human response to a whole range of experiences, from the incongruous to the completely unexpected; laughter can be a shared joy, a healing relief, a derisory put down, a vocal signal of sarcasm, even a rejoicing in an enemy's hurt or worse. So what makes a good laugh good? Good for whom? Good for what? Perhaps for the person who laughs, so that laughter is therapy; or the person laughed at, so laughter is a humiliation; or the person laughed with, although shared laughter can also be corporate bullying, the clique picking on a less powerful individual. So laughter is morally malleable, and the motive and intention as well as the source and target, are all important criteria in deciding whether laughter is good or bad.

All of this was sparked in my mind this morning reading chapter 13 of Julian of Norwich and her Revelations of Divine Love. Julian has a fifth Revelation and sees the Devil as evil incarnate, but also sees that the Passion of Christ has rended the Devil's power impotent, because the cross signals the final defeat of evil, and the resurrection the final triumph of the love of God. So, seeing the strutting arrogance of the devil, the contrast between such vaunted power plays, and the triumph of the crucified Christ is so absolute, that Julian, from the depths of her suffering and near fatal illness, burst out laughing so hard it became infectious and all those waiting round her sick bed dissolved into mirth, festivity, inexplicable joy and loud laughter. Here is her account of her hilarious outburst having just seen evil do its worst, and eternal love do its best:

"At the sight of this I laughed heartily, and that made those who were around me to laugh and their laughter was a pleasure to me. In my thoughts I wished that all my fellow Christians had seen what I saw, and then they would all have laughed with me."

This is no trivialisation of evil, suffering, cruelty, greed, pride and the arrogance of abusive power. Julian lived through the black death, and in the context of an often brutal and violent culture; she knew evil was real, destructive, manipulative and persistent. But she had seen its end, because she had seen God take on the world's worst nightmares, bear their terror and absorb their toxic waste. Julian had seen that the love that made and sustains and redeems the creation is forever more powerful and life giving than anything evil can concoct. Laughter is her response; a good laugh is hopeful merriment at the expense of evil and the pretensions of sin and devil alike.

In that sense there is a close connection between holy laughter and eschatology. Holy laughter erupts from a heart that hopes and imagines and trusts "the love that moves the sun and other stars." Laughter in that sense is praise, laughter is gratitude for life, laughter voices faith and confidence in the grace and mercy of a Creator, whose purposes are benign and benevolent beyond human imagination. To see evil boast of its achievements, while knowing its ultimate defeat is to enter into the greatest mystery and the greatest denouement of the greatest drama ever. The incongruity of laughter at the foot of the cross is precisely what makes Christian faith wise foolishness, and Christian hope defiant of all other claims on the heart's allegiance.

The suffering of the Syrian people, the cruelty and inhumane trading and trafficking in people, the long treks and voyages of refugees, the poverty and powerlessness of billions, the plundering, waste and despoiling of our oceans and forests and human habitats, are all, and each, reason enough to dread for the future. They are no laughing matter; and Julian of Norwich, whose world was incomparably different from 21st Century times, would nevertheless recognise our human fallenness and capacity for damage and hurt of others, and our intractable and self-defeating fixation on self-interest, whether individual or national. And she would weep, as we ought.

And yet. I recognise in her laughter a profound theological conviction, that God, not us, holds the decisive hand. Julian's theological instincts are being entirely re-oriented as the Passion of Christ and his Cross, is shown to her in its folly and power, its apparent defeat yet mysterious triumph. And into the deep layers of her laughter, seeds of hope fall from the Cross, and in prayers of trustful joy, they germinate and propagate towards fulfilment as God's great purposes work out, "breaking down dividing walls of hostility, and "reconciling all things to himself, making peace by the blood of the cross."

It is now 10 years since I started blogging at Living Wittily. This past year or so I have posted less often. Partially that is due to the using of other media like Facebook for those serendipity, ad hoc, or immediate responses to news and events and circumstances. That has meant the blog has become more occasional and the pieces the more considered and intentionally thought provoking or for more developed engagement on things literary, theological and current affairs.

Several times I have wondered whther the effort is worth it, but only briefly. There have been many encouraging emails, comments and personal responses from regular visitors to Living Wittily. Amongst the losses of being engaged in Facebook is that more personal material tends to appear there instead of here. For much of that material that is right, as there are appropriate boundaries of what gets posted here, and indeed on Facebook. But I would like to return to more regular thinking by writing here, so those who regularly visit, there should be a more continuous conversation.

Amongst the enjoyments of my semi-retirement are my camera, my bicycle and more freedom to read beyond my own areas of specialism and necessity for teaching and preaching. I have come to enjoy the camera as a lens through which to observe the world, frame the world, consider the world, and in the deeper and more pentrating senses, to see the world. Here is a photo I took a year ago, and shared on Facebook. It is a good example of seeing Christ in the world of Creation. When I think of the great Logos hymn and the Colossian hymn, I imagine the cruciform shape of reality, that the God who is love, and whose love is cruciform, is the Creator of a world that is redeemed by love, sacriificial love that is eternal in intention and eternal in consequence.

This photo captures the reality that "all things were made through him", and "through him to reconcile all things, whether on heaven or on earth, making peace by the blood of the Cross". The old timbers of the breakwaters at Aberdeen beach were briefly exposed by the storms a year ago. Walking along the beach, at just the right angle the weathered timbers came into an alignment, at just the right angle of vision, for this photo. It is one of my favourite moments with my own camera – which is a modest Sony Cybershot, and can be surprisingly clever!

If you can't be bothered reading stories, I'm not sure pastoral ministry is a good idea for a vocation. I don't usually take the high ground like that, but there is something odd about saying "I'm called to ministry" while being disinterested in the narrative flows of human life, or complacent about the thickly textured existence that is human experience. Character, plot, tensions, resolutions, imagined encounters between people, with all their complexities of motive, meaning, and communication. Then too all the possibilities of misunderstanding, ignorance, hurt; these and many other features of the novel provide scenarios rich in hermeneutic possibility, forcing us to question and sympathise, to like and dislike, to care and not to care.

Pastoral ministry is a callling to enter the mess of human life, not as the great solver of problems, but as the companion and fellow traveller, the caring friend who knows when to shut up and when to interfere and risk the friendship itself. But even more, pastoral ministry, in its caring and accompanying actions, is a willingness to enter another person's story, and create a new complexity as their story and mine begin to be told together, in the exchanges and encounters and commitments that make up every serious relationship. Novels allow us to rehearse these.

Stories well told pull us into worlds where people and problems and hopes and fears, and all the brokennness and wholesomeness of life are opened up to sight. Tragedy and comedy, failure and achievement, fallibility and courage, moral anguish and spiritual longing, evil and good, diminishment and growth, the whole many-stranded fankle of human life in its complexificated messiness, are open to our eyes, displayed for our moral insight, and narrated not for our comfort in happy endings, but for our education in what it takes to be human. Novels are at their best when they challenge our assumptions, pull the rug from beneath our far too self-confident feet, and unnerve us by showing us our deeper and darker thoughts we are loathe to admit are there at all. 

All of this Helen Dunmore's book does well. It is a story of betrayal and deceit, but also of faithfulness and loyalty. At the centre of the novel is a marriage tested to the limits by secrets, unspoken suspicions, perseverance in believing in someone who seems not to deserve such faithfulness. The nature of love and desire, the accidental ways in which we meet people and begin to care and to commit and to bind our own destiny to theirs is all told in the context of cold war politics, spying as a way of life, and then the betrayals that can sometimes be deliberate and devastating, or inadvertent, but still devastating. Making the novel more interesting are the legacies of previous relationships, the half-life of our histories as these continue to influence decisions, subvert moral principle and impinge on the central relationships in the lives of the protagonists.

A review shouldn't spoil the plot, tell the ending or in any other way compromise the storyteller's primary goal – to draw you into the story and keep you reading till the last sentence. So no more clues here; just the observation that in a culture riven by suspicion and fear as were the 1950's and early 60's, there are telling parallels to our own culture where fear of commitment and its costs and consequences are just as acute. What makes this novel important is the integrity in Dunmore's writing. At no point did she take the easy way of resolving the dilemmas that are inherent in human relationships, nor does she simplify or guarantee success in that desperate search of the human heart for a place to stand, to feel safe, or at least understood. Good novels deepen our understaning of others, school us in compassion for human weakness and longing, and remind us of our own flawed hopes, missed chances and moments of insight that are amongst our most expensive and enriching gifts. 

One of the more satisfying audits is to review a year's reading. I mainly read books, though I do a lot of research and casual reading by browsing favourite websites, and sometimes being diverted to new sources and resources for my interests. But yes, books remain my mainstay for learning, reading, praying, thinking, meditating, struggling, nourishing and stimulation. As Rachel Cooke wrote of Christopher De Hamel's Meeting with Remarkable Manuscripts, in the digital age, the book is "the ultimate analogue consolation."

Actually the whole paragraph is worth pondering for its persuasive commendation of writing and reading as safeguards of knowledge, wisdom and yes, respect for truth:

"A scholar who can convey his enthusiasm and erudition to the lay person without ever seeming to patronise, his tone is so urbane and wise, you find yourself absorbing the most arcane and complicated stuff – the history of handwriting, say – almost by osmosis. The religious texts he describes, born of endless labour and unfathomable (to us) faith, seem not to connect at all with our own times, and yet they do, in ways I cannot begin to describe here. In a digital world that cares less and less for facts, moreover, de Hamel’s book, the product of a lifetime’s learning, is the ultimate analogue consolation."

But those words refer to a book I haven't read. This past year I've read several books that have filled gaps, opened new seams, extended horizons, or whatever other metaphor describes a book that changes the way we see the world, ourselves and the relations between the two. 

Konrad Hammond, Rudolf Bultmann. A Biography. This is more than an intellectual history of one of the greatest New Testament scholars of last or any other century. It is a history of the cultural changes in Germany from pre First World War, through the rise of National Socialism, and on into the late mid 20th Century. Bultmann's intellectual and theological development is traced with care, told with fairness and supported by an encyclopedic grasp of detail. Superficial evaluations, often based on theological presuppositions conservative or liberal, and whether adulatory or dismissive, are simply disqualified by this massive account of a mind refusing to have the questions silenced, and equally resistant to easy closure or cheap conclusions.

Demythologising was the bogey word for much of Bultmann's career. Yet even after his death his work is still by many scholars judged to be a benchmark of scholarly discipline. Further, some of his most admiring critics concede that even though his answers may be wrong, wrong headed or no longer tenable, the questions he asked, and the methods he used in asking them, remain programmatic for the discipline of NT studies.  Often it is the scholar who identifies the basic issues, the more intrtactable problems and the key critical questions, whose contribution is the most durable.

My interest in the history of New Testament interpretation made this book a weighty ingot of gold for me. Some of the greatest Christian minds have delved deep into those ancient, potent and subversive texts and have sought a deeper understanding not only of the foundation documents of our Faith, but have probed and pondered the transformative events to which they bear witness. In the middle years of the 20th Century Bultmann was a major planet drawing many other scholars into his orbit. And although many differed from him in their conclusions, the contribution of a veritable galaxy of NT scholars to our understanding of the New Testament has been far reaching, and echoes still down the decades into our own time. Names like Dibelius, Kasemann, Cullmann, Jeremias, Conzelmann, are some of those whose life work was inevitably responsive to, or reactive against, Bultmann's work. Bultmann's own interlocutors included Heidegger, Gogartern, Von Soden, Barth and others whose philosophical and theological emphases coincided or collided with his own. Like all good biographies this is the story of a life, in all its humanity, but given depth by also being an account of the mind of a great scholar theologian, and of a man of faith. Bultmann's faith was deeply entangled in the cultural and intellectual categories of Existentialism, but it is readily apparent to anyone who takes time to read him, and to hear his faith resonating in his sermons, that this complex and powerful personality was grounded (a word he would approve) in a faith deeply christological and forward looking to the eschaton and final triumph of the Christ of faith.

Ironically, and thankfully, those who don't need or can't afford the hard copy book (it is very expensive) can download to Kindle for £7.43 – this is the bargain of the year for those happy with a digital copy. But as noted above, with a big book token to take the weight of its purchase, I am happy to own it as a book, an analogue consolation Kindle notwithstanding!

It has been a long year. Half a month of it left. First will come Christmas, then that last week of waiting for the chronological confirmation it is a New Year, marked by fireworks, bells, and in Aberdeen, ship horns from the harbour. Waiting for New Year can be an exercise in passive patience, or an episode of agitated impatience, or even  a process of slow release anticipation; alternatively, waiting can be a time of fallow resting, allowing new ideas to seed and propagate, in the fertile mulch of memory, previous hopes and new born choices.

It's strange how the threshold of a date can be disturbing, interrupting the routine flow of days and weeks. Birthdays, anniversaries whether of gladness or sadness, liturgical mileposts in the year's journey, and that end of year full stop, when midnight gives way to a new year. The clock and the calendar are little different from the scrape marks on the prisoner's wall, a way of dividing time, recording how much has passed. There are no ways of assessing how much is still to come. 

For years now I have tried to save a day of quiet sometime between Christmas and New Year, for fallow resting. With a few sheets of paper, a pen, a Bible, a diary, and enough time to think backwards, and forwards. The cliche about the unexamined life not being worth living, like all cliches, has enough truth to make it bear repeating. But the over-examined life isn't much fun either. A life dissected, analysed, appraised, evaluated by various criteria from productivity and achievement, to pleasure and fulfilment, can become an exercise either in self congratulation or mass produced guilt.

So marking out fallow time, to think back and think forward, and allow our forward thinking to be shaped by our backward thinking, is not so much an exercise in self-praise or self-blame. It is the ongoing attempt to live wisely. It is the courtesy of listening, taking time to listen to our lives. It is a bid for freedom from unexamined routine. It is a taking seriously of this self which is a changing continuity that thankfully can never be pinned down to a definitive me. It is one practical way of trying for once to be obedient to a word of Scripture:

"So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a wise heart." Psalm 90.12

Numbering our days in turn means more than accurate chronology. It surely has to mean weighing the days for significance, which in turns begs a question. Significant for whom, and for what? Only when we honestly reflect backwards can we have some sense of what worked out, what mattered then and still matters, what was achieved and at what cost and was it worth it? What are the triggers of joy, the events that shaped us, the circumstances that drew us out of complacency towards challenge and change, the encounters and relationships which inevitably become part of our history, and some of them, of our identity.

It has been a long year. So I am ready again to spend a day waiting. Thinking of the story so far, in the company of the One whose Presence is the driver of the narrative? How different from that is prayer? The poet Psalmist was humble enough to recognise that careful numbering of days is not our default setting. It has to be learned, and therefore has to be taught. His words are an honest prayer for wisdom which cannot be imbibed like raw data, but is the fruit of reflection, humility, and seriousness of purpose going forward.

That contemporary management cliche, "going forward" seems to suggest there is no such thing as going backward, or if there is, it isn't a desirable state of affairs. But reflection is exactly that, a going backward, a retracing of steps, thoughts, choices, encounters, events, circumstances and everything else that makes up the interwoven but patterned tapestry that is out life. Reflection is two faced though; it is also a going forward in thought, choice and hopefulness. The question is, having reflected backwards, what we now choose, what we hope for, and thus what we decide will now be the priorities of those days still to be numbered, and on which we have no right to presume, other than in the mercy of God.

Nobody can be surprised that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has published a letter sent to our political leaders expressing serious concern at the post Referendum rise in hate crimes, and the continuing deterioration post-Brexit of public discourse around issues such as immigration, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Acts of violence and words of hate and ridicule against minority groups and those who are deemed to be "other", "different" and "not us" spiked post-Brexit, and are still too frequent.

The Commission is rightly careful to state, "The vast majority of people who voted to leave the European Union did so because they believe it is best for Britain and not because they are intolerant of others." That is undoubtedly true, and I have many friends and acquaintances who voted to leave, very few of whom I would ever think harboured racist views. That said, when public discourse becomes inflamed by claim and counter claim, and language becomes more rigid and confrontational, then opinions are expressed with increasing force and the rhetorical weapons of choice become more and more harmful. Inside all of us are seeds and potentialities that given the right set of circumstances, the fertility of cultural fears, the social excitement of sensitive economic and political differences blown into existential choices, can be propagated and made to grow into attitudes of which we never thought ourselves capable.

But what is more serious, strategic and concerning is the Commission's stark warning to political leaders and all politicians to cease and desist from polarising language. I welcome the implied rebuke, and the genuine and courageous finger-pointing of the letter. The following sentence is freighted with warning: "politicians of all sides should be aware of the effect on national mood of their words and policies, even when they are not enacted". That particular criticism, if not aimed at Amber Rudd, is certainly a reference to our Home Secretary, whose intended policy of requiring employers to declare the proportion of foreign people they employ was first announced at the Conservative Party Conference, then hastily withdrawn in the face of widespread dissent and opposition.

What interests me about this specific debacle is the mindset of the politician who conceived the idea of making being foreign a distinctive that has social, public and political implications which transcend the rights of the individual foreign citizen. To even think of such discrimination, and to require publication of such statistics, at the very least gives comfort to those, however small a minority, for whom anti-immigration is tinged with racism and hostility to the presence amongst us of those who are different; and whose difference is then to be highlighted as a negative datum by such blatantly irresponsible social discrimination.

Our Home Secretary has legal responsibilities to work within the law and the spirit of the law of the Human Rights Convention, a role which requires a wise protection and stewardship of social cohesion and harmony in our communities. It is therefore of major political significance that this letter unmistakably warns politicians of something they should know already, and should have no need to have it pointed out to them. Words matter. Words do things. Speech is not mere words. Spoken words and written words have power to persuade and motivate, to ignite anger or construct peace, to reassure or destabilise, to further understanding or intentionally mislead. Words used wisely help us negotiate towards co-operation, or if used as weapons, they break down bridges and use the bricks to build walls.

When an independent watchdog Body, created to be an early warning system for a deterioration in race relations, racial harmony, community diversity and that mutual respect of each other which lies at the centre of the common good, – when such a Body has to remind politicians that their words have the power to "legitimise hate", and in the same report points to statistical evidence of a spike in hate crime, then two things need thinking about. First, the politicians should take heed, and accept the weighty responsibility conferred on them by their high office, of speaking responsibly, truthfully and with respect and care for those of whom and to whom they speak. Secondly it is a disgrace that the Commission for Equality and Human Rights should have to say this at all, and that those it cites include our Home Secretary, and several of those now to the fore in Government. Some are those whose language during the Referendum was at worst a major contribuition to the problems we now face, and at best condoned by their silence the more extreme expressions of anti-immigration and anti-Eurpoean rhetoric.

I use that word "disgrace", not in its pejorative and vernacular use. I use it in a semi-technical sense, suggesting that our political leaders have disgraced their high office by their use of words that provoke such concern and censure from, of all groups, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The kind of democracy we enjoy and evolve depends upon the integrity of our discourse, the civility of our language, and a strong ethic and stewardship of words, a standard of discourse that has recently seemed to be beyond the moral imagination and character virtues of elected leaders. That is a disgrace. 

The lack of shame, the silence of those same voices in the face of social backlashes in hate crimes, or just as reprehensible, the belated attempt at recovering moral high ground by saying the Government has made more money available to tackle hate crime, these too are a disgrace. Grace as a moral virtue exhibits a cluster of inward impulses including generosity, respect, courtesy, dignity and integrity, and giving these moral cohesion, a valuing of each human being within our communities. Long agao the redoubtable Shirley Williams wrote a book called Politics is for People. Yes it is. And political leaders, and politicians of all parties are there to serve the people not rule them, to unite the people not divide them, to work for social cohesion and co-operation, not conflict and rivalry for the sake of political and narrow ends. 

It remains to be seen whether the only response of the Government is to throw money at resources to tackle hate crimes. Unless they suppress their own inflammatory language, money is merely buying bottled water to throw on fires that will go on being ignited by the rhetorical arson of carelessly cynical words used as a hate accelerant.