Monday, June 12, 2006
Haw's for thought
My route to St.Matthew’s and the studio takes me through Parliament Square every day, right past the Houses of Parliament, in London, UK.
For sometime now, a guy called Brian Haw has been sitting in front of Parliament in protest over the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war.
Unfortunately, due to some rather draconian and hastily passed laws, he’s been reduced. His signage used to spread all the way along the edge of the square, and included some very clever artwork by Banksy. However, the police have been, and taken most of it away, leaving the rather Canute-like figure that you see in the photos above.
I wonder about Brian. Some would see him as a postmodern hermit – prophet for our age like some kind of contemporary Simon Stylites. But who was he before? It’s often said of some of the more extreme old-time prophets – be they Moses, Isaiah, Simon Stylites – or maybe even Brian himself – maybe they should just have been sectioned or given the right kind of medication. What’s the difference between Brian and David Blaine? Some of our ideas of what constitutes being a Christian have become so corrupted with time, that we now rationalise them out of our lexicon – we pay lip-service to ideas such as meekness, humility, obedience and the like, but when it comes down to it, we see most of these things as another form of doormat-ism – a one-way ticket to poor mental health.
Why did Brian Haw take up the position he occupies today? Was it really an altruistic protest over the Iraq War? Or a failed marriage? Or maybe, just maybe, the kind of draconian laws that I mentioned earlier are slowly sending our society into greater mental chaos every day.
It seems to me, that to recover a sense of meekness, mercy, humility, and obedience amongst other Christian virtues is our most urgent task at the moment. The TRUE nature of those qualities has been lost in the mix, and to dig out what they really mean for today is a task-and-a-half. It’s a cheese-wire line to walk, but we must walk it. And I feel that it’s something that has to be done in the context of community, rather than playing the Romantic male loner-hero figure that I see every day.
