Rector's letter for February Fowey News

Dear Friends

“I can’t breathe.” On 25 May 2020, George Floyd said it 27 times in 9 minutes. That was his plea to an indifferent police officer kneeling on the back of his neck suffocating him. The cell-phone footage of his death rippled out from Minneapolis prompting thousands of protests, not only around the United States, but across the world, including the UK.

Half a century before Martin Luther King had called the American Declaration of Independence a “promissory note.” Its proclamation of inalienable rights and equality was unfulfilled. 52 years later protestors marched to demand that promise be realised.

The fact that all this occurred 3 months into a global pandemic suggests that there are human values that eclipse those of health and safety and even life. Perhaps we are not simply biological creatures seeking safety nor capitalist consumers seeking comfort, but moral agents seeking right? We care deeply about justice (even if we disagree about what that looks like and how that should be achieved).

But why did Floyd’s death light such a fuse and have such a profound effect?

I suggest it was a profoundly resonant echo because our moral universe was birthed out of similar pains. Two millennia before, on a hill outside Jerusalem, an unarmed victim of oppression of an uncaring authority suffered a public and humiliating death. As a result we have viewed the universe differently ever since, perceiving virtue in the victim and tyranny in the oppressor. Floyd’s cry, “I can’t breathe,” could have been placed on Christ’s own lips.

Author and tech entrepreneur, Antonio Garcia Martinez, comments, “The Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency: the Christ story. Hit it with the right Christ figure and it’ll just hum deafeningly in resonance.” Christianity has profoundly shaped our culture up until now.

The danger is we are losing touch with the roots, whilst still expecting the tree to yield it fruit. The reality is the fruit quickly withers, in particular, as Douglas Murray noted in The Madness of Crowds, forgiveness is lost, “Today we do seem to live in a word where… guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption.” We desperately need a person who both expects our best and forgives our worst. That person is Jesus of Nazareth, the one who started the revolution which birthed our values.

with every blessing

Philip