Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 10th September 2023
Dear Friends, It often happens that for varying reasons we don’t want to face the truth. And sometimes it is hard to speak the truth to a friend or loved … Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 10th September 2023
Dear Friends,
It often happens that for varying reasons we don’t want to face the truth. And sometimes it is hard to speak the truth to a friend or loved one. In his book Silence and Honey CakesRowan Williams writes ‘We Christians talk about “speaking the truth in love” …This doesn’t mean telling other people exactly where they’ve gone wrong. It means finding a way to speak to them that resonates with the creative word working in their depths. Love is not a feeling of good will towards the neighbour, but the active search for that word – so that I can hear what God has to say to them and give me through them and also so I can speak to what is real in them, not what suits or interests me or my agenda. Sometimes this means that what at first looks like the ‘loving’ response won’t quite do.’How do we learn to be like this? I suppose trial and error is the best sort of answer; learning from one’s mistakes and finding better ways. Growing up in a fair-minded family helps. Living with people of integrity in our formative years and later on working with similar people enables someone to grow in stability and truthfulness. There will be times when it can be wise to hold one’s peace rather than speaking the truth. There are also times when having someone in a group who speaks out in a direct way can be very useful and save a lot of time pussyfooting around. In certain situations too, accurate and unprejudiced reporting are of great value when decisions have to be made. If “speaking the truth in love” is the norm, white lies shouldn’t be necessary and, in my view, should always be avoided.Just as peace is a process and not a goal, so truth/integrity is an ongoing intangible, a process we can be part of throughout our lives. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet we tend to remember the big soliloquies, but Polonius the anxious, elderly, sometimes comic father of Laertes has many practical words of wisdom for his son who is about to set off on a long journey. These include:‘This above all to thine own self be trueAnd it must follow as the night the dayThou canst not then be false to any man.With loveCarolineon behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms and Nancy Wall)