Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 20th October 2024

Dear Friends,

I recently came across a youngish man sitting on the pavement outside Waitrose. I had seen him quite often before, but he had always been in the passageway off Cliffe High Street leading to the river. I stopped to talk to him, and he explained that he had moved to his new position as he had found that people tended to be more generous there. I put all the change that I had into his cup and offered to buy him another hot chocolate.

As I walked away, I felt really depressed about the whole encounter, asking myself what more I could, should, have done. Should I have stopped at all in fact? We are sometimes asked not to give money to anyone begging on the streets, as they will only spend it on drugs. I simply find that confusing, however, as I have no idea whether that is true or not.

So strong is my sense of confusion over the whole issue that, when I saw the very same man in the same place the next day, I deliberately took another route to avoid having to walk past him. But why? What am I actually confused about? Is it perhaps because, although I feel instinctively that I have a moral responsibility to help him and others like him, I can’t decide exactly where the limit of that responsibility lies? What is preventing me from giving him money every time? Or giving him much more? After all, I am in the very fortunate position of being able to do so, aware that Jesus has enjoined us to ‘go and sell what we have and give to the poor’? (Matthew 19:21). How are we to interpret this particular passage? Are we to look on it as a dogmatic instruction, or as a guide to action – an ideal we should all strive to follow to the best of our ability?

As a result of an existential crisis in his 50s, during which he became convinced that, like Socrates, ‘the unexamined life was not worth living’, Leo Tolstoy went a long way to doing just that, by renouncing and denouncing his privileged life style. Whatever we decide for ourselves, the presence of the man outside Waitrose is a stark reminder that we remain a grotesquely divided society. ‘We are angered by actions which have knowingly led to the polarization of our society – into the affluent, who epitomize success according to the values of a materialistic society, and the ‘have-leasts’, who by the expectations of that same society are oppressed, judged, found wanting and punished’ (QFP 23.21, 1987).

Does it not follow from this that we all have a communal responsibility to do what we can to create a better and fairer world? At the same time we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our immediate loved-ones not to be too harsh on ourselves, to continue to search for the right balance between happiness and virtue and, rather than surrender to cynicism and despair, to sustain and nurture our faith in an ultimately just universe – Kant’s dual perspective of the moral law within and the starry skies above.

Roger Cockrell

on behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms and Nancy Wall)