The Bishop’s Letter
Lessons from the building trade
In this month’s Bishop’s Letter, Bishop Mike encourages us to ask where we have plastered over the cracks in our lives.
Shock and horror. They have discovered dry and wet rot in the walls of one of the bedrooms in our home. We are now in the process of finding the extent of the infestation so that the appropriate “cure” can be administered.
All this is highly disruptive. Carpets taken up, plaster and dust everywhere and, of course, no certainty as to how long and how much money this will take to get fixed. My attention was arrested by the damp specialist who reminded me that, “we could just plaster over it, but it would come back and be worse and even more expensive to put right.”
That’s obvious and common sense. Better to deal with the cause of the rot rather than pretend it might not come back. Good sense and a good plan.
However, having an ongoing interest in human behavior, I couldn’t help but think of the times I don’t apply the same wisdom to my own life.
How strange that many of us seem happy to live with the rottenness of our lives hoping either that it will go away or that we can sufficiently plaster over our difficult bits and hope that we shall get by.
Relationships are really important: they make the world go round and yet so often the sin and the hurt that we carry around with us lingers. At the age of sixty-one, I have to ask myself if I am becoming an easier person to know and to hang out with, or if I am starting to see the cracks of my character showing through the feeble attempts I have made to plaster over them.
As I have written before, I think the Church (you and me) is meant to be a healing community; a place where some of the rottenness of our lives can be treated.
But one stumbles through life meeting people who claim to have been damaged by the Church and, even allowing for those people who seem to be disposed to disruptive and very difficult behaviour, this is a worrying observation.
