Dear Friends

Choice, chance and change. That’s the message from the US primaries in the run-up to November’s presidential election.  As I write, only the Iowa and New Hampshire decisions are in, with a Super Day clutch of voting close at hand, but already there has been a see-sawing between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.  Will it be a first black or a first women in the White House?  Or have the Republicans a chance of pulling it off again, despite the poor record of the unpopular George W.?  Will it go down to the wire?  All that can be said at this stage is that, in the very chancy business of elections – remember the Florida vote in 2000, and, though in a different category, the problems in Kenya now – the choice of the American voters seems to be for change.

And, after all, choice is what all political parties say they want to give us.  It’s what most of us reckon we want.  No-one likes the idea of not having a choice, though it can be sometimes be used as a threat, or a political excuse.  Remember how often our own leaders have brought in the famous Tina (“There is no alternative”) to justify their policies.  Even when there is a choice, in some places it can be grimly narrowed.  To speak out against the regime, or keep your head down?  To take a bribe, or see your family starve?  To be destitute or a prostitute?  Nearer home, to ‘blow the whistle’ on something wrong a work, or keep your job?  To load more debt on to your ‘plastic’, or deny your child that special school trip?  That’s where choice can be agonising.

Never more so than when it’s a matter of life or death.  Do you remember that TV programme, recalling the desperate famine in Ethiopia, which led Bob Geldof to produce the Band Aid record and Live Aid concert, pricking consciences world-wide, and saving two million lives with the money raised?  What stuck in my mind was the nurse in a refugee camp, having to decide how to distribute the limited food available.  Which 500 children should be picked out of the many thousands starving around her?  It was terrible, she said, to have to play God.  It broke her heart.  The awfulness of the experience haunted her, until, on a return visit, she was greeted and hugged by young people whose lives she had saved.  And it’s a situation no doubt being replayed today, in Darfur, Kenya, Bangladesh, wherever disaster brings famine and supplies of vital food or medicine have to be rationed.

The decisions most of us face are, thankfully, nothing like that.  But choice does not have to be limited to be a problem.  We can have too much of it.  We are for ever being asked to pick our ‘best-ever’ Britons, books, films, sit-coms – you name it.  Seemingly innocuous questionnaires probe and record our status and interests to set us up as future customer fodder.

In other ways, too, we seem to make too many choices that turn out questionable, or just plain wrong.  The post-Christmas queues at Marks & Spencer’s return counters, and the steady increase in divorce rates are two extremes of this.  Why can’t we be more sure of making the right choice?  Perhaps there’s too much of “That’s what I want, so I’ll have it” and too little of “What’s good for you as well as me?”  John F. Kennedy put it challengingly, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but, rather, what can you do for your country”.  Not a popular cry.  By nature we’re all for short term gratification.  In the long term, as Keynes said, we’re all dead.  But what do we do while we’re alive still matters.  And the quality of our life comes from right decisions.

Christianity has a good deal to say about this – about where best we should put our trust, and why.  When some of Jesus’ followers couldn’t stand the pressure, and left, Peter encouraged the rest to stay firm.  For him it was a ‘Tina’ moment.  “What real choice is there?” he said.  “He’s got the clue to living.”  And in all the chances and changes of our lives that’s the basic choice for us to make and work out, as, in our two parishes, we have during this interregnum in Rosemary’s sure and devoted custody, and now look forward to continuing, from next month, with the guidance and encouragement, under God, of Charles and Joanne.

Yours in Christ,

Barry Smallman