Recently a friend of mine retired to the Shropshire countryside and started attending the local Parish Church. It took him a couple of months to get to know when to stand and sit, and where to look in the Prayer Book, but eventually he felt relaxed enough to listen to what was being said during the service.
He said, “The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of reasons to feel guilty.” He continued, “I know that guilt figures in other denominations, but it seems prominent with Anglicans.” His words may remind readers that I have previously mused about whether it is better to be motivated by feelings of guilt or by feelings of gratitude, and of how choice of motivation could lead in radically different directions.
Another friend then told me that the General Synod had voted to apologise for slavery and that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York will lead a parade in London on March 24th. They are doing this two hundred years after Britain made the slave trade illegal, and my friend is confident that they will also honour the memory of those British seamen who died whilst enforcing the navy’s actions in freeing slaves being transported by the French.
I am sure the two leaders have their reasons to apologise for something done by one unknown party to another unknown party two hundred years ago, and I hope some good will come of it. I also hope however, that they are apologising because they are grateful and not guilty because if the latter, I shall have to re-think my whole concept of guilt.
I had been taught by previous archbishops that guilt is what I ought to feel when I did something wrong by commission or omission, and that guilt was a motivating force to put something right. What I hadn’t reckoned on however, is that I should feel guilty for something I hadn’t done to someone I didn’t know two hundred years ago.
Mind you, such a concept does open up opportunities. It is coming up to a thousand years since the Normans invaded and brutally occupied the properties of my aristocratic Anglo Saxon ancestors. Since then, my family have endured some thousand years of relative poverty and, at one time, had to resort to digging wells to earn an honest crust. If the notion of guilt being passed from generation to generation is correct, my grandchildren might, in time, hear an apology from the descendents of those rapacious Norman conquerors.
It is however possible that those Normans were themselves taken into slavery by the Romans some six hundred years earlier and, in the absence of an apology or reparations by the Romans, felt justified in taking out their spleen on the peace loving Anglo Saxons.
Improbable as it may seem, this line of ecclesiastical thinking stretches way back beyond the Romans, Greeks and Babylonians and into the Garden of Eden. We were kicked out because a serpent tempted Eve and she then tempted Adam. The serpent’s guilt resulted in it having no legs, but what of Eve; can the men of the parish now expect an apology from the womenfolk?
View from the Pew 