The Milk Bottle

I have a compulsion to read. If something has words I need to pick it up and read it. So it was last week, while we were on holiday, that I sat at the table reading the text on a milk bottle. I nearly splattered the room with my breakfast when I read the words, ‘Allergy advice: contains milk’. Well, I obviously couldn’t have worked out that one for myself, could I? How far do we have to go now to protect the stupid from themselves, I wondered unchristianly?

A day or two later we were visiting an adventure park and got talking to a staff member who was supervising the children’s rides. She recalled buying a bag of peanuts with the allergy warning that it contained nuts.

But she also told the story of someone who threatened to sue the adventure park, because it had wet grass. The words ‘park’ and ‘open-air’ had not been enough of a clue, or maybe the complainant had expected them still to cover their eighty acres with a roof. Put this alongside even the mighty Tesco, probably the most powerful commercial force in the UK, having to put their allergy warning on a milk bottle, and we are most definitely in an ‘If it moves, sue it’ culture.

The Christian praxis of forgiveness seems to have waned with the decline in Christian faith (not that I am suggesting that Christians have a monopoly on forgiving, just that certain Christian values were central to our culture and are markedly less so now). But many of the competitors that have attempted to fill the vacuum do not prize forgiveness.

There is the burgeoning interest in what John Drane calls ‘New Spirituality‘ (although by the middle fo the twenty-first century it might be actively practised by 3% of Brits) but so much of it is about self-fulfilment that however much there is a longing for community, making oneself into a god makes for such self-centredness that it does not really address the need to forgive.

If it’s not about ‘spirituality’ then consumerism militates against forgiveness, because everything is monetised. Everything has a price. Everything is a money-making opportunity.

And if it’s not that then technology has made us an instant society and so we see the ugly sight of families who have been bereaved through a terrible murder dragged blinking before bright media lights like victims before Roman lions and then asked, ‘Can you forgive the murderer?’ Forgiveness, like coffee and microwaves, is meant to be instant. The need to feel the anger as part of the path to forgiveness is obliterated. We leave people with a dangerous choice between a false notion of forgiveness that merely constitutes suppressing the anger (only for it to leap out later like a jack-in-the-box) and a lust for vengeance that is so regularly exploited in the plots of Hollywood blockbusters. And, it might be said, some popular Christian practices of forgiveness have fallen prey to the temptation of the ‘instant’ model and caused deep emotional and spiritual damage.

You can’t help feeling that we could do with someone called Jesus in a society like this. Trouble is, you’d find him hanging on a hill outside the city.

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