Less John, more Joan. How Paris’ secular hymn fell flat

Despite launching a flaming piano of peace, France missed an obvious emissary.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A floating stage bears a flaming piano and singer standing at a mic.

That opening ceremony.

BBC.

Amid the furor around Dionysus and his flesh suit it was another point in the Olympic opening ceremony that got me thinking spiritually. Which is ironic, given the moment’s message. Silence fell after a chaotic, multi-barge disco. An atmospherically lit boat carrying a piano on fire sailed down the Seine, with a beautifully sung Imagine, by John Lennon, drifting from the singer.

Nowhere does secularism like France, with a religion-less public society so entrenched that a French Muslim sprinter, Sounkamba Sylla, had to swap her hijab for a cap at the opening ceremony to abide by its public religiosity laws. Telling a woman what she can and can’t wear is not a great look for a modern democracy. However, choosing Imagine, - a well-known atheistic plea for a world without religious devotion and the dogma, extremism, and warring that comes with it, perhaps tells us what France is going for. Beautiful, modern, peace. The world as one in Godless enlightenment. No hell to scare you. No heaven to inspire you.

Except. Humans have managed to do an excellent job of conceiving, enacting, and justifying extreme violence without religious devotion for much of the last two centuries. Side-by-side with religious acts of aggression were communist oppression, The Great Leap Forward, Gulags, Darwinian race wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Perhaps rather than blaming religion for the constant state of war the global populace finds themselves in, John Lennon would be best investigating our common human instinct.

Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

When God is taken out of the equation, peace is no better found in science, rationality, or self-actualisation, the twentieth century demonstrates that. These things are just as likely to be twisted towards conflict. Without God there is no inspiration to be selfless, moral, or compassionate, the impulses of each which might lead to reconciliation rather than war.

Just a little after the flaming piano, a figure that better points the way to peace came riding down the Seine. Billed as a Gallo-Roman goddess, it was more a recreation of Joan of Arc, the French saint who brought spiritual leadership to her country and defeat to English invaders. She bore the Olympic flag onto dry land. In a very medieval way Joan’s life after hearing from God was of breaking sieges and leading armies. It might seem strange to anoint her the bearer of peace, but she shows the way to the united humanity that John Lennon was striving for.

Christians await with anticipation the Kingdom of God fully coming on Earth which will bring with it peace and perfect justice. Joan, being led by God to challenge the oppression of English invaders, points the way towards it by rising up against injustice. And she points the way back to Jesus, her Lord, who turned the world upside down with his message of peace and his beginning of this Kingdom of God. Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

Rather than seeking a Godless paradise which can never have enough moral force to be anything other than a selfish search for meaning, we must look to Joan’s God. We will find a God who calls any who will follow him to a life of justice and peace. Only in giving up our own desires, to follow the example of Jesus, will we ever have a world as one.

As my wife, Harriet, remarked whilst we watched Lennon’s hymn, it’s only a few words away from being spot on. Rather than taking the modern French approach and keeping God away from the public sphere, we might delve into Joan’s spirituality and find a burning for justice, a desire for peace, and a self-sacrifice which will one day lead to peace under God. Imagine there’s a heaven. It’s easy if you try. And it’s the only place humans will ever find the true and lasting peace of Lennon’s imagination.

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Justice

9 September 2024

4 min read

Grenfell – what should happen now?

Six urgent priorities that should follow the Inquiry

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tube train runs on a raised track, in the distance is a tower block wrapped in white material with a green heart on it.

I remember standing at the base of Grenfell Tower on the morning of the 14th June 2017, talking with firefighters, gathering clergy to act as emergency volunteers, praying with evacuees from the surrounding blocks, as the building still smouldered. At the time the question on everyone’s lips was: how could something like this happen in sophisticated twenty-first century Britain?

Now we know.

In one sense the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell tower fire told us nothing new. Few people who have followed the Inquiry over the last six years will have been surprised by its conclusions. What is new is to see the dreadful catalogue of ‘incompetence dishonesty and greed’ laid out in excoriating detail for all to see.

So what should happen now? At least six things must be on the agenda:

Combustible cladding on remaining buildings around the country should be removed as soon as possible. Government estimates suggest there are 4,600 buildings around the country with unsafe cladding. Less than one third of them have had their remediation completed, and work is yet to start on half of them. And, astonishing as it may sound, this is now more than seven years after Grenfell. Cladding that is illegal on new buildings can still remain on existing ones. Developers and owners who are responsible for this state of affairs should be made to pay for the remediation rather than passing those costs on to leaseholders, or delaying remediation for technical and bureaucratic reasons. Institutional resistance to this, as outlined recently by Michael Gove, someone who from my dealing with him on Grenfell, was one of the better politicians to deal with this issue, has to be overcome with urgency.
Prosecution of those who have been identified in the inquiry as bearing responsibility for the fire should also be brought as soon as possible. The police investigation suggests that it will be a number of years before court cases take place. The victims of this tragedy have already had to wait seven long years and now face the prospect of another three or even more years until justice is served. That is too long.
Those named and shamed in the report should examine their own hearts. Some remorse and apology has been evident from some, but not enough. Many still deny responsibility despite seven years of evidence-gathering. This is not a matter of revenge, but an indispensable step towards justice for everyone. Those named have presumably carried a burden of guilt over these past years. The Christian doctrine of repentance, confession and absolution tells us that there is a relief in finally admitting culpability, bearing the penalty, and finally, once all this has happened, receiving a measure of absolution.

We might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

The companies involved often have big pockets and the bereaved and survivors are ordinary people without the resources to pay expensive legal fees. The government should set aside a sum of money to enable victims, if they wish, to bring a civil case against those accused in the report. Arguably this should have happened many years before to speed up the process of justice.
A wider debate needs to take place in our society as to how we place love for neighbour at the heart of national life. A libertarian individualism which focusses on personal fulfilment and a view of freedom as doing what we like as long as we don’t harm others, rather than freedom to do the good has led us to this point. What would it mean in company law, for example, for each business or institution to have to explain how it is seeking the genuine welfare of its staff, clients and customers, not as an add on in their ESG agenda, but as the primary purpose of the organisation?
We need a spiritual renewal. Toleration rather than persecution of the neighbour was a good legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is not enough to build a well-functioning society. We are commanded not just to tolerate our neighbours but to love them. And this only be justified if my neighbour has ultimate transcendent value. The new atheism was an act of cultural vandalism, undermining faith in God, an objective basis for each human life, and having nothing to replace it with. As Nick Cave recently put it: “People need meaning. And secular society has not come up with the goods.” This is why religious traditions including Christianity have tended to link love for God to love for neighbour. What that spiritual renewal looks like is hard to tell, and yet we have perhaps seen a stirring of it in recent times.

If something approaching those six things happened, then we might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.