The morning after
AT ABOUT 5 a.m. most days, a curious sound echoes around Soho and Piccadilly. Along with the drone of the street-cleaners and the beeping of reversing vans delivering early-morning supplies to the restaurants, cafés, and hotels comes an intense, high-pitched swooshing noise, repeated two or three times, and followed by the sound of an engine. It is a noisy cascade of glass bottles from the night before — thousands of them — being tipped into the recycling van.
Whenever I hear it, I remember the account of the end of the First World War: on the morning of 12 November 1918, the Savoy Hotel reportedly had a couple of thousand bottles of champagne stacked up after the night’s celebrations of the Armistice.
These days, given the millennials’ preference for matcha tea over alcohol on a night out, many of these bottles will have been of water as well as wine. But still, to my ears, it’s a wild sound, pointing to a measure of hedonism that persists in the centre of town, even while the cost of living is far too high for most people to contemplate buying champagne.
In vino veritas
THE root of the word “armistice” is related to the solstice: laying down weapons is related to the moment when the sun stands still. Given the geopolitical situation this November, both seem equally out of reach.
The voting public in the United States will have something to say about the direction of wars abroad, and have more power than most citizens to affect what happens next — although less, it seems, than before.
And so, this Remembrance season, we’ll pray hard for the peace that feels more elusive than ever: spending time with a young woman from our congregation of Jewish ancestry who, for the first time in her life, is disturbed and frightened by the anti-Semitism that she is enduring; and every day, in the church courtyard, checking in with our Palestinian food-market trader who has lost contact with his brother in Khan Younis.
Nor will we overlook what is being called the “forgotten” war in Sudan, where the numbers of killed and displaced people are similar to the Middle Eastern catastrophe, but receiving much less air time.
Far-away wars seem no longer so far away in our super-connected world; perhaps, these days, the early-morning crash of the bottles is less likely to be the legacy of celebrations than of drinking to forget.
Value-driven
TALKING of early mornings, I find myself one weekday at a business breakfast, talking about the power of imagination in the boardroom. Slipping in some theology (I hope) under the wire, we speak among ourselves about recruitment, retention, and the strategic challenges facing the various business people in the room, whose occupations range from the communications industries to retail and the art trade.
They speak movingly about their desire to embed values as strong motivation for their boards’ decision-making — as important as delivering a successful result each quarter for the bottom line. They speak, too, about the challenges of holding on to those values when that scourge of business planning, uncertainty, has become the new normal.
There is a sense that they want, of course, to find a way to generate monetary “value” for their employees, shareholders, and themselves, but also that they are acutely aware of the dangers of making this the driving force (there is always a lot of “driving” in these conversations), which can end in the assumption that greed is good.
I leave the room feeling that I have somehow experienced a secular version of morning prayer, with readings, canticles, and responses expressing the lived contradictions of leadership in the world today — just as I do in the church’s morning prayer, listening to the accounts of the kings, the prophets, the wars and politics of Herod, the economics of Zacchaeus, Matthew, and Mary Magdalene, and the unsettling stories that Jesus told about judges and widows, armies, shopkeepers, and farmers.
Faith in God is revealed and renewed in this group, none of whose members are involved with church, but all of whom are imaginative and kind and yearn to make the world a better place.
Better together
IN A recent “Quiz the Clergy” session, hosted by younger members of our congregation, there was — in a similar way to those business leaders — a willingness to go to some very deep and thoughtful places, and to take risks with what they asked and what they said.
And, at a lunch in my flat shared with 25 people currently going through the gruelling and debilitating asylum system, I learned that, although it is incredibly important that the Church doesn’t take itself too seriously for its own sake, it is equally important that we are never afraid to speak together of the most profound mysteries, the most complex contradictions, the most powerful shames, and the most beautiful hopes.
This is because the majority of the UK population, who live their lives without reference to organised religion, are there already, hoping against hope that there will be meaning and purpose in life and work, even in the middle of the enormous challenges that they face every day; and because. That most of them don’t consider the Church as any sort of option to help them to address these deepest concerns is our problem, not theirs.
The Revd Lucy Winkett is Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, and Priest-in-Charge of St Pancras Church, Euston Road, in the diocese of London.