Our recent holiday round the south of England was full of
words. From The Merchant of Venice in Stratford to the Magna Carta at
Salisbury, I was reminded just how important words are for our pleasure and for
our freedoms. At a time when writing
anything cost a small fortune the tiny and thinly spaced words of the Great
Charter of 1215 reminded me how cheaply we view the production of text
today. Words fly through the internet at
an ever growing rate, enabling opinions to be shared across continents in just
a few seconds. Compared with the time of
King John, when a small number of people could read and write, our own era is
swamped with communication. Perhaps talk
really is cheap now, and matching actions to words matters more than ever.
The Magana Carta exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral is linked
to a lot of work around human rights.
Building on the Cathedral’s legacy as a home to one of the four
surviving charters the community which worships there does much to champion
issues of justice. It’s hardly
surprising that this was the first Cathedral to appoint a woman priest as Dean
with the arrival of June Osborne in 2004.
It is a place which looks outward and looks forward.
Last year there was a debate in the Church of England’s
General Synod about the importance of marking the Church’s role in the creation
of the Magna Carta. Keith Malcouronne,
who represents the Runnymede area on Synod, suggested that the anniversary be
used to: “highlight the Church’s pivotal role in reconciliation across society
and securing some very fundamental human rights. We should look around us today
and into the future as we live out that vocation – serving the common good,
defending the weak and powerless, and seeking freedom for those facing
modern-day exploitation and deprivation.”
A key theme in The
Merchant of Venice is to remind us that human difference is only skin
deep. We all bleed. The dignity denied to Shylock is a familiar
story, no less alive today than either 500 or 800 years ago. It seems to be an enduring aspect of the
humanity that the privileged will always need someone to despise as well as the
comfort of others to tell them they’re right to do it. The current debate about refugees in Calais
cannot be separated from the legacy of the Magna Carta. The local difficulties
England experienced in 1215 took place at a time when travel from one end of the
Kingdom to another would have taken much longer than it takes to get to
Australia today. We really do live in a
global village: ignorance of the suffering of others cannot be our defence.
800 years ago a step was taken to narrow the gap between the
King and his subjects. No longer could a
King simply act as he wished. Some level
of consent from the people was required.
Perhaps today the crisis of immigration arises from another yawning gap,
the disparity between rich and poor around the world. Like King John we can kid ourselves that we
live in a different world, privileged and remote yet somehow a situation
ordained and inevitable. Perhaps, like
him, we’ll also have a day of reckoning when the majority call the minority to
account. History, as they say, has a
habit of repeating itself
