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Reflecting on the political upheavals of recent months in Britain and abroad, I have been wondering about the parallels with England at the time of the civil war in the seventeenth century. The deposing and beheading of Charles I was not envisaged at the outset of the war, but it became politically inevitable after his repeated refusal to negotiate. The real debates about policy only started after the Parliamentarians had gained some victories. Instability and intolerance continued for decades thereafter.
I met Bart only once, more than forty years ago. He and his wife Jo were Dutch. He was my mother-in-law’s cousin and my wife’s godfather. I remember him, at their small house in Hengelo, as a quiet, kind man. During the second world war he was a prisoner in Buchenwald for four years.
Like most concentration camp survivors, Bart never talked about his experiences. However, soon after I met him, he sat down at a typewriter and recorded the experiences of his imprisonment. It was a closely typed sixty-page memoir, all the more moving because of the care with which it is written. Bart died two years after he had finished the memoir.
‘Success is not one of the names of God’
- Martin Buber
On 13 December I was sitting on a train heading down from Hull to Reading to stand trial, alongside Hannah, Ellis, John and Gillian, for our nonviolent direct action against Trident at AWE Burghfield. We were pretty certain that, barring some kind of miracle, we would lose.
If you live within reach of London, you have less than a month to hotfoot it round to the British Museum, and, in their ‘South Africa: The art of a nation’ exhibition, see one of the most surprising religious images of the late twentieth century.
Before Christmas I was lucky enough to see, in Edinburgh, Johannes Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the Scottish National Gallery. It confirmed to me the idea of this series. My choices, in selecting twelve images of Christ, are bound to be personal, so where better to start than with Jesus’ encounter with two women – and two strong-minded women at that. The story of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Bethany, appears in Luke’s gospel (10:38-42) immediately after the parable of the Good Samaritan. Maybe this, too, is part of the answer to the question that was posed to Jesus: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Is the more neighbourly act to sit and listen to this visiting preacher, who has unexpectedly dropped by, or to set about putting a meal on the table?
It was the year of the Russian Revolution; the year the United States entered the war; the year of the advance into Palestine with the surrender of Jerusalem to the Allied forces, and the declaration by the British government of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations; the year of the Irish Convention; and the year the House of Commons adopted a large measure of woman’s suffrage.
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