From the Rector

Dear Everybody, hello again.

The incident where fifteen sailors were captured by the Iranians shows how damaging publicity can be.  The sailors were pawns in a propaganda skirmish which the Brits resoundingly lost.  What was very clear, though, was that the same story was not being told by the different sides.  There was the truth, and there were the stories.

The press have been enjoying the rumpus about whether the sailors ought to have sold their story.  The rumpus is good copy, especially with the possibility of ministerial resignations attached.  But hold on.  The sailors have sold their stories to the press, it’s the press that have sold the stories to us.  The sailors are also pawns in a circulation war between the newspapers.  As far as the small world of the press is concerned, they can try to get propaganda coups over their rivals in the same way that countries can.

We may think, sometimes, that it’s important to get our side of a particular story across, but it doesn’t always work that way.  Dealing with slander and libel in the courts is notoriously chancy.  And when you see a press retraction of a story, it’s a twentieth of the size of the original, tucked away in an inside page.  It can be worse than useless to try to justify yourself, or correct a story.  This can lead people to doubt the truth of anything that they hear; or else, to believe anything and everything, as long as it’s bad.

The earliest Christians had that problem with their bizarre story of someone rising from the dead.  Often it was treated as spin, or “they would say that, wouldn’t they?”  All religions now face the problem of being seen as one story among many.  But somewhere out there, there is truth.  And in the end, we are not justified – or otherwise – by what people think about us, but by the Truth.

God bless you                                       David Head