Penny Lane
A Liverpool councillor this week suggested renaming some of the city's streets that were connected with its slave trading past. A number were nominated and it was only the fact that one of them, Penny Lane, had other, more positive, associations that stopped the plan in its tracks.
It's not just Liverpool. Residents of Colchester have tried to get Stalin Road renamed and a number of people have questioned the ongoing presence of Sir Henry Havelock, the general who played a lead role in the Indian Mutiny, in several street names and in Trafalgar Square.
The question is, how far do you go? Should the many Martyrs' Lanes be renamed to avoid offending atheists? Or the numerous St Mary's Streets to avoid offending Protestants? Or the uncountable number of roads named after English monarchs to avoid offending republicans?
History might not be a nightmare from which we wish to awake, but it can certainly weigh heavily on us. Both personally and collectively, the past bears witness to words and actions that shame the present. How we manage it is a fundamental human question.
At one extreme, we do not: it manages us. 'There is nothing but the past/ Brittle with relics', the poet RS Thomas wrote in one of his (many) gloomy moments. The past tells us who we are, where we are and what the future holds.
At the other, we abolish it. Renaming streets is different to, but on the same spectrum as, erasing events, documents and people. We manage the past by re-inventing it or by pretending it never happened. Stalin Street is, perhaps appropriately, airbrushed from history.
Living with the past - recognising but transcending it - is more difficult. 'If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,' Paul wrote to the Corinthians. 'The old has gone, the new has come!'
But what does 'gone' mean? The resurrected Christ had scars where Roman metal had sliced him open. The marks of his torture and his triumph had not 'gone'.
But nor had they retained their power. They had been overcome, like the weapons that inflicted them, by the one they sought to vanquish.
Perhaps they, like the streets named after those who grew rich on the misery of millions, are part of the new creation: not as signs of celebration but as reminders of whence we have come.
Nick Spencer
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