“There is nothing either good or bad…”
To those of us who were taught other languages through traditional grammar, the dread word conjugate is the stuff of nightmares. Je suis, tu es, il est, we laboriously intoned. Far more entertaining is to play with the form and come up with sequences like I am firm; you are obstinate; she is pig-headed, or We are freedom fighters; you are guerrillas; they are terrorists.
Then who is right? Are we to agree with Hamlet that, "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"?
Our perceptions may be nurtured by ignorance, arrogance or wilful blindness, seldom by objective truth (and indeed in many situations there is no such thing as 'objective truth'). In a world so diverse, so complex, compromise and cooperation are the only possible way forward, the only way ultimately to avoid our all killing each other.
So we see our Coalition government struggling to accommodate people and ideas that they would normally oppose. In the Lib Dem Conference last week, speakers picked their way, testing the ground so to speak, not only in order to stay in power, but also because compromise even without consensus is essential for stability. In Nick Clegg's phrase, "not doing the easy thing but the right thing."
Controversy rages as to whether Palestine's application to the United Nations for full recognition of a Palestinian state is likely to raise yet another obstacle to negotiations with Israel. One gets the feeling that in this intractable confrontation both are saying to the rest of the world, We are in the right; you are ignorant; they are in the wrong.
So, in our relativist culture, is everything largely a matter of perception? Are absolutist claims not only false but dangerous? This is the Church's current dilemma. We long for striving peoples to seek the reconciliation that can only come through compromise; but at the same time we believe that we have, in Christ, the Truth.
We cannot compromise our confidence in the uniqueness of the Gospel. But perhaps we might try taking as a constructive starting point: We are human beings loved by God; you are human beings loved by God; they are human beings loved by God. And see where that leads us...
Helen Parry
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