Weekly Reflection – Murder Most Foul

I have just started reading the latest offering from Richard Coles in the Canon Clement Mystery series, Murder at the Monastery. I do like a good murder mystery, and I have to say, the ecclesiastical setting of Coles’ books also please me, nearly as much as another of my favourite crime authors’, PD James. I am not averse to TV series either. Latterly I have watched the Sr Boniface Mysteries, and am tuning in to the latest series of Midsomer Murders – though I’m surprised that after 24 seasons there’s anyone left to kill in those rural Oxfordshire villages!

Crime, murder and the like can intrigue us and fascinate the human mind. But I have to say that personally, I prefer the fictional stuff to real crime reporting. Indeed, whilst the former entertains, the latter simply shows to me the wickedness of the world we live in, and what the human heart is capable of doing: destroying – or at least maiming – God’s beautiful creation.

Such realities were brought home to me recently as two priests I know have dealt with two major incidents reported in the national media, the first close to home with the road accident between Wakefield and Barnsley, and the second the atrocities this week we have seen in what was the quiet seaside town of Southport. Far from being intrigued or entertained by the capacity of human beings to hurt, intentionally or not, my heart goes out to those affected, and I ask myself ‘Why?’.

This article is not the best medium in which to develop a fully-thought through theodicy, but perhaps it is a good place to recommend a Christian response when we see these things happening in the world around us. And there are two things I think we can do. The first is to pray. However near or far we are from the situations, we can commend them to God in prayer. It may seem fruitless – how many times we have prayed for an end to violence in the Middle East or the war in Ukraine to stop, and yet these things persist. But prayer is essential. St Therese of Lisieux defines it as ‘a surge of the heart … a simple look turned toward heaven … a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy’, and in these situations we must be like the prophets, standing firm and summoning the people to conversion of heart whilst interceding for them, that perpetrator and victim alike may know God’s salvation, God’s healing, God’s peace. Yet as St Augustine reminds us in his letter to Proba, prayer must also be supported by good works – feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, visiting the imprisoned, burying the dead. So when the Son of Man comes in all his glory, he will say to us ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’.

Christians cannot solve the world’s problems. But we can respond in a Christ-like way as we seek to, gently but surely, usher in the Kingdom of God. I hope and pray that seeing the reality of the world ‘out there’ may not lead you to despair, but to your bedside, to your church, to the altar, to the place where you pray, and into the broken world where we can bring just a little of God’s healing to the situations we see around us.

Father Christopher