Dear Dad … 3)

Dear Dad,

I expect you’d be glad at the lessening of a formal unthinking (hypocritical?) chapel/church attendance over the years. But you’d be thoughtful and realise that the total loss of the Christian standards isn’t going to help, even if they were only being held reluctantly, superficially, unthinkingly. You’d found them explained poorly in many churches: now as then they are explained well in some, but few have a hunger to hear them, or consider.

But there is a greater insistence now in our land that everyone can decide for themselves what they want to feel is right, and that there is no objective truth. But a lot of people are getting hurt – not necessarily physically – and many people are left in confusion and lack of foundations, security and goals, which are ultimately hurting them. Free speech has become anyone can say anything as long as it’s not disagreement (though that be polite and thoughtful, honest, and willing-to-reason disagreement) with any new and minority view. Kindness and gentleness seem to be disappearing, and especially a ‘fear of God’ in the way of reverence, is generally banished. But not only is that a truth that all will one day acknowledge, but it is also a break on rushing into violence and selfishness. To state belief, and the morals of the Bible is assumed to be inflammatory, and condemnatory.

Maleness and femaleness is regarded as fluid by some – not that we don’t see variety in the outworking of everyone’s gender and biology – but there are a lot of unpleasant pressures around – as usual those who feel they are being persecuted can soon become the persecutors of any who dare question the rightness and wisdom of new attitudes and actions.

And even those in medicine can feel under pressure to carry out strong physical treatments that may be regretted later by the patients, and whose implications are far greater than they anticipated.

Many feel that women have the right of forcing medics to terminate the life of the foetus they are carrying, and a developing baby, or their father have no rights until the child is born, and not then if it has been torn from the womb.

When you died we found an old New Testament of yours with all sorts of little jottings in its margins over why hypocrisy in the church etc. I wonder what you’d write today. You’d underlined though John 6:68 [after ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ Jesus asked the Twelve. ] Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ and we put that on your funeral sheet and emphasised to the person who was speaking that you’d been searching for the truth.
Rhiannon

[IP: write to someone in the past or the future, describing and (hopefully) explaining something that's happening now]

(For the third of these letters, I had been working on trying to explain some of the moral pressures and changes of 50 years on, but not an easy topic, but, prompted by the current IP, I thought I should persevere.)