Moth and Rust

If his recent visit is any measure, the Pope seems to have a bit of a thing about us Brits and our ungodly ways. Still harping on Henry VIII after all these years... Get over it, the Pope! (though I think he was probably mainly thinking about Professor Dawkins, and may have mistaken Christopher Hitchens for an Englishman).

It is true that secularism has made enormous inroads into our national culture. My children are utterly ignorant of even the barest shreds of Christian worship: the Lord's Prayer, for example, is not now taught at school (unsurprisingly, when a fair proportion of their classmates came from Sikh, Hindu, or Muslim families). By contrast, when I was at school, a compulsory morning religious assembly meant that even the most resolutely church-avoidant children (the fathers of several of my friends were communist trade unionists, for example) got a thorough steeping in the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible, and Hymns Ancient and Modern. No bad thing, linguistically.

The main legacy of those years of early morning indocrination is a stock of sonorous phrases, and reflexive associations. At work, I often find myself saying things like "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" and "Let thy yes be yes, and thy no be no"; the younger folk probably think it's Shakespeare. I have no idea why anyone would cast their bread upon the waters, other than to feed the ducks, but the phrase is branded on my subconscious mind, along with all those exotic names our Puritan ancestors used to lift from the Bible and inflict on their children -- "Oi, Abednego and Shadrach, stop tormenting Meshach!"

But, if this is any comfort to the Pope, it is not just Christianity that has faded from the national consciousness. I'm acutely aware that the Western, for example, with all its handy references and tropes, is becoming an unknown genre. On Sundays, when my mother and sister were off at the local Baptist church, Dad and I would settle down to Bonanza, Bronco, Gunsmoke, High Chaparral, Boots and Saddles, Cheyenne, Laramie, The Lone Ranger, Rawhide ... It is astonishing, in retrospect, quite how many Western series were shown in the limited broadcasting time available in the 1950s and 60s.

The cowboy obsession went way back to my Dad's youth, and seemed eternal, a rival set of metaphors to those Biblical ones. The advantages of the Navy Colt over the Buntline Special or the Derringer was the stuff of heated playground debates. Lone Ranger silver bullets and sherriff's badges were given away free in Puffed Wheat, and we collected bubble gum and cigarette cards of prominent cowboys and indians. You could have predicted the nascent hippies because we admired the indians more than the cowboys; I had a deep admiration for the apaches, at least as portrayed in High Chaparral. In later years, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Black Elk Speaks were among my favourite books.

Then sometime in the 1970s someone influential somewhere important got bored with Westerns, and science fiction and police serials took over that important moral low ground where showdowns and roundups had once taken place. My children, whose moral framework and inner arsenal of weaponry have been supplied by Star Wars, not High Noon, do not realise why Han Solo wears that waistcoat or carries his holster laced to his thigh. Does this matter? Times change; the message is much the same. Perhaps someone should have a word with Benedict XVI.

To every thing there is a season. Head 'em up, move 'em out!

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth
where moth and rust doth corrupt

(Matthew 6:19)

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light.

(Matthew 6:22)

But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.
If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
(Matthew 6:23)