Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Today, Daisaku Ikeda the leader of a Buddhist group Soka Gakkai International wrote a warning to members in the newspaper about scams.  A lot of people in his area have suffered from scammers, especially older people, who were more trusting.  Workmen pretend to offer services around the house, they might see that your roof needs mending or tell you that the next time it rains you’ll get a serious leak. Old people imagine being wet and catching cold, and they are frightened. Feeling as if they should act quickly, they give money for these scam builders to buy materials. Contracts of course are worth nothing unless the person who signs it is honest. A criminal will sign a false name and disappear with your money.

However much we warn people, ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is’, hope somehow still triumphs over both experience and common sense. Although I am very sensible, and my Dad taught me from an early age not to buy from a cold seller, I sometimes find that I am reproaching myself for not buying a lottery ticket or phoning an expensive phone line.

     ‘You can’t win,’ I tell myself, ‘If you don’t enter.’ The odds are stacked against me nonetheless, and it would almost certainly be a waste of my money. Almost certainly. It’s the almost that gets us!

In previous communications, Daisaku Ikeda has advised us to ‘gargle regularly in order not to catch colds’ and to ‘get home early on dark nights’.  If only I had taken heed of the former! For the past week I have been unable to speak, with a sore throat, a virus I caught from the hundreds of children I see each week when I’m teaching.  Most years I do follow his advice, on the basis that it seems sensible. This year I outwitted myself again and decided that, since I never get throat infections, it must be because I am lucky, as oppose to because I usually do what he says and gargle, ‘just in case.’ Like the rest of mankind, I am my own worst enemy.

As I was cooking yesterday, my husband found himself delirious with married bliss. He now has a wife who is unable to speak or make any noise. I can barely tut. All I can do is cook and do the washing, and am easily satisfied by his occasional trip to the chemist to get more throat medicine.  I am trying to perfect a silent glower, as famously used by my mother in law when she finds spare particles of dust on the shelves for example, or realises we’ve bought the kind of washer-dryer that Which magazine expressly told us was the worst one, and complain that it keeps breaking down.

To return to the main point of this week’s article, what is the role of a religious leader? How can you tell if someone with a position of authority within a church, mosque or temple is a genuine spiritual person, a cynic just doing their job, a megalomaniac after political power, or a genuine but inadequate person, perhaps experiencing doubt or difficulties themselves at the present time? After all, we are all human beings, just the same (except the Pope, of course, who is divinely inspired).

In the past your local religious leader would control most areas of your life. You would, for example, take advice on how to live happily married before the wedding.  People did this even with priests who could never marry, as if they would have good advice on marriage!

In England, famously, as the novelist Jeannette Winterson repeated gaggles in her magnificent novel ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’, the protestant church required that married couples had sex through a sheet (you need scissors to prepare this. I have never tried it but it sounds quite kinky, although I think the intention is to avoid taking pleasure from the flesh).  They insisted for centuries on the ‘Missionary Position’ (man on top) and not because it is the most pleasurable, but the most pragmatic to conceive a baby, which should be the sole reason for sexual activity among Christian folk. It is still illegal in some American States to use any other position.  I can’t help but imagine policemen who regularly patrol bedroom windows to keep a check on this sort of thing.

Although generally we modern people would rarely consider it the religious leader’s role to advise us on how to ‘do it’, some religious groups still have extremely detailed stipulations about what constitutes immoral homosexual practise for example, including that it’s OK to think about it as long as you don’t intend to ever do it, which strikes me as a hypocritical and also mentally unhealthy position to adopt (sic not intended).  In deference to my readers, however, we will let that drop, as I know some of you don’t like to think about it, and I wouldn’t want you to waste any more time writing hate mail on my account.

No religious leader in history has ever held any opinion about ‘women on women’, because religious leaders are usually male and can’t really imagine it. Being completely outside society’s scope is one of the advantages of being a member of the weaker sex.

I always expect religious leaders to oppose war, on the basis that most religions disapprove of war and killing, or expressly forbid it. Buddhism doesn’t actually ban killing, it just reminds us that every cause has an effect, so we mustn’t expect to get away with it. Christianity, however, is absolutely straight about this, as Jesus was against violence in all its forms, even though his country was occupied by a foreign army (the Romans). He bad Peter to put up his sword and not save him, and refused even to defend himself with words at his trial. So I always expect Christian Bishops and so on to oppose wars, but they never do. I can’t think of a Pope or an Archbishop who disagreed with his country about war, and how can this be?

As in the case of scams, perhaps, people are astonishingly able to deceive themselves when they think they themselves will profit, evben when they still consider themselves to be part of a faith which says the opposite. The clearest example of this in recent perhaps is our very own Tony Blair, responsible personally for more wars than any other Prime Minister in British history, yet professing to hold deep Christian faith. His conscience nevertheless must have led him to convert to Catholicism after he left office.

 I suppose that, rather than spouting rules at us which they themselves may or may not give us a good example of, a true religious leader would probably be someone who encourages us to be ourselves, to have the clarity and courage to think clearly about how to live our own life, for ourselves and others, according to our understanding, and to take care of our own life, our family, and our community.

 So, with the best of intentions, may I remind you to beware of scams, my dearest reader, and gargle daily.

1207 words

Jill Rees

17 November 2008 

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Tags: hypocrisy, pacifism, religious leaders, sexual practices and the Church