Stealing Breakfast and Other Tiny Sins

Gracie:  Speaking of illegal, have you ever, like, committed a crime?

Cheryl:  Yes. Yes, I did.

Gracie:  Go on.

Cheryl:  One time, I stole red underwear from the department store. My mother wouldn’t buy them; she said they were Satan’s panties.

Gracie:  So is that it?

Cheryl:  Yeah.

Miss Congeniality (2000)

A tasty-looking breakfast. Ooh, I’m hungry now.

I’m spending a few weeks this summer staying in a Cambridge college, while I’m working nearby.¹ It’s a pretty good way of getting a little sample of some of the nice bits of the Cambridge university experience – being surrounded by beautiful architecture, views over the quadrangle, free access to the college grounds, meals in the impressive high-ceilinged dining hall, that sort of thing – without having to actually, you know, study at Cambridge and consequently die from sheer volume of work.² Taking meals in hall turned out to be a bit more confusing than I had anticipated, however: when I first went in to breakfast, I was mistaken for an attendee on the college international summer school, and guided through the available selection of comestibles under the assumption that I had already paid for all of it as part of my summer school fees. Not realising at the time that said mistake had been made, I in turn assumed that breakfast must come included with my accommodation. It was only later, upon rereading some of the information I had been given upon my arrival, that I realised this wasn’t the case; I should have been paying for breakfast after all.

Wow, Anne, what a stupendously interesting story. No wonder you never blog about things that happen in your life is this is your latest nominee for Thrilling Anecdote of the Week. Where the heck are you going with this?

The thing is, it would have been really, really easy just to keep on acting as if I were on the summer school programme, taking my breakfast, melting into the crowd, and never handing over a penny. I didn’t even know how to pay for my breakfast. I would have to ask someone, and that was bound to be awkward, and frankly I was paying enough for my accommodation already, and if I was ever challenged on the matter, I could claim, quite truthfully, that I had been told I didn’t need to pay for anything except the special extra snazzy items in the fridges at the sides of the room. Nobody would be able to convict me of anything.

It would have been really, really easy. And that’s why I fell asleep praying fairly fervently that God would enable me to overcome the temptation.

Really? All of the massively important things you could have been praying about – all the much, much more serious sins to which you capitulate on a daily basis – and the subject of your desperate entreaty to your almighty Lord was that he would empower you to resist taking a couple of quid’s worth of food you weren’t technically entitled to?

Well, that’s kind of my point. It would have been really easy to shrug the whole thing off as no big deal. It would have been really easy to tell myself that my sinful desire to keep hold of my cash rather than rendering it to whom it was owed, and my equally sinful and probably more potent fear of coming across as a bit of an idiot (i.e. to whomever I had to ask about the correct payment procedure), didn’t actually have that much of a hold on me, that I could deal with the issue by myself and it wasn’t worth bothering God with it; he wouldn’t care. It would have been really easy to assure myself that yeah, I’d try to pay for my breakfast, but if I chickened out, it didn’t really matter; it was only a few quid, after all.

 

We’re talking under a fiver. Not that I could have paid with the one in this picture now that the new plasticky ones have come in.

But look here, if I’m not committed to obeying what God has commanded in a matter as small as stealing breakfast, how on earth can I imagine that I’m really committed to obeying what God has commanded in any weightier matter one cares to name? And he has commanded me:³

You shall not steal. – Exodus 20: 15

You shall not steal … but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord. – Leviticus 19: 11, 18

And you shall not steal. – Deuteronomy 5:18

And putting that in context (because there are other commands in the Torah that I wouldn’t claim to be under any obligation to obey on account of the whole new-covenant thing):

Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honour to whom honour is owed. Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet”, and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” – Romans 13:8-9

This wasn’t an issue of a few quid. It was an issue of whether I was going to look my King and Captain in the face, knowing full well the orders he had given me, and say ‘no’.

You know those Bible stories that never seem to get told in Sunday school, where someone commits some apparently minor crime and, on God’s initiative, suffers an uncompromising punishment as a result? I’m talking, for example, about the guy who gathered sticks on the Sabbath and was stoned to death (Num 15:32-37); Achan, who nicked a few bits and bobs from the sack of Jericho and was stoned to death along with his whole family (Joshua 7); Saul, who kept hold of some live animals from Amalek and was deposed from the throne of Israel (1 Samuel 15).⁴ These were people who heard what God commanded, pledged themselves to obey him, and then promptly turned round and decided it was more important to them to take something they wanted than to adhere to God’s commands. It wasn’t an issue of a few sticks, of a few bits and bobs from Jericho, of a few sheep and oxen. It was an issue of people looking their King and Captain in the face, knowing full well the orders he had given them, and saying ‘no’. It’s no big deal, they decided. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t need to worry about it. I don’t need to ask God to help me obey him; he doesn’t care. I can work things out myself – my way.

It’s probably worth my mentioning, incidentally, that even if someone has got the wrong end of the stick about what is or isn’t a sin, to do something one thinks is disobedient is, pretty obviously, still a form of disobedience, as Paul writes with regard to the matter of unclean foods: “whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”⁵

But it would be laughable, wouldn’t it, if I set about following that other God-issued command to confess my sins to fellow-believers,⁶ and the big confession I made was that I’d stolen a couple of quid’s worth of breakfast in the aforementioned manner. Or, say, that I’d taken advantage of the open barriers at the railway station to avoid paying a quid or two in train fares. Or that I’d illegally downloaded something, or failed to give due credit to a content creator whose work I’d used. I would come across as hilariously or perhaps unbearably holier-than-thou to confess to something like that as if it were some sort of major transgression. It would be like that scene in Miss Congeniality that I quoted above, where our FBI-agent heroine Gracie is trying to assess whether Cheryl might be the terrorist threatening violence at the Miss United States beauty pageant, and the worst crime Cheryl can recall having committed is the theft of some lingerie. Cheryl’s great confession is so trivial that she surely can’t be the culprit; she’s clearly far too good and sweet and innocent. Gracie was expecting some far more dramatic admission.⁷

I wonder whether we, as a Church, too often have the same kind of attitude: we get excited, for instance, about the testimonies of former murderers and mob bosses who have now come to serve Jesus, and shrug our shoulders at those of nice middle-class kids whose former, unregenerate selves never committed any crime more dramatic than, say, stealing breakfast. Similarly, when our brothers and sisters confess their sins to us, we are keener to reassure them that everybody does that than we are to remind them that in Christ they are not only fully forgiven for doing that, but empowered to stop doing that by the same power that raised Christ from the dead. And as regards matters like getting away with not paying for stuff, we sometimes even talk in the same way as the spiritually-dead world around us, as if getting the absolute most for ourselves and avoiding shelling out any more cash than strictly necessary is a normative and thoroughly admirable aspiration.

That’s not, I think it’s fair to say, the kind of atmosphere that facilitates the pursuit of holiness. What would we today have said to the guy who gathered sticks on the Sabbath, or to Achan, or to Saul? Would we have assured them that everybody does that sometimes? Would we have shrugged our shoulders and called it no big deal? Would we have internally (or externally) laughed at the triviality of their confessions?

 

Sticks. And consequently, stones...

I hope not, because the end of each of those stories demonstrates quite indisputably that, as far as God is concerned, knowing his commands and yet disobeying them is a massive deal. “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,” said the prophet Samuel to Saul after the latter’s disobedience, “as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.” And after Achan stole the stuff from Jericho, God caused his people to be defeated in battle, declared that they had put themselves in the same category as the people on whom they were supposed to be enacting his judgement, and stated that he would no longer be with them if they did not kill and burn the culprit and all he had.

Oh, brilliant. The most laughably trivial sin you can think of amounts to disobedience worthy of defeat, abandonment, and destruction. If that’s the case, how exactly does any of us stand a chance?

But that, of course, is precisely it. None of us stands a chance, be we former mob bosses or nice middle-class kids. The only human being who was never disobedient to what God had commanded was Jesus. He was obedient to the point of never committing even a sin as trivial as stealing breakfast. And moreover, he was obedient to the point of dying on a cross, experiencing every ounce of the defeat, abandonment, and destruction we had earned by our disobedience – our sins of all sizes – so that we might be spared it, and treated as if we had been just as obedient as Jesus was. We don’t need to be afraid that we’ll be subjected to punishment for our seemingly trivial sins – but we do need to remember that that’s only true because our King and Captain was already subjected to that punishment.

So next time a seemingly trivial sin suggests itself to your still-imperfect heart, please don’t shrug your shoulders and dismiss it as no big deal. If you are aware that God has commanded you otherwise, take the issue to him, because disobedience is always a big enough deal to be worth bothering him about. Pray that you would be able to resist temptation. Pray for a good while if you have to. Look over relevant bits of scripture and meditate on them. Remind yourself that Jesus died to free you from sins like this, that he has won a spectacular victory over them, and that he has sent you his Spirit to empower you to fight them. I can recommend this stuff because I did it and it worked: the next day, I had the necessary awkward conversation and paid for my breakfast.

A tiny victory over a tiny sin, perhaps, hardly worth mentioning. But from my perspective, it was an answer to prayer; a significant weight off my conscience; and a tangible manifestation of God fulfilling his promise to make me, little by little, more like Jesus.

Footnotes

¹ I’m doing a summer programme at Tyndale House, http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/, which is basically the best place ever if you’re an evangelical academic.

² If you fancy doing the same thing yourself, start here: http://www.visitcambridge.org/accommodation/college-rooms.

³ All the links: Exodus, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&version=ESVUK; Leviticus, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+19&version=ESVUK; Deuteronomy, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+5&version=ESVUK, and Romans, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+13&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Even more all the links: Numbers, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+15&version=ESVUK; Joshua, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=joshua+7&version=ESVUK; 1 Samuel, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+samuel+15&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Just the one link this time: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+14&version=ESVUK.

⁶ That’s in James 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+5&version=ESVUK.

⁷ I can’t find a clip of that scene, but you can have this one that also features an unexpected answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3st-Hai1y54.

Porcupines, Sheep, and the Chosen-One Story

“One day, a talented lass or fellow, a special one with face of yellow, will make the Piece of Resistance found from its hiding refuge underground, and, with a noble army at the helm, this Master Builder will thwart the Kragle and save the realm, and be the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times. All this is true because it rhymes.”

The Lego Movie (2014)

All right, folks, buckle up; we’re going meta this week. The principle of first things first, however, calls for a brief word of context before we get there.

Winner Takes All is a Doctor Who novel by Jacqueline Rayner,¹ which features a community of porcupine-like aliens called Quevvils who have a cunning plan to penetrate the stronghold of their long-term enemies, the mantis-like Mantodeans, by kidnapping humans, subjecting them to remote electronic control, and tricking other humans into acting as the controllers by pretending the whole thing is a video game, with a prize for the first player to successfully reach the centre of the stronghold. The Ninth Doctor and Rose quickly catch on to the Quevvils’ deception and set off to rescue the kidnapped humans, among whom is a teenaged nerd called Robert. Of course, I assign him the title ‘nerd’ in the spirit of one hailing a fellow, rather than disdaining an eccentric; Robert is even more obsessed with stories than I am. By the time he runs into the Doctor and Rose, the reader has already been offered a few glimpses of his way of looking at the world, which primarily involves mentally elaborating upon the mundane scenarios he finds himself in so that they fit with some sort of fantastical storyline in which he is the Chosen One, destined to save the day, win the victory, get the girl, and generally be the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times.²

 

So a Quevvil is like a human-sized, bipedal, alien one of these. Not that your knowing so is of any import for your getting the gist of this post.

But now that something fantastical really is happening to him – because if being held captive by giant porcupines on an alien planet doesn’t count as fantastical, I’m not sure what does – he finds that the manner in which he is behaving is completely out of step with the way any Chosen One character in the whole realm of fiction would behave in the same situation. Far from playing the hero, Robert has just been cowering in the corner with the rest of the helpless humans. When the Quevvils have periodically shown up to select new victims from their stock of prisoners, he’s been letting them take other people without a murmur of protest. He even let them take his mother. There’s not been a smidgen of day-saving in sight.

Then a police box materialises in the middle of the room, and out steps this leather-jacketed Mancunian declaring that he’s there to rescue everybody, that nobody else is going to be taken by the Quevvils. And, as an opportunity presents itself to step into unknown danger in order to allow the Doctor to carry out his rescue plan, something dawns on Robert.

But he wasn’t special. He wasn’t the Chosen One.

And even if he was…

He loved books like that, and telly, and films. He loved stuff where there was a Chosen One, a special person, a hero, and he loved to imagine that one day things like that would happen to him. But there was one thing he’d noticed, and that was that however much the hero seemed to risk his life, all the way through there would be other people risking their lives too, happy to give up their lives so the Chosen One, the hero, could live to fight another day, or do something clever, and everyone accepted that that was just as it should be. Often, the hero didn’t even know their names. He certainly rarely gave them a second thought, after the first brief regret of the loss.

Robert knew he wasn’t the hero, wasn’t special. But looking at this man, the ‘Doctor freak’ as Darren called him, he knew that he was in the presence of someone who was.

He remembered what the man had said about no one else being taken. Well, maybe he was almost right. He was going to put a stop to all this, Robert really believed that. So maybe one more person had to go, and then everyone else would be all right: Sarah, and her mother, and old Mrs Pobjoy and the rest. And maybe the person going would be able to help the hero. Maybe be able to give their life for the hero. Maybe be a part of the solution, even if they had to die.

It dawns on Robert that he’s not the Chosen One, the special one, the one who saves the day; rather, that person is standing in front of him wearing a leather jacket. And immediately, Robert grasps that he consequently owes that person the whole of his allegiance, his service, his commitment, even to the point of death. It’s not that there’s likely to be anything in it for Robert if he offers the Doctor his service, but simply that, faced with the Chosen One destined to save the day – which Robert truly believes the Doctor is – there is no choice but to offer one’s service. That’s the only right thing to do, the only way to belong to the solution instead of the problem, and, frankly, the Chosen One warrants it. Everyone else is just cowering in the corner, helpless to bring about his or her own rescue; only the Chosen One can make such a rescue happen. Total allegiance and service and commitment are owed him, simply because he is the only hope.

Robert gets this because he’s read a lot of Chosen-One stories. Those of us who have also read a lot of Chosen-One stories – and frankly, any of us who’s read (or heard, or watched) a lot of stories, full stop, is surely bound to have read a lot of Chosen-One stories – ought to get it too. But bring the concept into real life and the ultimate Chosen One of the story of everything, and I know I for one am prone to forgetting it.

I owe the Lord Jesus my full allegiance and service and commitment from the off. There’s a very real sense in which what I do or don’t get out of offering that service is neither here nor there; if I believe that he’s the Chosen One, the special one, the one who saves the day, then offering it is the only right thing to do. If I can see that apart from him I have no hope, but am just cowering in the corner, helpless to effect my own rescue from being a prisoner of sin, then to pledge my service to him and his way of doing things is the only way to belong to the solution instead of the problem. Simply by virtue of who he is, the hero of the story and the only hope, Jesus immediately warrants my complete loyalty to him. Even to the point of death.

But of course, it’s better than that. When Robert pledges his service to the Doctor, he isn’t expecting even to survive, even to have his name remembered, let alone to receive any reward. When I pledge my service to Jesus, by contrast, I can, by his extraordinary grace, expect all of that. Check out the following selections of the tenth chapter of the apostle John’s account of the life and deeds of the Lord:

But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out … I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep … My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.³

 

Sheep! There are loads of stock photos of sheep about, but I liked this one because of the snow.

The Doctor may not ever know Robert’s name; Jesus calls me by mine. The Doctor can’t guarantee that he will be able to protect Robert; Jesus guarantees that I will never be snatched from his hand. The Doctor may end up requiring Robert to die so that he might live to fight another day; Jesus was prepared to die so that I might live forever.

In light of which, how much more reason do I have to pledge my allegiance and service and commitment to Jesus than any fictional character has ever had reason to pledge these things to the Chosen One of his or her own universe? Simply by virtue of who he is, he warrants it, and yet on top of that, he heaps me with irrevocable, imperishable blessings that culminate in an eternity of immeasurable bliss spent at his side – in his service. Adelphoi, let’s take this seriously, and spur one another on to take it ever more seriously. Complete loyalty to Jesus – adoration married to obedience – is our highest privilege: it’s our most fundamental duty, and it’s our sweetest joy – because he calls us by name and he lays down his life for us and he gives us eternal life, and nobody in all of time and space can snatch us out of his hand.

Footnotes

¹ It’s probably my favourite Doctor Who novel ever, and that’s saying quite a lot: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Jacqueline-Rayner/Doctor-Who-Winner-Takes-All/14971523.

² The Honest Trailer for The Lego Movie features Epic Rap Battles of History, so of course you want to give it a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJGXsVHkhrk. Although I disagree with it about Song of the Sea (my favourite film) and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (emotionally destroying, but breathtakingly gorgeous).

³ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10&version=ESVUK.

God and Girlguiding 2: No Need for Bubbles

“‘Good deed’ indeed! Well, it don’t look like it to me, and I’ve no patience with these Guides – seems to me Guiding’s about the last thing they do.”

Eve Garnett, The Family from One End Street (1937)

 

The bubble thing will get relevant, I promise.

Right, myth-busting time: Girlguiding has never actually been a Christian organisation.

What now? But you said last week –

What I said last week was that Girlguiding has historically held to the importance of putting God first in one’s life.¹ I never said that it prescribed that the God in question had to be the God revealed in the Bible and the person of Jesus. And the reason I never said that is because it never did. Some thoughtful human called Leslie has compiled a history of the relationship between religion and Guiding over the decades (which I shall be plundering heavily for the duration of this post, with sincere gratitude to the aforementioned Leslie);² she includes quotations from a number of relevant sources, and records that the first Guide handbook, written by Agnes Baden-Powell (sister of Robert) and published in 1912, included the following assertion:

There are many kinds of religion, such as Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mohammedans, and so on, but the main point about them is that they all worship God, although in different ways. They are like an army which serves one king, though it is divided into different branches such as cavalry, artillery, and infantry. So, when you meet a person of a different religion to your own, you should not be hostile to him, but recognize that he is like a soldier in your own army, though in a different uniform, and still serving the same king as you.

Argh! Pluralism! Help! Run! Or at least, that’s something like what my brain did when I first read these few lines. Honestly, I could not disagree more. Anyone who does not worship God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does not worship the same God as me. Anyone who does not worship Jesus Christ as the sinner’s sole means of being counted righteous does not worship the same God as me. Anyone who worships a God who doesn’t mind being conflated with other gods does not worship the same God as me.³

And so I seem to have backed myself into a bit of a corner, really. On the one hand, I argued last week that Girlguiding ought to stand firm on its historic foundations; on the other, it now emerges that Girlguiding’s view of God has historically been quite incompatible with mine. Am I not arguing myself out of belonging to the movement at all?

The thing is, when one’s doing one’s best to live under God’s rule amidst a world given over to outright rebellion against that rule, things are bound to get messy. There are all sorts of situations in which we are going to find ourselves required to work together with, or under the authority of, people who don’t share all of our values and goals. Essentially, there are only two possible reactions: we can either retreat, in every sphere of life, into a bubble populated only by people of very similar theological persuasion; or we can get stuck into doing stuff alongside people of various different theological persuasions, pray hard for wisdom and godliness, and do our best to draw the lines as to what we will and won’t do or affirm in God-glorifying places. And if we’re serious about making Jesus known to a world that’s doomed without him, the first possibility simply isn’t a runner.

And so I wasn’t advocating, in last week’s post, that Girlguiding ought to be a bubble populated only by people of very similar theological persuasion to me. There are enough church youth clubs out there; that’s not what Guiding is for. Nor has it ever existed to convert or to proselytise. Members have always been encouraged to be active within their own religious communities, and any participation in religious activities associated with a tradition other than a girl’s own has always been voluntary and required her parents’ permission (even in the days when the only other activity for which parental permission was required was camping). Apparently, a 1985 leaflet called ‘The Religious Policy of the Girl Guides Association in the United Kingdom’ said this on the subject:

Membership of the Girl Guides Association is voluntary, and is open to girls and women without discrimination as to race, religion or any other circumstances, providing they are prepared to make the Promise.

Here, then, is the nub. If a girl can say the Promise and say it honestly, she can be a Guide. This, I remind you, was the Promise I made:

I promise that I will do my best

            to love my God,

            to serve the Queen and my country,

            to help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.

I made the promise, incidentally, on the same day as my childhood best friend, who’s a Muslim. When she said that first line, I have no doubt she meant something different by it to what I meant – but we could both of us say it and mean it. Whether or not Agnes Baden-Powell had been a pluralist had no bearing on the situation; her views weren’t what we were being asked to subscribe to. And so it’s clear that it isn’t remotely necessary that Girlguiding be a bubble populated only by people of a very similar theological persuasion to a particular girl, in order for her to be fully involved in it. Certainly I don’t want it to be a bubble populated only by people of a very similar theological persuasion to me. Equally, nonetheless, I don’t want it to be a cult of the self, either – and that’s why I object to the new ‘be true to myself’ Promise.

It’s a messy thing belonging to any earthly organisation when one knows that the only authority to which one ultimately owes allegiance is the kingdom of God. It’s messy even just to be a citizen of a nation-state or an employee of a company or, I would argue, a member of a church denomination; to be a Girl Guide doesn’t strike me as particularly any messier. Insofar as the things that the organisations we belong to ask us to do are compatible with the higher allegiance we owe, there’s no reason for us not to do those things. The beauty of the Promise I made as a Guide was that it not only allowed me to acknowledge that higher allegiance, but positively obliged me to prioritise it. That was more than enough, no need for the organisation to be a theological bubble.

So I hope it’s clear that when I call for Girlguiding to stand firm on its foundations instead of trailing sorrily behind the moving status quo, I’m not advocating that it ought to work for me and people like me and everyone else can shove off. A balance can be struck: one can stand for something without making that something so incredibly specific that one is compelled to stand for it more or less alone. Yes, that’s going to be messy, but so is belonging to any sort of collective existing in the present age. And hey, I’m a Girl Guide; we’re good at figuring messy things out…⁴

Footnotes

¹ You may well want to read last week’s post before this one, particularly if you’re a bit hazy about what Girlguiding actually is – link in the box on the right, of course.

² It’s generally a very good and informative site, but here’s the particular page in question: http://lesliesguidinghistory.webs.com/religion-and-guiding.

³ Try Isaiah 46, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+46&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Incidentally, the Guiding higher-ups are currently in the process of developing a new programme, http://stories.girlguiding.org.uk/ourjourney/, which is a pretty big deal and so I thought I ought to mention it at some point in these two posts…

God and Girlguiding 1: Standing for Something

The Pirate Captain:        Pirates? What pirates? Nobody here but us Girl Guides.

The Albino Pirate:          I’ve got a badge for looting!

The Pirates! In an Adventure, with Scientists (2012)

This is a post – which is, as it turns out, actually going to be two posts – that I’ve been meaning to write for ages. This weekend, however, proved something of a catalyst for my mind and typing fingers actually to compose it in that I encountered some New and Relevant Information which I will probably struggle to re-consult in future. In other words, I am getting this jazz down while it’s fresh in my mind.

 

This is the Trefoil, the symbol of Girlguiding in the UK. The three leaves stand for the three parts of the Promise; the star stands for the Law. Thanks to G Filz at clipartlogo.com.

Girlguiding, in case there are any of you out there who are unaware of the movement or perhaps know it under a different name, is an international organisation for girls and young women, founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1910 as a girls’ equivalent to his then-new Boy Scout movement.¹ I’ve been involved in Guiding pretty much continuously since I was five years old, initially as a participant (working my way up through Rainbows, Brownies, and then Guides proper) and subsequently as a leader, so it seems fair to say it’s been a pretty big part of my life. Indeed, Thursday evenings have in my mind become practically synonymous with Guide meetings – not that the programme for the girls in the Brownie and Guide units I help to lead is limited to our Thursday evening activities, as is immediately evident from the fact that this weekend we took a number of the girls camping, an annual fixture in this as well as many Guide units. The theme of our camp this year (and the name of the badge gained by attending) was Traditions of Guiding. That meant laying woodcraft trails through the forest,² lashing together camp-related gadgets using nothing more than logs and string, and learning odd bits and pieces about how Guiding used to work in days gone by, on which account our Unit Leader brought along a couple of vintage Guide Handbooks for the girls to consult, one of them from 1992 and the other from 1968.³

I was immediately fascinated. I love all the history-of-the-movement stuff, the traditions and the structures and the symbolism (the sorts of things that, on principle, I don’t allow my ISTJ brain⁴ to indulge in very much in a church context, and of which it is consequently starved and grateful for opportunities to indulge in in other contexts) – and so, when I got a spare moment, I settled down to have a peruse of these two snapshots of my beloved Girlguiding as it was in former decades. I found much that interested me, but, in order that this post end up something at least close to a manageable length, I’ll adhere solely to the relevant sections, namely what was said about God.

See, when I became a Girl Guide proper at the age of ten, I was required, like all Girl Guides throughout the ages, to make publicly the Guide Promise, the unifying statement of all Girl Guides throughout the UK, which, at the time when I made it, went like this:

I promise that I will do my best

                to love my God,

                to serve the Queen and my country,

                to help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.⁵

I was fine with that as a Promise. But apparently – unsurprisingly – not everyone was, and in 2013, after a nationwide consultation, the Promise was changed to this:

I promise that I will do my best

                to be true to myself and develop my beliefs,

                to serve the Queen and my community,

                to help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.

Spot the difference.

And I get that not everybody is happy making a solemn pledge to love her God. That’s obvious. It is, in fact, not even news. That 1968 Guide Handbook I mentioned earlier had a bit to say on the subject, in fact. (The Promise at that stage, incidentally, would have had its first component as to do my duty to God – that change was made in 1994). Essentially, the author, M. Elizabeth Brimelow, recognised that some people choose to live their lives without acknowledging God, but suggested that such people are severely missing out, and that part of being a Guide is being, as she put it, “alive to God”. This stuff wasn’t very specific or doctrinal – the concept of God expressed was, as I recall, basically limited to a good Creator who cares about how humans behave themselves – but it was firmly, unapologetically there. Brimelow went on to stress the importance of belonging to some sort of worshipping congregation, and encouraged the reader that if her family did not belong to such a congregation already, she should ask her Guide leader to recommend one to her – and this in a handbook which elsewhere exhorts girls to respect and adhere to the policies and traditions of their families (one of the clauses of the Guide Law back then was A Guide is obedient). In essence, Brimelow considered a Guide’s duty to her God to be of primary importance – a Guide without a God is, by her reckoning, no Guide at all – such that she advocated that that duty should be executed even should it stand at odds with other influences and authorities, as she was perfectly aware it sometimes would. She knew that not everybody would agree with her stance and apparently, she was OK with that. Apparently, the Girlguiding of her day was OK with that. It was OK with standing for something not everyone would agree with. In fact, we can shorten that: it was OK with standing for something.

Because, try as one might, one cannot stand for something that everyone agrees with. The new Promise was supposed to make Guiding more widely accessible, but even as it has opened doors to atheists, agnostics, and secularists of various sub-persuasions, it has shut or left closed other doors. Anyone who principally objects to the monarchy is still excluded, for instance. So, on different grounds, would I be, if it were required of me to make the new Promise in order to continue my role in Guiding. Happily, it has as yet not been, and so I count my commitment to the movement as continuing to be encapsulated by the version of the Promise I originally made. The substance of my objection to the new Promise, just to be clear, isn’t that I’m sulking in a corner at the removal of the word God, resolutely unwilling to give any alternative phrasing a fair hearing; it’s that I can’t very well promise to do my best to be true to myself when my Lord tells me to deny myself, take up the cross on which I am daily to put myself to death, and follow him and him alone.⁶ My objection is that the first component of the Promise is supposed to be about spiritual development,⁷ and it has been reduced to a commitment to the self and the self’s preferred values – an endorsement of our innate but immoral human tendency to obsess over furthering our own interests. Girlguiding has never stood for self above others; indeed, it has always encouraged a minimisation of the self and selfish desires in favour of helping others, being a responsible member of society, and doing the right thing. The Brownie Guide Law is still A Brownie Guide thinks of others before herself and does a good turn every day, and I don’t forecast that changing any time soon, but I deem it saddening that the new Promise sits so ill alongside it. Putting God first in the Promise made sense of the rest of Girlguiding’s values; putting the self first seems to me to contradict them.

On one level, I think we could all see the change coming. The trajectory was to some extent discernible from the 1990s Guide handbook I skimmed through at camp this weekend: therein the commitment to God was still upheld, but in slightly more embarassed tones, allowing that people have different ideas about God; the decision not to belong to a worshipping congregation was also legitimised. But surely such concessions were hardly dramatically ‘progressive’ at the time? And surely even the new Promise is, in the eyes of secular society, only the inevitable eventual surrender of a stronghold that had already been offensively holding out for far too long? Girlguiding is big on tradition. Change, whatever the current spin placed on the organisation’s history by its central leadership,⁸ does not tend to happen very quickly. At the rate we’re going, the Girl Guides would seem to be simply following the path of society in general, many miles behind the cutting edge.

What if we were to stop trailing reluctantly after the crowd, and take things more M. Elizabeth Brimelow style instead? It’s not news that some people are going to be excluded from an organisation whose foundational pledge includes a commitment to God – but the fact is that some people are going to be excluded from an organisation whose foundational pledge includes anything, or rather exists at all. If we want to stand for something, we have to stand for something not everybody is going to like. Is making incredibly delayed alterations to that something, vaguely along the lines of what appears to be the majority view, really the most attractive possibility we can come up with?

I’m not trying to whine here: If Girlguiding had always had at its heart something I fundamentally disagreed with, then it wouldn’t have been fair for me to have expected to find room within its ranks. But I did find room, and I grew to feel quite at home in it, and all in all the whole movement has become very dear to me – and so now, I would much rather see it take a stand on the foundations that made it great, than abandon them under a false premise of inclusivity.

Footnotes

¹ Official website: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/.

² Robert Baden-Powell has the symbol for ‘I have gone home’ on his gravestone, which is one of my favourite things. Seriously thinking about copycatting…

³ You can get copies of the 1968 one on AbeBooks: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-guide-handbook/author/m-elizabeth-brimelow/. It seems to have become quite iconic, actually.

⁴ I explain my ISTJ-ness in a post called ‘Myers-Briggs and Morality’, coincidentally written this same weekend – first in July, Guide camp – last year. (I’m sure you’ve got the hang of finding stuff in the box on the right by now.)

⁵ The Guide Law then consisted, as it still does, of the following six clauses:

1) A Guide is honest, reliable, and can be trusted.

2) A Guide is helpful and uses her time and abilities wisely.

3) A Guide faces challenges and learns from her experiences.

4) A Guide is a good friend and a sister to all Guides.

5) A Guide is polite and considerate.

6) A Guide respects all living things and takes care of the world around her.

⁶ That chunk is a if not the pivotal point of the gospel according to Mark: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+8&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Interestingly, Girlguiding still affirms its commitment to enabling the spiritual development of young members (along with five other areas of development). I learned that in an e-training module I did earlier this year, so I assume it’s still current.

⁸ See what I mean: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/what-makes-guiding-special/our-history/.