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A report was published this week after the sentencing of Valdo Calocane who killed Grace O’ Malley Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates in June last year. Their families’ grief is unimaginable, overwhelming, never-ending. The more so as the report identifies a series of ‘errors, omissions and misjudgements’, leading to the conclusion for many that this crime could have been prevented. Such a longer term review takes its place within a deeper conversation our society must continue to have beneath the immediate debates over political policy and health service funding choices.
Because just as influential on our common life as legal, economic, political arrangements are the underlying cultural mechanisms of belief, shame, stigma, and hope: the decisions that must be taken to protect individual agency and freedom alongside consideration of what’s in the best interests of the whole.
These aren’t purely philosophical or spiritual questions: they’re practical. Questions that demand us to exercise judgements - between respect for the agency of the individual, (emphasising responsibility as well as rights), and balancing this with the removal of that agency for various reasons: including when a person cannot, will not, make decisions for themselves to take medication that will keep them and others safe.
There’s not always time for these slower-moving reflections in the day-to-day speed of events.
In the case of the recent riots, it wasn’t just a ‘hot take’, as social media has it, that caused problems but wilful misinformation about who had perpetrated that terrible crime that had real life consequences for thousands of people. And in that immediate context, my rejection of Christian imagery being used in the rioting, for example, doesn’t prevent me wanting to understand in longer time the underlying reasons for frustration and anger, even while at the same time working hard at my church, to support people seeking asylum from other countries today.
Christian spiritual practice insists on holding every-day reality within the divine presence that eternally fills the universe with both dynamic love and seismic grief. And this spiritual practice prevents human identity in society becoming fixed or brittle or incapable of change. For any adult making our way through the world, life is complex and we move between, for example, ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ throughout our lives in more ways than we know.
Perhaps one insight from Christian practice that we can carry into the longer term debates over the sort of society we want to build, is that very rarely are we only victim, only perpetrator. Very rarely are we only one or the other. More often than not in fact - we are both.