Imperfection
I thought of calling this address “Imperfection” since it comes with a theological health warning.
I have been a school boy (in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral), student, farm worker, office administrator, bus conductor (when I managed to get us lost on a bus route), school teacher, university lecturer (in law), army officer, barrister, diocesan chancellor and judge. I have even attended a Benedictine Monastery. But I have never been a theologian. When appointed Chancellor of the Diocese of St Albans I unwisely asked my then Bishop what happened if I encountered a theological problem. He replied at once: “I am appointing you to keep your feet on the ground, the theology you can leave to me!”
I am therefore probably the least qualified person to be giving this address.
Hence my theme of imperfection: we are human beings, we administer human justice, we are not divine, and we are not perfect. We do not always get it right. We may strive hopefully constantly to “be perfect” but there is many a stumble on the way.
Everyone knows what judges do, or what they think they are supposed to do, but few know what Chancellors do. Every diocese has a diocesan bishop. So, too, every diocese has a diocesan consistory or ecclesiastical court and the Chancellor is the judge of that court. Ecclesiastical courts date back pre-1066. In 1072 William the Conqueror confirmed the ecclesiastical courts and separated them from the secular courts.
Originally disputes concerning marriage, divorce, nullity, wills, inheritance, testamentary capacity and the like as well as clergy discipline and what might or might not be permitted in church or as part of the liturgy were all heard and dealt with in the ecclesiastical courts in accordance with ecclesiastical or canon law.
History since has seen almost all the work of ecclesiastical courts taken over by the secular or state courts. But the consistory court still remains (just) presided over by the Chancellor.
The real remaining work of the Chancellor today I find falls into two parts.
First, the formal side: The Chancellor’s jurisdiction is in respect of Parish Churches. Broadly speaking nothing (other than minor matters) may go into or be removed from a church or churchyard without a faculty, that is the permission of the Church Court. This in practice means the Chancellor mainly assisted by the Archdeacons and the Diocesan Advisory Committee and the registrar.
The second part is rather harder to define. I could describe it as pastoral or spiritual since in my experience Chancellors often get involved as impartial judges to resolve disputes or give advice, help or guidance.
I could give many examples but one will suffice:
I once received a petition from a lady whose husband had died and been cremated some 10 years previously. Her husband had been a devout Christian and his remains had been interred (in a suitable wooden casket) in their local parish church. She now wished to emigrate to Australia and wanted to take her husband (as it were) with her. She had herself undergone a change of faith in the meantime and had become a Buddhist. Her daughter did not want her to take dad. The two ladies recognised there was a problem. They also discovered that they would need a faculty to exhume the cremated remains of dad. Not wishing to undergo the unseemly and public spectacle of a dispute between mother and daughter, they resolved on a compromise and petitioned their Chancellor (me!) on that basis: they proposed to exhume the casket, open it, pour half the contents into mum’s handbag and the remainder they would re-inter. Mum would board her plane to Sydney and deposit the other half of dad in a Buddhist mountain cemetery in the Snowy Mountains. This has its obvious tragic-comic side but represented and represents a real human story. What was I to do? I proposed asking the Archdeacon and the local incumbent to intervene. For the one and only time in my life I was also thankful for the expense of the law. I pointed out there were considerable legal as well as theological obstacles in the way which had to be overcome even though both sides agreed on this proposal. I suggested I should have a court hearing and would welcome the assistance of learned counsel versed in ecclesiastical law. It might sadly all cost a great deal of money. Thankfully, I never heard another word. So far as I know dad still sleeps peacefully in the churchyard.
In Christianity, as in Judaism and in other faiths, it is the Law which, founded on the teachings of that faith has provided a framework for our moral and religious life. This is not just a bottom line minimum of the standards that can be expected from everyone, having an element of social control which if we fail to keep we can expect to be punished. Law has reflected the embodiment of religious ideals and has helped to set the boundaries of our social cohesion as well as setting our visions and aspirations. It stands on recognition of human imperfection and strives to find ways of dealing with such imperfection and improving life. At the end of the day all disputes and differences whether public or private, civil or criminal involve of course human beings with all their foibles, prejudices, hopes, fears and aspirations. Without an understanding of human life in all its diversity and manifestations, how can judges judge disputes involving human beings?
Judges are often accused of having no idea of real human life or its imperfections or unfairness. Given the work they do in dealing with all aspects of human life in criminal and civil and family courts I find this strange.
One circuit judge some years ago demonstrated his recognition of life’s foibles in graphic terms. On sentencing a defendant to prison he was called a rude word (I leave the word to your imagination) by the hapless prisoner. The judge riposted: “In a short while I am going home to a good dinner. I shall spend the evening reading in front of a fire before retiring to a comfortable bed with my wife. You, thanks to your own greed, will be taken in a van to prison where you will have to slop out every day, eat prison food and stare at the same blank walls for the next two years. Now which of us would you say was the bigger …. ?”
Viktor Frankl, the American psychotherapist, once described wisdom as “knowledge plus: knowledge – and the knowledge of its own limits”. Without knowledge of our own limitations and imperfections and the imperfection of the justice we administer how can we understand, assess and make allowances for those of others? To understand ourselves we need insight to ourselves, the insight which comes from a spiritual basis for living. I must be careful here because recognition of imperfections in oneself and in others is not a general licence to go round telling other people how to behave (however tempting!). What I mean is that we need that true recognition and acceptance that to err is human, only God may forgive.
Let me put this another way: In relation to law Jesus stands in the traditions of Judaism but his distinctiveness is that he takes what was a minority reading in interpreting the law. When a lawyer stood up to ask him about what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus replied, in effect, keep the commandments: Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. The arrogant lawyer wanting to justify himself asked the question well known to all lawyers with memories of snails being found in ginger beer bottles (non-lawyers can ask their lawyer friends as to the origin of this) “Who is my neighbour?” And Jesus told one of the best known stories in the Gospels, the scandalous story of the Good Samaritan in which the person who was neighbour to the man who fell among thieves was not the priest or the Levite, religiously good men, but the Samaritan, the despised outsider. To make the point plain Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which of the three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” So much were the Samaritans despised that the lawyer was unable even to say his name. “The one who showed mercy”, he said; to which Jesus replied, “Go and do likewise.” (The other thing this story tells us is that Jesus recognised the imperfection and lack of insight in the lawyer but simply encouraged him to do as the Samaritan!)
Recognising one’s own imperfections is a start to recognising not the imperfections of others but rather the universal imperfection of human beings. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “There is a crack in everything God has made”. Being human means recognising and accepting the cracks.
This is not a plea to my fellow judges suddenly to start going soft. Evil and wickedness exist and must be recognised as such. But I will stand up for the right of judges to show compassion and recognition of human frailty in individual cases. The judge may get it right, the judge may unfortunately sometimes get it wrong. That is the imperfection of judges who are themselves after all only human.
How therefore do we reconcile this with the passage in St Matthew: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect”. There are two aspects to this. First, for myself, - and I recognise I am here on theological thin ice – there is implicit in this the very assumption that as humans we are not perfect, otherwise why should we be urged to be perfect. Second, the word “perfect” can have another meaning, well known to lawyers. An order of the court in civil proceedings is said to be “perfected” when it is sealed and entered in the court register that is when it is completed in all respects. Thus the word “perfect” can mean “fully complete”. (There is support in this in that the Greek word from which the word “perfect” was translated is “teleios” which means “fully complete”.)
In short, in recognising our imperfections and those of all humans we recognise our state of incompleteness. And to be complete we need both to keep trying to lead better lives but also more complete and balanced lives: to develop our inner or spiritual life as well as our physical and intellectual. Life needs to be in balance or harmony and there can be no harmony without a physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual life. If we are missing any of these there is an imbalance and incompleteness. This is, after all, our life’s journey and there are bound to be many stumbles on the way.
It is human to be imperfect; it is in our imperfections that we are also human. We are not divine, we are not gods, and we are born and made imperfect. That is who and what we are. To recognise this, to do, in the words of the judicial oath, “right by all manner of people … without fear or favour, affection or ill will” surely we need humility; we need, as the prophet Micah said, to “walk humbly before the lord”, we need the recognition and acceptance of our own inherent imperfections otherwise the trappings of our status, our robes, our wigs, our gowns and retinues can lead to us confusing who we really are and what we are.
Reading previous editions of the Church Times over Christmas I was struck by an article on a modern translation of the Golden Sequence, a 13th century poem attributed to Archbishop Stephen Langton. Part of it went like this:
“What is soilèd, make thou pure;
What is wounded, work its cure,
What is parchèd, fructify;
What is rigid, gently bend;
What is frozen, warmly tend;
Strengthen what goes erringly.”
Not a bad prayer for judges.
Roger Kaye QC
Chancellor of the Dioceses of Hereford, St Albans
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