Love

"All love ends in bereavement"
wrote CS Lewis reflecting on the death of his wife in "A Grief Observed"

Anthony J Sargeant comments - Some who grieve may find this short book helpful

Love

"All love ends in bereavement"
C.S.Lewis (from 'A Grief Observed')

A reflection on the use of ‘story’ to tell the truth. 

My Grandmother used to say “are you telling me a story?”

meaning “are you telling me a lie?”

“Telling stories” has a bad press!

And yet there are true stories and there are stories that tell the truth

In a novel “Mourning Roby” by Helen Dunmore, Rebecca the young mother who has lost an only child is told, “sometimes the real story doesn’t tell you the truth.”

Anthony J Sargeant

Anthony J Sargeant 1944-1949: ‘Birth to Infants School’ - Memories? False Memory? Remembering Memories?

It is difficult to disentangle real events, real facts, real experiences, real sensations from our ‘remembered memory’, that memory which we successively and unknowingly edit and re-invent whenever we ‘remember’ the past.

So what do I think I remember of the earliest years?  - those years from 1944 until the age of five in 1949 when I started at Elfrida Infants’ School in Elfrida Crescent, just off of King Alfred Avenue on the Bellingham Council Estate in South London.

I have a remembrance of frequent power-cuts at that time. The power-cuts were due to coal shortages for the power stations in the severe winters of 1948, and  1949. It is an often forgotten fact that conscription of young men, not to national service in the military, but unromantically, to the coal mines, continued for some years after the Second World War had finished. These young conscripts were the ‘Bevin Boys’ named after Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in 1943 - at which time it was realised that the depletion of the labour force in the coal mines by conscripting young men to serve in the military was having a serious impact on the war effort. 

I remember the power-cuts because we would sometimes go round to my grandparents’ house in King Alfred Avenue, where we would sit in the kitchen at the back of the house which still had gaslight. Indeed all of the streets of the Bellingham Estate were lit by gas-lights until about 1950. Only when one got to Southend Lane the ‘modern’ dual carriageway bounding the estate on the southern and eastern side did tall mercury vapour street lights really ‘light’ the streets as opposed to simply providing the dim, but soft and comforting, yellow glimmer emitted by the gas lights – or at least they did until the power cuts extinguished their sharp blue-white glare.

Anthony J Sargeant Tony

Evolution and Religion

Religion and Evolution - a comment by Tony Sargeant

Natural selection favoured a rather small and inconspicuous group of mammals who would survive by working co-operatively in small groups.

These groups needed to communicate in order to work together.

The better they were able to communicate – the better their chance of survival.

As that ability to communicate developed so did the mammals need to express the need to be part of community – to embed the understanding that the individual was necessarily part of something that transcended its own individual survival 

That transcendent other is expressed in religious terms

Anthony J Sargeant