Not knowing who the Beatles were in the 1960s would have had little impact upon the reality of daily life.  It might have left one open to mockery, but it would not have affected how one communicated, how one did business, how one heard news, how one went shopping, how one managed one’s finances, how one presented oneself to the world.

As great as the Beatles were, their influence did not change the way we lived.  The Internet, on the other hand, has had a profound impact in almost every area of human activity – it has, at once, shrunk and expanded the world.  Nothing is now remote, but infinite knowledge is now available.

Profound social and ethical issues are raised by questions that range from who controls information on a global basis to what intimate details are being shared in social networks.  Massive opportunities arise for those who are in the business of communicating a message.

Christians, reputedly in the business of being concerned at the issues confronting humanity and alleging that they have news to share with the world, might reasonably be expected to have some interest in the Internet.

In fact, serious Christians could surely be assumed to be running to keep up with all the developments.  Mobile broadband, Wifi hotspots, social networking, iPhone appliances: these are changing the way we live, the way we communicate, the friends we have.  Amongst the vast raft of complex issues, virtual relationships pose questions about personal morality; online trading poses questions about business morality; blog smear campaigns pose questions about political morality; the list is potentially endless.

Imagine yourself as a Christian who believed in changing the world: wouldn’t you be saying, ‘we need to look at these issues’.  Wouldn’t you be saying, ‘this is where our young people are; we need to be here’?  Wouldn’t you be saying, ‘there are an awful lot of people using the Net for an awful lot of thing; I think we should be there in the middle of it all”.

If you were part of a church committee and you wanted to engage with the 21st Century world, you would surely be urging that resources be devoted to taking the church to where the people are.  Mission work has shifted from distant lands to cyber space; but the church cannot comprehend that the world has changed.

The Church of Ireland so struggles with the 21st Century that this morning it approved the disbandment of its Internet Committee (a colleague announced this on his Facebook page using his iPhone).  Perhaps the committee had been very limited in its remit, and perhaps more might have been achieved, but instead of strengthening its resources and expanding its work, the Church of Ireland Standing Committee agreed that the Internet Committee should cease to exist.

It is a decision that is hard to comprehend.  It demonstrates a disconnectedness from reality on a par with the legendary magistrate who asked in the 1960s, “who are the Beatles?” More than that, it demonstrates a turning of the back on the world that Jesus came to save.

Some encounters are no more than single brief moments in time, others are repeated, but seem like a single moment.  Sitting, earlier in the evening, we had talked about the songs played at the end of discos.

“Did you have Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York”?

“No, we had Jeff Beck singing, “Hi, ho, silver lining”.

Did we though? Were there to be an inquiry into songs being badly sung by people who had drunk too much, could I testify that Jeff Beck’s lyrics were sung on every occasion?

Maybe we didn’t always sing Jeff Beck; maybe we sang him only once, and the moment became the mood felt at the end of every disco.

Maybe it was that Jeff Beck created a mood in which you escaped for a few minutes from the fact that the evening was over, and that very mundane life continued in the morning.  Was it that we were all pretending to be jolly as the refrain was raucously shouted?

Perhaps ‘New York, New York’ played a similar role in rural Ireland.  You couldn’t be much more removed from the Big Apple than a town in the Irish midlands, yet for a moment you could escape; forget about the boredom of everyday life.

Maybe ‘New York, New York’ was a more considered response to the reality of rural life than Jeff Beck, or maybe Irish teenagers of the 1970s were more cheerful than their English counterparts, able to imagine themselves in a different world, while we just sang loudly to blot out the things that annoyed us.

None of it matters.  We moved far from our respective worlds to be able to be sat in Bray on a spring night, but there are moments when one could write an entire autobiography in a series of songs; at least one that ran to the point where listening departed from the present to retreat into the world of nostalgia.

Maybe it would be possible to pick a playlist to express the moods of a life.  Maybe that was what prompted sitting on the table to listen on Friday night, while everyone else talked.  ‘Ain’t no sunshine’ would have its place in those years of teenage angst.

‘Keeping things ticking other is not such a bad thing to do’.

It wasn’t a very good answer. On reflection, there might have been a more positive response.  The point of keeping things ticking over is to be counter-cultural; to re-assert the values of community, to affirm those who have held on to a belief in something other than money and possessions in the face of rampant materialism.  Keeping things ticking over allows a rediscovery of roots. True radicalism is about going to the roots and building from there.

None of that would have made the slightest sense in a local newspaper, and is probably no more than a post hoc interpretation of a decision to move to the country that was really a matter of pragmatism, but the Lord moves in mysterious ways.  Maybe a rediscovery of the soul of the church, and of our community, needs to come from the rural roots of our parishes.

Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools suggests that Ireland never had the chance to mature as a modern democracy before being overtaken by all that happened in the past decade.  Perhaps, though, it is more than the development of modern political culture, where TDs are not glorified county councillors, that is the problem.

Irish society moved from traditional Irish Catholicism, through the experience of the Enlightenment (which took three centuries in Protestant Britain), to the current state, which is described as post-modernity, all in the space of one generation.

The South African writer David Bosch in his 1991 book Transforming Mission said:

The Enlightenment creed taught that every individual was free to pursue his or her own happiness, irrespective of what others thought or said.

This entire approach had disastrous consequences. The so-called openness of modern liberalism really means that people do not take others seriously – indeed, that they do not need others.  It follows that individuals can no longer take themselves seriously and that, in spite of the fact that they have the liberty to believe and do as they like, many do not believe in anything any more, and spend all their lives “in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to look into the abyss” . . . Too confident to acknowledge or draw on their religious roots, too urbane to be duped by the lure of some irrational ideologies, all that remains in the end is the embrace of nihilism.  Free to use their power any way they wish, modern humans have no referent outside themselves, no guarantee they will use their freedom responsibly and for the sake of the common good.  The autonomy of the individual, so much flaunted in recent decades, has ended in heteronomy; the freedom to believe whatever one chooses to believe has ended in no belief at all; the refusal to risk interdependence has ended in alienation also from oneself.”

There is an overwhelming sense of alienation within Ireland; particularly from the political structures that now place the burden of the greed of the super rich upon the backs of working people.  Alienation from the state is accompanied by alienation from the self-serving churches, which once provided community and interdependence.  People feel isolated and voiceless.

Keeping things ticking over maybe means the opportunity to look and listen and to find community and the values that made this country a special place.  It wouldn’t be bad plan, but would hardly sound like sense in the paper.

Trawling through the archives, a story was found about an encounter with someone not expected deep in rural Ireland

It was the summer of 1988 and I was driving on a road out of Galway city heading westwards. Having been an impoverished student not so long before, I was in the habit of feeling sorry for hitch hikers and picked one up on the outskirts of the city.

It turned out that he was an artist, making a few pounds by selling pictures of Galway scenery. He lived in a cottage halfway up a mountain.

We talked about this and that and, given the fact I was wearing a clerical collar, we talked about religion. He said it was something he couldn’t accept.

When we reached the turning off the main road for his cottage. I said I would drive him up. I had a little Austin Metro and I had to coax it up the winding mountain road.

When we reached the cottage, J offered me coffee and because I was curious about him, I accepted.

The cottage was as I expected. There was a stone floor; embers still glowed in the open fireplace; it was not very clean; the dishes were dirty and a woman’s clothes, including underwear, were strewn around the place; I didn’t ask.

Apart from a fridge, a kettle and a cassette player, the house could have been something out of a museum.

We drank black coffee from china teacups that had no saucers and talked about what had brought him to a cottage on a mountainside in Galway.

He had grown up in Co Tyrone. His father had gone to jail for membership of an illegal organisation. From an early age, he had been under pressure to support the cause. He couldn’t agree with the rest of his family, so he left home and school and drifted.

I asked him if he went home at all.

Every couple of years, he said, but it was painful. Going home meant threats, because of the people he mixed with and because he refused to support his family’s beliefs.

Two of his brothers were in prison, serving long sentences for terrorist offences. ‘I can’t understand it’, he said, one of them came to visit me when I was down in Cork. He was just an ordinary fella. Two days later he was caught planting a bomb’.

J had no time for religion, or the church, or anything that went with the; he saw them as destroying the life he felt was important. J’s life was lived outside of the law and outside of society.  He spoke warmly of the kindness and care he had received from people he had never met before. He talked about how he was trying to help a friend with drink problems.

As I rose to go, he cuddled a puppy and thanked me for the lift. He walked to the car with me and said he hoped I would call again.

I never did call.

You meet the most unexpected people in country places.

Simon Kuper, my favourite journalist, writes a sports column in the Weekend edition of the Financial Times. One need have no interest whatsoever in the sport in question; Kuper finds human interest in the most esoteric and the most mundane of sporting stories.

He wrote with a touching passion about the Dutch cricket team some years ago, a piece that does not seem to be in the FT archives. He knew many of the players and noted that they were coming to the end of their playing days. Kuper’s closing line was, ‘the sad thing is, five minutes ago, we were all fourteen’.

Kuper’s words came back to me this week.

A cousin announced her 50th birthday party for Sunday, 4th April.  Working in a parish, the date proves impossible, it is Easter, but the announcement of the party brought back many memories

Her father, my uncle, was one of those figures who would always loom large in a young boy’s imagination; sometimes he could be very serious, but often there was mischief and humour. His mouth would be set firm and then crinkle into a smile before a roar of laughter. He did things that other people wouldn’t do. He would get in the car and go on holiday in the middle of the night. He would shout with delight at silly situations. He would have no care as to what people with disapproving faces thought.

I think I went on holiday with he and his family three or four times between the ages of eight and thirteen. Visits from him were always a very welcome interlude in my very rural life. There was always an air of excitement when he was around – anything might happen. Even on my wedding day in 1983 he came to me at the end of the reception and said ‘Well, Ian, fancy going camping?’ At any other moment I might have leapt at the opportunity.

Pondering not being able to attend an ‘80s Party’ (I never liked the 80s anyway, bad perms and awful music) I thought back on the moments and smiled.  My uncle died suddenly five years ago. The memories of so many happy moments remain.

The sad thing is that five minutes ago my cousins and I were all fourteen.

If I go out and commit a crime, who is to blame for my actions?

In times past there would have been no doubt as to where responsibility lay, an individual would be held accountable for his or her own actions, no matter how harsh such a decision might have been. Your family might have been dying in poverty, but if you were to steal to try to feed them you would have been punished with the full force of the law.

The song so beloved of Irish rugby and soccer fans, ‘The Fields of Athenry’ is a ballad about a young man being transported to Australia for stealing corn to feed his starving family during the famine. Being transported was an improvement on previous centuries, when one could be executed for stealing something valued at more than one shilling

The harsh interpretation of the law in times past was clearly contrary to the Gospel teaching, on a number of occasions Jesus makes it quite clear that human need came before rigid application of the law – if your children had not enough to eat, then it was appropriate that you would do whatever you could to feed them. Movements for social reform in Britain and Ireland helped create a more tolerant society, and the law was applied in a way that took more account of the circumstances of the crime.

In the 20th century, social scientists, sociologists and psychologists, produced a series of studies suggesting that our circumstances weren’t just to be taken into account when passing judgment, they were in fact the cause, in whole or in part, of people becoming criminals in the first place.

We seem sometimes to have swung from one extreme to the other, from a situation where a person was completely responsible for their own actions, no matter what the circumstances were, to a situation where a person is seen as completely the product of their upbringing and environment, and is not at all responsible for their actions.

Where do Christians stand in this matter? The rather odd Gospel reading this morning can give us some clues.

A group of Jews tell Jesus about Galileans who have been killed by Pilate’s men in a violent clash at the Temple, and he refers himself to other Jews who were killed in another violent incident at the aqueduct that was being built at Siloam. Jesus makes the point that lawlessness and violence aren’t just the responsibility of these small groups of people. Twice he says to his listeners, ‘unless you repent, you too will all perish’.

Jesus is quite clear that crime and violence are a matter of concern for the whole of society and unless Jewish society is prepared to change it will be destroyed. Sadly, Jesus’ words were to come true in the disastrous Jewish revolt of AD 70 that led to the destruction of the Temple.

So, on the one hand, Jesus is saying that crime and lawlessness has a very strong social dimension and that it is a matter for the concern of everyone.

But Jesus then goes on to tell the rather odd parable of the fig tree that has produced no fruit.

The man in the parable says ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’ And he is told, leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’ ”

The parable of the fig tree forcibly makes the point that if we don’t make use of the opportunities we have been given then we can expect to be held to account. The fig tree has been given three opportunities, now it is to be given one last chance and then it faces judgement.

His teaching about the responsibility of the whole Jewish people to change is balanced by this very strong teaching about individual responsibility, if you have not taken the opportunities you have been given, then that is your fault and the blame rests with you.

Both society and individuals bear responsibility for crimes, but where is the balance to be struck? What Jesus seems to be saying is that when a person has been given ample opportunities, then they should be more sharply called to account. It is not the case that the fig tree has been given just one chance and has failed, it has been given three chances and is given yet another one. Where a person has been given many opportunities in life, then it would seem that Jesus’ teaching is that the judgment should be more harsh, rather than more lenient.

Confronted with our contemporary society, I think Jesus would show great disappointment at our society in its careless approach towards social responsibility. I think he would warn us that if we don’t change then our society faces disintegration.

But I also think that, in administering the justice system, he would apply the logic of the parable of the fig tree, particularly to those responsible for the misleading of the country through the financial crisis. There would not be different systems of justice for different people; there would be some hard words for them to hear. The individuals would be held accountable for their individual failures, as the individual tree is judged for its individual failures.

‘Unless you repent, you too will all perish’, Jesus warns our society. ‘Unless you repent, you will perish’, Jesus warns each one of us.

In the months that followed, there were a number of alarming moments.  Unable to find her car, she had gone to the police station to report it missing; the police had found it, in a different car park.  Her solicitor had met her in a light summer dress, walking the promenade on a biting winter’s day.  She had stopped going to the corner shop after the girl at the till had suggested to her that she had bought the same things earlier in the day. She had phoned the mechanic who looked after her car because it would not move; she had tried to turn it around inside her garage and had wedged it diagonally against the walls.

Phoning Pat’s doctor, we were told that we were being alarmist and that Pat was just a little forgetful.  Pat maintained she was well and would be down for Christmas. When Christmas Eve came, she again excused herself.

Further calls to the doctor prompted assurance he would keep an eye on her.  It was to be of no consequence, she fell down the stairs and broke her back and was crippled for the remaining years of her life.

The confusion seemed to arrive like a wave, sweeping all before it.  In hospital in Belfast, a lifelong Unionist, she instructed visitors not to sit in a particular chair as the Pope was coming.  She developed a story that she had broken her ankle and would be in hospital for ten days, but would be out and about again soon – a story that she repeated for the rest of her life.

There was no option other than nursing home care, Pat required specialized lifting.  The decision she should go into a beautiful home a few hundred yards from the house where she had lived brought the ire of her friends.  There was nothing wrong with her, they insisted.  She just needed time to build up her strength.  They brought books from the library that she never opened and writing paper that never bore a single word.  It was wrong that she should be in a nursing home, they said, she still got her Daily Telegraph each day.  She did, it was as pristine in the evening, as when it had been delivered in the morning.

Their seemed a conspiracy of denial amongst her friends.  When they saw that Pat was capable of neither reading nor writing, and would never return to her house, they stopped visiting altogether.

Perhaps it is the old stigma, perhaps people still have odd notions that being confused is somehow something embarrassing, something about which not to talk.  Who are they protecting?

Visiting a lady who has steadily deteriorated over recent years, another visitor was there.  Each time the lady spoke, her visitor cut across her, “What are you talking about?  What are you trying to say?”  The poor lady became visibly distressed at the challenges, hitting the arm of her chair in a muddled frustration.

Confusion, dementia, Alzheimer’s, are amongst the most common of illnesses, yet to admit someone was suffering is treated almost as some sort of moral failure.  Caring for Pat was made considerably more difficult by those who refused to recognize the truth; there must be many, many people who have had similar experiences.

It’s not exciting, groundbreaking stuff.  It’s routine, sometimes monotonous, but it’s what matters.

Looking for some time to be quiet last night, I travelled to Kilkenny where Katharine, dean-designate of the cathedral, had a meeting.  Wrapping my Leinster scarf around my neck, and putting up the collar of my coat, I walked out into the frosty night air, to spend an hour or so ambling the streets of the city and walking beside the Nore

My old friend Brian came to mind, as he often does at such moments; he has appeared here before.

He farmed amongst the drumlins of Co Down; a quietly spoken and reflective Ulsterman who had never more than a few words, but every one of those words counted.

Brian was one of those who appointed me to my first parish, some twenty-one years ago; taking a great risk in appointing a twenty-eight year old blow-in to a conservative and traditional rural congregation.  At the interview with Brian and his fellow parochial representatives, I asked what they wanted from their new Rector, Brian spoke up, “We want someone who will bury our dead, visit our sick and teach our children”.

Brian’s words hit home hard at the time.  This wasn’t the sort of vision and strategy statement that we had been taught in college; this was something from a bygone age.

Over twenty years after that first encounter with Brian, his words carry even greater weight.  Falling foul of the cult of managerialism, the Church of Ireland has all but disappeared in some places.  The belief that the Rector was there not to work, but was to “lead” and to “facilitate” has led to an abandonment of the workaday duties that Brian would have expected from his Rector.  The shepherd of the flock has turned his back on his charges to spend his days in his office; his phone is turned off or diverted after five in the evening.

Perhaps Brian belongs to the past, perhaps he is a remnant of the 19th Century, but Brian would have pointed to the numbers in his church – seventy or eighty per cent of the people in Brian’s parish attended church.  It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t innovating, it was plain and traditional, and rooted in the Rector doing the old fashioned stuff.

I grew to love Brian’s community; they were very different from me, but there was never a moment when I felt that I could turn away from them, never a moment when I would not have answered a call, never a moment when I would not have gone to a house that wanted to see me.  Perhaps much of my motivation was fear of a guilty conscience, but it wasn’t such a bad motivator.

The Church of Ireland is a church of many, many people like Brian.

Perhaps it came on an evening in 2005.  A group drawn from two parishes sat to watch a video made in 1999 on Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, one of the books near the back of the Bible. It was filmed in a well-known church in London. The church was packed. I know that this wasn’t just for the video; members of my church had attended there and had to queue to get in half an hour before the service.

Hordes of people sat absolutely intent on listening to every word that was said. They are filled with enthusiasm for studying the Bible and fired by a great love for Jesus.

We didn’t have hordes. There were six of us, two clergy, an evangelist, a lay reader, a clergy spouse – and a solitary lady who wasn’t part of the business of parish leadership.

Watching the video, I wondered where I went wrong. Where were all the people with enthusiasm in our area?

I was sure the man on the video had never had to help run a fete to raise the money to pay himself; nor had he ever never been part of a work party clearing the church grounds; or had to photocopy the parish magazine. His world was very different from the one inhabited by sloggers like myself.

The low point was a turning point.  Would I have changed places with him? No.

One of the things I believe is that Jesus had a place in his heart for ordinary blokes and women who are never going to be inside any of the evangelical churches. They matter to him as well as the enthusiastic crowds who fill the videos. Staying in touch with them was a struggle. It meant staying in a lukewarm world, it meant taking knocks and setbacks, and failing at most things you tried– not because of a lack of faith, but because people hadn’t changed in 2,000 years.

It was never about strategies or plans or programmes.  It was about people, people as ordinary as myself.  Life never fitted into slogans or titles; it was blurred and messy and vague.  Wherever ministry is exercised, it is the same; it is about the people.

We meandered down through the middle of France, staying in the Auvergne, before heading down to Argeles on the Mediterranean coast near the French-Spanish border.

Because it was such a lengthy trek, it is hard to remember precisely the details of the towns on the way. But there was one small town where we stopped for a picnic lunch. The place was quiet, the local children having all returned to school. Our son, Michael was just short of his third birthday and spied swings and a seesaw on an open patch of green near to where we were parked. He and I made for the swings.

We were there for about five minutes when a local man appeared from among the houses and started to remonstrate with us in fast, provincial French. The gist of what he seemed to be saying was that the swings were reserved for the use of the children of the town.

I did my best to apologize for my transgression at which point he exclaimed that as we were not Parisians, we were welcome to use the swings – and he turned on his heel and returned to his house.

It was an astonishing piece of prejudice; a middle-aged man coming to object to a three year old being on a swing because he thought that we might have come from Paris.  To have robustly disagreed with the man who did not like Parisians would have been perceived by the man as what he would expect from outsiders – it would have confirmed him in his position.

The man came to mind during one of those silly arguments that come around too often, where one argues a case one doesn’t believe because the other person has taken such an extreme position.  The other person sought to defend a journalist who in the past had labelled a community in Ireland as ‘animals’.  The position seemed indefensible, but instead of discussing whether it was acceptable to call people animals, the ground of the argument was shifted to attempting to justify the frequently anti-social behaviour of the community.  Once the positions had shifted, the battle became unwinnable.

The discussion raised questions about what constituted legitimate opinion and what constituted prejudice.  Had battle not been joined, the other person would have contended that while the label was unacceptable, the opinion reflected real and substantial grievances.  He might have argued that robust opinion and prejudice are very different things, and, had we not disagreed on the matter of labelling people, his approach might have seemed reasonable.

The line between robust opinions and plain prejudice can be a thin one.  Opinions should be formed on the basis of facts.  There would always be disagreement as to which facts are admissible.  Sometimes, though, prejudice is so blatant that it needs no facts at all; it is sufficient just to think something.  Challenging prejudice needs to take account of the sometimes irrational roots of thinking; otherwise one ends with a last state that is worse than the first, and those who protect their swings against foreign children believe they were right after all.