The truth and dignity of mankind are held up by the church. Freedom is the gift that God gives to us, which makes us the image of God and which cannot be surrendered. Together the worshiping and lamenting church asks whether the body of this country, Britain, is being broken and scattered, or gathered, restored, and renewed. In its songs and prayers, it asks whether any community represented in these markets is being built up here or demolished.
These businesses are the cultic shrines of the gods of this world. They feed on mankind, and for them mankind is continually hauled onto the altar, carved open and splayed. He is divided: half is acceptable, half declared repellent and discarded. The gods demand it, and their spokesmen insist on it. Always a new fraction of him is revealed as morally too hideous to be permitted: his inadequacy and depravity is surely holding our society back. Man is divided again and again, from work, friends, and colleagues, from his body, from wife, from children, from parents, from his culture, from the last generation and the next, and from the traditions that give him his identity and self-worth. The regime continually invents new ways of dividing him, determining which of his aspects are threatening to them and turning public opinion against them. Everyone must show that they are appalled by this newly revealed vileness and agree that we urgently need to rid ourselves of him. Everyone watches their neighbor to check that they are on the right side. The everyday functioning of media, markets, and the economy are a pagan sacrifice. Their whole message s that for the sake of economic growth, for the sake of the gods of this world, mankind must be sacrificed and, at ever-decreasing intervals, sacrificed again.
This pagan sacrifice must be unmasked by the church. It must travel through societies fallen prey to cults, paralyzed by fear, convulsed by rage, vandalizing their culture and losing their mind. Our pilgrimage through these societies will be a way of the cross for us. As we bear it and suffer it, we will realize that many Christians in other generations have borne the cross through these streets before us. Their witness called those societies back to sanity and prevented the worst of their violence. Those saints gave their witness for us and were sometimes broken for us. At intervals on our procession, we arrive at a church or Christian foundation. We can celebrate in those places in which Christians in previous generations have reconciled their society and been instrumental in its healing. They are the wells along our route at which we can be glad about signs of the arrival of new reconciliation and wholeness in our society.
Worship and Eucharist chapter 4
