Martin Henry

Two girls, part of the 82 per cent females at the University of the West Indies, (UWI) ahead of me in the bookstore line, were discussing Archbishop Sentamu's visit to Jamaica. Actually, one was telling the other about it. She ended sweetly, "I like him".

That's pretty cool for an archbishop coming from a teenager - and one at university. Universities, many of them founded to foster faith, have become notorious destroyers of faith with bogus 'reason'.

Archbishop Sentamu is visiting a highly religious country - the murders are no indication - coming from one which no longer is. Atheism has always been a minority religion. In fact, the tiniest world faith. Not too many people deny the existence of God. And those, a man of faith in God, in the Hebrew Psalms, describes with rough directness as fools - asses, if you will.

God is rather hard to miss in the universe he has created. A thoughtful professor of engineering just recently pointed out in a conversation that the unexpected changing structure of iron when heated, which allows atoms of other elements to slip into the lattice, seems to have had steelmaking in mind. And iron just happens to be the most abundant metal in the earth's crust. Steel is the metallic foundation of modern civilisation. The Professor sees God in iron and we got to talking about this anthropic principle in nature - the idea growing in 'scientific' respectability that a super mind designed a world to be inhabited and used by creative humans.

What is far more popular than outright atheism is ignoreGodism. But people do worship - everyone. More and more in an age of comparative abundance people are worshipping the God of Work, among others. In a 24/7 world wanting a dedicated day of rest and worship off is tantamount to treason against the economy in which 'workers' are to live and move and have their beings. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached a powerful sermon, "The Man who was a Fool", on Jesus' parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12. The sermon appears in King's "Strength to Love, the manuscript of which was produced here in Jamaica. This rich man, King said, was a fool "because he failed to realise his dependence on God". And the richer he became materially, the poorer he became intellectually and spiritually. "Without dependence on God our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest night", the Baptist preacher warned. "May it not be," King mused, "that the 'certain rich man' is Western civilisation?"

The hypocrisy and sins of the Church have been a big turn-off from Christian faith. It might have been a bit comical to see a black African, now the second highest primate in the Church of England, apologising for the role of the church in the transatlantic trade in Africans but for the transcendent power of the Gospel. Men are not at university, and men are not in church. The mamaisation of the church has been offered as one reason behind the turn-off of men.

Patient burden-bearer

As every Jamaican knows, an ass is quite different from a donkey. While an ass is just stubbornly stupid, a donkey is a patient burden-bearer. The Archbishop of York, dressed in his self-styled 'funny' sacerdotal garments sees himself and his brother bishops - and indeed all Christians - as merely a donkey, like the one which Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. A donkey "taking Jesus to places where there is no love, where there is no hope, where there is no justice."

That's cool. What a message for this strange land Jamaica where so much hatred, violence, hopelessness and injustice rub shoulders with love, mercy, grace and faith!

In an age of overweening pride and self-sufficiency, the majority outside and inside communities of faith are more willing to be asses than donkeys.

There is just sweet - very sweet - historical irony in the black second-ranking prelate of the Anglican Church coming to one of the great spiritual centres of the world, via Africa, from a post-Christian wasteland of faith as an apostle of atonement, peace and love.