The other day I listened to a chilling account by the BBC World Service European affairs correspondent, Oana Lungescu, of her experiences in Romania when she was a student. She said, "Growing up in communist Romania you carried around a terrible certainty - one in 30 people was an informer for the dreaded Securitate secret police on behalf of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. In 1983, while at university, I was invited to be interviewed at a travel agency, on the pretext of a translation job. It soon transpired that the man who interviewed me was a Securitate captain. He offered me privileges: a passport to travel abroad and the cancer drugs my sick father needed. In exchange I would have to spy on people I knew. I said no. It has taken me until now to see the file the secret police kept on me as a result of that refusal." (The secret files, 27 kms of them!, are now held at a special centre in Bucharest and Oana went along to view her files) -

"In April 1983, there is a type-written report on how I had refused to sign a written pledge to inform. I remember I had broken down in tears that day and said I just couldn't do it - but that's not mentioned. But on the very same day, a higher-ranking officer signed a document marked 'Strictly Secret'. It is a list of measures for my surveillance, including bugging my phone and opening my letters." (Oana found a detailed account, in hundreds of pages, of her and her family's private life).

Oana mentioned in her talk that ten years before the end of communism in Romania, "As the regime entered its final decade, people had been cowed into thinking the secret police was all-powerful. The Securitate controlled us through our own fear." A similar fear has happened at various periods of the Christian Church. If it wasn't the papacy it was the Scriptures read as literal truth about God the Almighty's pronouncements. There are Christians today in the 21st century who maintain as God's word to humankind that universal sinfulness and consequent guilt of mankind as a result of the fall will result in eternal punishment for unbelievers and eternal life with God for believers. This is surely a cynical statement about God, as well as of ourselves, that not only the perpetrators of a police state in the 20th century but also Christians in the 21st century can only see the human person as a sort of object either to be deprived of ordinary life or to be treated as outcasts of the 'holy society' of Christians?

Yes! the human person can become very twisted so that his/her humanness is no longer recognisable to us. But in the largest view of ourselves we live in a society and world which is good - which is not the same as saying that it is 'the best of all possible worlds'. Just when Vermeer was painting the portrait shown on this page, Europe was going through a series of political calamities while in England we had just suffered the bloodiest civil war of all time - between Christians! But the girl in the painting reminds us of the extraordinary vibrancy, dignity and worth of our common humanness. If we are of such worth then we must surely 'see' the divine through the eyes of Jesus rather than through our own clouded vision?

Diarmaid MacCulloch in his remarkable book A History of Christianity, and in the recent televison series based on that book, remarks on the fact that while in Russia the fall of Stalinism brought the people back to a conservative Russian Orthodox Church and that Pentecostalism is drawing throngs of people in Africa and in the Americas, Europe is indifferent to Christianity today. Maybe the Old World has grown tired of 'isms' of one kind or another? Particularly a religion which seems to find words in a book to be binding upon human nature and totally out of step with thought and life in the modern world. Yes, the Scriptures are important but in ways quite different to the past of our history. They are the witnesses to the God who was revealed in Jesus' life: the one who in his life and death revealed the humanness of an integrated life in love for all.

Perhaps our history challenges us to embrace the positiveness of our humanness - if not as Christians, then as those who look for truth and for the future and meaning of life. We may not be able to prove the existence of the divine - but the possibility of the divine as the upholder of our lives and as the vision of what is perfect, does remain as the inspiration for the many who know within themselves that their own nature is humanly the vehicle for a love beyond our imagination and can be shared with others.

May this Christmas be the celebration not only of the 'child', but of the Man who is close, not only to his friends - "I have called you friends" - but also to all of humanity of whatever persuasion - the Lord, who is also servant of all.

Copyright © Aelred Arnesen