In the film “The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” is the following conversation:
"Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. I'd far rather be happy than right any day."
"And are you?"
"No. That's where it all falls down of course."
"Pity."
So in the past, it was the group (whether defined by beliefs, religion, ethnicity, family, language, colour …) which showed you the dividing line between those you had to love, and those you did not. Now the group consists of one, the individual, isolated from everyone else by many things, including Mammon. It’s a bit of a paradox, that even though we’ve all become isolated, at the same time and for the same reason, we’ve become all the same – beige. In order to reach out towards the Other, I need to have confidence in who I am myself, so that together we can make a rainbow.
In fact, here the Body of Christ should be a light to the world surely? Jesus told us that people would see that we are his disciples when we love each other: unity in diversity.
Europe is in a mini-crisis. Hilaire Belloc, the Anglo-French writer who was a conservative catholic from the last century, said “Europe is the Faith; the Faith is Europe”. What he had in mind was that Europe is built on Christianity – a proposition which would have been denied in the new constitution in fact. For the Elite however, the phrase has an opposite meaning, namely that our salvation can only be realised in the Europe Project, safe and bland. Happy or right … or a theory which has fallen down?