We have watched with interest today, the first anniversary of the London bombings on July 7 2005. Particularly we have noted that the Rev Julia Nicholson is still angry and unforgiving.  The Rev Nicholson resigned as a priest when the message of forgiveness and turning the other cheek she had preached for so long to her flock, had become impossible for her to practice when her own daughter was murdered in the bombings.  (see:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/07/nichol07.xml)

In fairness to the good Vicar of St Aidan with St George, she has run up against the same brick wall that many other have with Christianity: that it requires its adherants to deny human nature.  Christianity asks us to forgive the unforgiveable and to render ourselves and our loved ones in subordination to anyone who chooses to wrong us.  The message of Christianity is to suffer and to continue to suffer.  This of course regardless of actual scripture (did Christ forgive the moneylenders and persuade them to leave the temple of their own volition?) and is simply the politics of control.  Christianity in its world religion form is simply the most ruthless method of mass control ever established, how else could you sublimate a mother’s natural rage over her murdered child?

When we lose our right to anger and the thirst for retribution, we stop becoming human beings and become,  not like the angels, but like thralls, fearing our own rage in case we anger a wrathful and childish god.

The Rev Nicholson said earlier this year: “Can I forgive them for what they did?  No, I cannot.  And I don’t wish to.”

Good for her... she has taken a step into a bigger world, where she can own her own rage and grief.