Tower and Town, March 2015 (view the full edition)Clergy Letter: Blue Plaques - For All?It is an enjoyable exercise to imagine which of our contemporaries might warrant a blue plaque in the future. Sometimes we can anticipate that someone is going to achieve great things, more often I suspect we are surprised by who it is that ends up in the limelight. Although it falls to very few of us to be remembered with any kind of a plaque, let alone a blue one, it falls to all of us to be remembered in one way or another. On the whole it is true to say that we have very little influence on how we will be remembered; most of us don’t write autobiographies! Furthermore, so often we don’t know the impact we have on others – positive or negative. As it has been said, No matter how we may be remembered, nor how little there may seem to be said about us, people of faith live with the conviction that we are all precious to, and loved by, God. An ordinary life is still a precious one. In God’s dispensation there are blue plaques for all. I remember someone talking once about the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and referring to the ‘Call of the 4,988’. There were the twelve disciples who we know about and the vast crowd of others who were there to be fed. The 4,988 had a vital role in God’s story. Sometimes we might find ourselves amongst the twelve, at other times we might be in the crowd. We can be faithful and fulfilled in either role. The well-known lines from the very end of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch come to mind: For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. I like the thought that on the unvisited tombs of the world, God bestows his own blue plaque. Andrew Studdert-Kennedy |