How lonely sits the City

Every Good Friday the Butterworth Charity service takes place in the churchyard of St Bartholomew the Great. This is what I said this year:

“How lonely sits the City that was full of people!” laments Jeremiah, “How like a widow she has become, she who was great among the nations. She who was a princess has become a slave.”

Jeremiah has much to say about Jerusalem that can equally be said of the City of London, the City financial, in these troubled days. And those who first administered this Butterworth Charity knew what was involved in being a widow at a time when women, especially women of the middle classes, were not, and could not be, financially independent. To be a widow meant being dependent on others, on more distant members of one’s own family, if they had anything to spare, on the Church, on the parish, on the overseers of the poor.

The Prayer Book litany easily identifies those at risk, those in need of prayer and charity — all women labouring of child, all sick persons, and young children, the fatherless children, and widows, and all that are desolate and oppressed. The poverty addressed by the parish charities was absolute, in the absence of all state aid. As the state increasingly provided resources, the parish charities lost their immediate reason for existing. A number of them were amalgamated and formed into a new body called the City Parochial Foundation. Its offices are in this parish, just along Cloth Fair, into Middle Street. What is its purpose? This is what the website says: “The City Parochial Foundation aims to enable and empower the poor of London to tackle poverty and its root causes, and ensure that our funds reach those most in need.”

But like so many endowed charities — for it received the endowments of the countless small and large parochial charities — it is suffering in the financial crisis. Its resources are diminished. Its ability to aid the poor reduced. And 150 years after the overseers of the poor had to be make difficult decisions here in this poor and populous parish, outside the City walls, the trustees of CPF — and I am one of them — recognise the truth of Jesus’ own words “The poor you have always with you.”

The responsibility in the end comes back to us. In her “History of Jerusalem”, Karen Armstrong explains that religion must have an ethical dimension and the test of true spirituality is practical compassion. “This,” she says, “also applies to the spirituality of a holy place. Crucial to the cult of Jerusalem from the very first was the importance of practical charity and social justice. The city cannot be holy unless it is also just and compassionate to the weak and vulnerable.”

Jeremiah thought that Jerusalem had fallen to her enemies because she had forsaken God and done it in a most practical way — denying justice, subverting lawsuits, crushing the prisoner under foot, shedding the blood of the righteous. And he puts forward a requirement and a challenge to us all on the day of the Lord’s atoning death: “Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord!”