What I have to be thankful for

First and above all, I am thankful that I was born in the right place at the right time. I love England, and especially the England of my childhood. It was a harsher, poorer country then – I grew up in a city pockmarked by bomb sites and plastered with soot. But I loved the English people and still do: their honesty and forthrightness, their gruff, embarrassed kindness, their quirky humour, and their bloody-minded independence of thought. I would never dare to call myself one of them. I am British-born and proud of it, but I know I can never be English because I grew up in a home where a foreign language was spoken and foreign food eaten, where my parents so often prefaced a sentence with “Zu Hause...” (“Back home...”). Mind you, I have reason to be thankful for that too. I would not love my country so much if I had not grown up seeing it “sideways on” as it were.

It was the right time too, for a number of reasons. Firstly there was no antisemitism then, at least not in the circles in which I moved. There were, it was said, certain high class golf clubs where Jews were not welcome, but there was no antisemitism on the street. The stories of what British soldiers had found at places like Belsen killed it off for decades. Unfortunately it is now back with a vengeance. Secondly I grew up under a genuinely socialist government who believed in equality of opportunity. So although my parents were dirt poor, I still got a first-class education paid for by the state. I am so thankful for that. Without my education, I think I would be a very different person.

I am thankful that I had parents who loved each other and loved me. So many children don’t have that. I am thankful for the mittel-Europäisch Jewish intellectual background of my family life, the classical music that was constantly playing on the radio and gramophone, and the books that were always lying around. In those days I read about three books a week. So I am thankful too for free public libraries. It is sad that so many are closing down now because councils can’t afford to pay their running costs any more.

Gradually I’ve come to be thankful too for my social isolation at school. Of course I hated it at the time, but it meant that I wasn’t given the opportunity to sell my soul in return for social acceptance. So many people do that in childhood and I’m sure I would have done it like a shot if the bargain had ever been offered to me. So I thank God that it wasn’t. Because, as Jesus once pointed out (Mk 8 v.36), once you have lost your soul, you can never buy it back again.

Of course I was not any kind of Christian then. My parents were Jewish by birth and atheist by conviction. So I am thankful that I was spared the “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” indoctrination which was the fate of Christian children in those days. I believe that for many of them, this acted as a form of spiritual vaccination, ensuring that they never got the real thing later on.

I became a Christian at grammar school as a result of reading the apologetic works of C S Lewis in my school library. I am thankful that there was in those days a hard-headed intellectual Christian who could present the faith in a way that I could accept and absorb. I certainly would never have been converted by the kind of sloppy evangelical propaganda that I came across later at university.

I am thankful for my university education and for the fact that I didn’t have to go into debt to pay for it. Again, I was born at the right time for this. In the sixties, only 15% of each year went to university (cf. my blog on A-levels and the decine of education), so the government could afford to pay for us. Actually it ended up as a good investment for them: we more than paid it back in extra income tax from our resultant higher salaries. I spent my working life in scientific libraries and I loved the work. So many people don’t have work that they really enjoy.

I am thankful too that God made me asexual. I have avoided so much unhappiness that way. I have never had a broken heart. I have never had a broken marriage. I have never had to go through childbirth. I have never had to worry about my children being ill or being bullied at school or being on drugs or a hundred other things that break mothers’ hearts.

I am thankful that I was able to earn enough to have a modest but comfortable retirement. I am thankful for my parish church and my friends there. I am thankful that there are still traditional middle-of-the-road parishes like ours in the Church of England in spite of all the bishops and their wokery (and in spite of GAFCON and their bigotry).

I am thankful that I’ve reached my “fourscore years” (psalm 90 v.10) without succumbing to dementia. Let’s hope it lasts! And finally I am thankful that my family in Israel survived all the bombing, that the last living Israeli hostages have been released, and that we now have some prospect of peace in the Holy Land.

I have a lot to be thankful for.

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