it’s NOT just you

This week I’ve been watching ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’.

I don’t suppose there are many reading this who are unaware of what this superb ITV drama is all about but, for those who have not seen it, or the headlines that it has created, it charts the story of hundreds of honest sub-postmasters and mistresses who, due to errors in a computer system, were accused by the Post Office of false accounting and theft. Many were financially ruined, some received criminal convictions and others, despite their complete innocence, were served custodial sentences and thus spent time in prison.

Furthermore, they were all lied to by the Post Office who repeatedly told them that nobody else was reporting any difficulties with the computerised system that had, in fact, been the cause of all their problems. Each and every one was told, ‘You’re the only one.’

It is an account of a catastrophic miscarriage of justice made all the more tragic by the fact that some of those who were so publicly humiliated took their own lives.

As well as a being a reminder of the dangers of our being over reliant on technology, several other themes emerge over the four part series. Given that we live in a country where even the most trustworthy people can be falsely convicted, the first is simply that sometimes there really is smoke without fire. A second is that the truth is the truth, however many lies are told by those who seek to conceal it. And a third is that justice is important, and worth fighting for, irrespective of long the battle for it to be won might be.

But perhaps the most important thing that we need to recognise having watched this important television drama, is that irrespective of how impossible life might be for us, we are never the only one who is finding it difficult.

Even when, we very much feel that we are.

Because when we feel we’re totally inadequate, when we feel overwhelmingly sad, and when we feel that life is all too much – it helps to know that we’re not the only one.

Of course, recognising that there are others who are struggling just as we are won’t, in and of itself, make our problems disappear. But knowing that there are others like us, it might help us to stop imagining that all our problems are down to we ourselves having some unique inability to cope. And if we do, we might then be able to stop blaming ourselves for being unable to bear the unbearable.

Because, no matter how often you’ve been told the opposite, the truth is that none of us are awesome. And the reason you don’t currently feel that you are awesome, is simply because we’re all more average than some people like to insist that we are.

Furthermore, we all of us need an Alan Bates in our life, someone who can come to our rescue, not only by being awesome for us, but by bringing us quietly ordinary folk together in order that, together, we can be quietly, and contentedly, ordinary.

The problem of course is that for this to have any chance of actually happening, more of us are going to have to stop pretending that we are anything other than ordinary ourselves. Which in a world that encourages us to boast of all that we can do, will not be easy. Living contrary to cultural norms never is.

Even so, it will be worth it.

Firstly we will we be able to at last lay down the burden of always having to be awesome, one that is far too heavy for any of us to bear. And secondly, rather than having to always go it alone, we will know the joy that comes from not being too proud to receive the help of someone else.

And who knows, by acknowledging our weakness, we may find ourselves strong enough to expose the lies of those who, imagining themselves to be strong, cannot see just how weak they really are. Furthermore, in so doing, we might even help them to joyfully accept their own inherent weakness too.

---

Related posts:

To read ‘Machines – enough to drive you berserk’, click here

To read ‘Real Power’, click here

To read ‘Don’t forget to be ordinary, if you want to be happy’, click here

To read ‘WWJD – What would Jack Do?’, click here

To read ‘Two Little Words’, click here

To read ‘Lewis Capaldi – retired hurt’, click here

To read ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’, click here

To read ‘Professor Ian Aird – A Time to Die?’, click here

To read ‘On not remotely caring’, click here

To read ‘Contactless’, click here

To read ‘Online criticism: it’s just not cricket’, click here

To read ‘Eleanor Rigby is not at all fine’, click here

To read ‘T.S. Eliot, Jesus and the Paradox of the Christian Life’, click here

To read “Why do bad things happen to good people – a tentative suggestion”, click here

To read “Luther and the global pandemic – on becoming a theologian of the cross”, click here

To read “Suffering- A Personal View”, click here.

To read ‘in loving memory of truth’, click here