My Heroes

Brian Haw died on June 18th. You probably won't recognize his name, but you know who he is. Brian Haw is the man who has camped out on Parliament Square for the last 10 years, in protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he's one of my heroes. I never met him; the last time I was in London, I ummed and aahed about going over and trying to talk to him, and then chickened out. The reason Brian is one of my heroes is that he didn't chicken out.

I'm not sure that it matters to me whether Brian Haw was absolutely right. I'm fairly sure that he wouldn't have been the easiest person to spend a lot of time with. And that doesn't matter either. What matters, I think, is that he was prepared to put himself in that vulnerable, exposed position in order to protest at something he saw as unjust and destructive. And then stick with it, whatever the cost to himself (and most likely, sadly, to his family). I imagine he was (unlike most of us) a lot less concerned about what others thought of him, and how they treated him, than about taking a stand against things he felt to be deeply wrong. For me, this is what makes a hero.

Like Brian Haw, Archbishop Desmond Tutu - another of my heroes - acts and speaks out of a deep-rooted Christian faith. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, both of these men have been prepared to swim against the tide, if they feel that God is calling them to do so. Within them there is a burning desire for justice, which means: not allowing the truth to be falsified, not allowing the powerless to be downtrodden, insisting on the sanctity and dignity of all people. In other words, insisting that the way the world works must be challenged by the values of the Kingdom of God - even though to do so will be difficult, costly and dangerous. This, after all, is what Jesus did, because there was something that mattered more to him than his own life: his God-given mission to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.

The trouble with heroes is the same as the trouble with saints: they seem so much better than us that we can easily give up on our calling to be heroes too - not necessarily in Parliament Square or in Soweto, but where we are, where God has placed us. Every day, indeed in every moment, we face a decision: whether to take the option that is best for our own comfort, profit or safety - or to try to discover the course of action that will be most truthful and most directed to the needs of others. We won't always get it right, of course; but for the grace of God, we won't escape our little shells of selfishness. But I believe we can learn to witness to God's truth.

And I believe there is quiet heroism going on all around us - people living with love for others uppermost in their lives. We can be heroes!