The Spectator’s Notes | 8 August 2009

Archbishop Vincent Nichols told the Sunday Telegraph that Facebook and the like meant that young people were ‘losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together’. Just after reading the Archbishop of Westminster’s words, I happened to be going to confession in his cathedral. Preparing for it, I read what the Simple Prayer Book says about how one should examine one’s conscience: ‘Careful preparation is vital in order to make the most of this encounter with our loving heavenly Father. Find some time to be alone and quiet to reflect on your life, your relationship with God and others.’ It struck me that my relationship with God closely resembles what worries Archbishop Nichols about Facebook. God and I have never met. Sometimes I tell myself that the relationship is going well and that God really does love me. At other times, I feel that He completely ignores me. When this happens I — like, I would guess, almost all believers — feel like teenagers on Facebook, as regarded by the Archbishop: ‘the friendship… collapses and they’re desolate’. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, ‘my lament/ Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent/ To dearest him that lives alas! away’. Archbishop Nichols is right that we must have ‘rounded communication’ to build a ‘rounded community’, but the very existence of prayer is an acknowledgment that the human predicament is inevitably unrounded and therefore also requires a much more hazardous and lonely form of communication.

My most learned regular correspondent writes: ‘Seventy per cent of old people own their homes. The average home is worth about £150,000. Who would not take Mum to Zurich for £150,000?’ He concludes that euthanasia ‘will be as with abortion: from small beginnings for special cases, to normal practice within a generation’.