I had intended to write a piece on the way the Bible is misused as a means of shutting out individuals a congregation does not approve of. That piece will have to wait for another day. Today I feel drawn to reflect on Gilo’s article and his observations. He claims that the Church of England at the highest levels seems to be guilty of ‘emotional delinquency’ with an attachment to ‘prestige, entitlement and deference.

What Gilo and the authors of the comments that follow his piece seem to pine for, is a new level of honesty and authenticity in our national Church, especially on the part of its bishops. They are of course mainly referring to the way that the church authorities have manifestly failed to respond adequately to survivors and others whose complaints threaten the comfortable status quo. Chris also adds to the discussion his sense of a strong disconnect in the way the church fails to engage properly with the needs of the poor and disenfranchised in our society. Returning to Gilo’s points, it seems fairly clear that there are major problems in the way that the Church is handling its legacy of sexual abuse. Those in charge of the institution responsible for the abuse seem unable to get a proper grip on the issue. Diversionary tactics and denials seem to be widespread in our church; at the same time media interest is growing rapidly. This uncovering of old secrets threatens the very future of our precious national institution.

In recent days we have been reminded (in the Church Times and elsewhere) of the 75th anniversary of the death of Sophie and Hans Scholl. This brother and sister were executed by the Gestapo in 1943 as members of a resistance organisation called the White Rose, based in Munich. This sought to awaken people to the evils of the Nazi corruption of thought and ideas. The group operated by peacefully writing and distributing tracts throughout Germany. The story of their resistance has been taught to generations of German school children and their portraits have appeared on German stamps.

The Church Times article makes something of the fact that the resistance of these young people (Sophie was just 21) followed a path that might have been set by church leaders. That is an interesting observation, but I want to refer to another part of the Scholl legacy. This was sketched out in an older 1970s essay on courage by Heinz Kohut, the American psychoanalyst. He used the accounts of Sophie and Hans to help illustrate his thinking about narcissistic disorders. The article where he discusses the Scholls focuses on their supreme courage in the face of death. It was not just that they were brave but Kohut perceives that both of them died in some way totally fulfilled as human beings. Their deaths, they knew, were destined to inspire in others resistance to the evil that they had identified at the heart of their society. The act of resistance gave their lives meaning which resonated with their core values. Kohut refers to this process as the ‘triumph of the nuclear self’. Without getting too much into the psychoanalytic language used by Kohut, it is clear that he wants us to see the Scholls as examples of how life is meant to be lived. It was said of Sophie that she ‘glowed’ in the face of death. In speaking about these young lives, Kohut implicitly contrasts them with the inauthentic parasitic existence of the many. Many people live out lives that are dependent on the opinions and flattery of others. The hero is the one who knows who and what he/she is – what is worth living for and sometimes what is worth dying for.

Kohut’s presentation of the White Rose group as examples of true authentic human living feeds into our discussion of what this blog is asking for from the Church – authenticity and total honesty. At the time of the Scholl’s deaths, the German general public had largely given up the struggle to find authentic meaning within themselves so they resorted to political solutions provided by the ruling party. They had forgotten, thanks to propaganda, how to know what they really were or thought. Notions of personal integrity were largely forgotten. In the Scholls there was, as it were, a moment of glory, as true human integrity shone through the miasma of conformity and self-serving instincts.

Whenever we encounter a gathering of people who only draw on the wisdom of a collective opinion, we can speak of a group mind. That is a situation where individual creativity and integrity finds it hard to flourish. Each person in different ways has surrendered to the collective. In some periods of history, the collective mind may conform to a political model. At other times the group ‘thinks’ along religious lines. What Gilo and other survivors seem to have been encountering are examples of thinking processes that look to a collective opinion to help them decide what to say. This process may well be caused by subtle institutional pressures placed on members to maintain a central power and control. You cannot have people thinking for themselves in the group. That would create untidiness in the collective at best; at worst you have the power of appointed leaders being undermined and challenged.

The witness of Sophie and Hans Scholl is a testimony to an authentic honest way of living that still inspires today. It represents the kind of honesty and truth that we would like to see in our churches and especially among its leaders. Where there is honesty and genuine human authenticity we can see a quasi-physical glow which many of us would describe as spiritual in nature. It is that kind of spirituality that we need and deserve to find in all our churches.