Article
Creed
Sin
4 min read

No mercy on the Megabus

Why is sin such a sickly, sticky thing in the human heart?

Jenny is training to be a priest. She holds a PhD in law and writes at the intersection of law, politics and theology.

An upset man holds his hands on his head as he misses a bus.
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

“I’m begging you, I’m begging you,” pleaded the passenger. His two large suitcases lying around him, the Nigerian man knelt on the pavement outside the Megabus station. The bus driver stood surly-faced, arms crossed. The passenger’s jacket was ripped where the driver had shoved him off the bus. The passenger had one too many bags; he had not read the Terms and Conditions on his ticket.  

The man groaned – “I must get to Heathrow, I have a flight to catch! I’m willing to do anything – to pay for an extra ticket, to pay the extra bag fee, I have money, see?” He showed the driver his wallet pleadingly, demonstrating his possession of several bank cards.  

A few concerned passengers stepped off the bus. “We don’t have a bag in the hold; we’re happy for this man to have our space.” Another person said, “I booked a ticket but my friend didn’t come – there’s a whole seat’s worth of luggage space available in the hold.” Yet the bus driver would not budge. Even though Megabus has an excess baggage policy, it was down to the driver’s discretion. The driver alone had the power of life and death, to say “yay” or “nay” – to restore a man’s dignity or completely ruin it, along with his jacket.  

As the minutes ticked on, other passengers began to get irate with the Nigerian man – “just buzz off mate, you’re making us late!” “You should have read the rules!” “You’re making the bairns on the bus cry!” Stony faces pressed against the window as the man knelt on the pavement. Even those who had tried to help him left him in the harsh hands of the bus driver and his colleagues, tiny kings in a kangaroo court. For the bus driver, there was no backing down – he was pacing, sweating and red-faced, repeating over and over again to himself his side of the story. And in the end, we left the Nigerian passenger in the heartless hands of bus bureaucracy, wiping our hands of the injury done to him – “we tried.”  

How mucky and murky the human heart can be. 

The whole experience on the Megabus that day left me feeling sick. We all like to think of ourselves as decent folks, as long as we do our “bit”. But on that bus I realized the difficulty: what is “my bit”? Who decides what is “enough”? How quickly a petty issue of baggage can descend into a power play. How quickly do ordinary nice people become a mob when they are outraged or inconvenienced. How mucky and murky the human heart can be. 

The only word that feels strong enough to me to describe this condition is “sin”. This word may sound like a relic of a bygone Britain, but I think it’s as relevant as ever. It’s a serious word, loaded with a sense that the things we do mean more than we know. Sin suggests that I am accountable for how I treat people – not just to my own perception but some higher standard that safeguards the dignity of all human beings. Christians believe that it is God who safeguards our humanity, who sets the standard for how we should and should not treat others. We are accountable “vertically” – to God – as well as “horizontally” to each other.  

It seems to me that “sin” is not a laundry-list of rules but more like a tangled knot of slippery threads – I can’t see where it begins and where it ends, in my own heart or in the world at large. The Christian Eastern Orthodox tradition often likens sin to sickness or a dis-ease of the soul; it infects our reasoning, our emotions and our actions. And that’s why the hurt and pain we cause each other is so “sticky” – no one is left untouched by the effects of the damage we cause each other.  

It was quite clear to me that there were some “sins of deliberate fault” on the Megabus that day – the bus driver’s behaviour was patently unfair and verging on abuse. But I would say sin also flourished in the self-defending logic of the passengers who just wanted to stay in their lane, and for the Nigerian chap to stay in his. Don’t bother me, with your problems. I look after me, you look after you. There were sins of ignorance too – I felt this sick sense in my stomach as the bus pulled out of the station that there was more I could have done, but I didn’t quite know what. All I know is that every person needed mercy on that Megabus, whether we knew it or not. Ironically, the Nigerian man was the most innocent of all.

Article
Belief
Creed
Weirdness
4 min read

The angels called Melanie or Dave that dwell among us

The metaphysical is very much present in our mundane

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A station concourse with a light well above.
Waiting for an angel at London Bridge station.
Network Rail.

There’s either too much or too little written about angels. There’s the serious hermeneutical stuff of divine messengers from scripture. Then there’s the Hallmark sentimentality about guardians, watching over us as nannies may watch their children playing in the park, picking up and comforting them when knees are grazed. 

They’re supernatural, but appear in human form. It’s incarnational in its way. But there’s plenty to notice of angelic manifestation in regular human beings – that nurses are routinely dubbed angels is both exasperating and earned. 

This is the via media, a third way, for angels: They’re called Melanie or Dave, have mortgages, and dwell among us. It’s just that sometimes they’re angels. These thoughts come after an incident I just experienced at London Bridge station. 

We’d just returned from an extended train tour of southern Europe, celebrating a fortieth wedding anniversary and my seventieth birthday. We’d stopped for a bit of lunch between St Pancras and London Bridge and ran late for our Sussex connection. For the first time in three weeks a huge station elevator was out, with no lift in sight. 

A young woman, maybe 23, appeared from nowhere and offered to take the larger-but-lighter case, striding up with it in her glorious white trousers with gold stripes. Then, a second and a half later, a young man of similar age grabbed my smaller-but-heavier bag and carried it up like a small briefcase. 

“Are you two together?” I gasped in his wake. “No,” he said. “You will be at the top,” I replied. It was a crass thing to say. In the movie they would have been. But this was real life. Two commuters offering random acts of kindness, leaving me marvelling at how wonderful young people are. 

And we can leave it there. Two fit (in both senses) strangers noticing a couple, more than old enough to be their parents, struggling. It’s a facet of ageing to which I’m adjusting; I was shocked and surprised a couple of years ago when a young woman offered me her seat on the Underground. It seems so little time since it was the other way around. 

But there it is again. Ordinary people, transcendent behaviour. And, in a metaphysical sense, our young friends at London Bridge really would be together at the top, supported on angels’ wings, though they would laugh that off and the moment would be quickly forgotten. 

These are trivial moments of angelic intervention in ordinary life. But they can be scaled up. When Martine Wright lay mortally wounded with her legs beyond rescue in a bombed carriage of a tube train under Aldgate on 7th July 2005, in her trance of trauma she saw off-duty policewoman Elizabeth Kenworthy picking her way through the wreckage towards her, unquestionably saving her life. She has since described it as like an angel coming to collect her. And who would gainsay that? 

Again, these are flesh-and-blood people, not winged and shining-white seraphs. But they are possessed of the spirit of angels. Who can doubt the presence of angels in the darkest hell that was 7/7? Clearly not Ms Wright. 

These are instances of the human agency of angels. They possess their own reality. But then there are those who experience, as it were, the real thing. I recently encountered a woman and her son after a church service, who described her very recent conversion experience. 

In a moment of darkest despair (which I’m unable to relate), she called out for someone, anything. A figure appeared at her side and she fell into his/her arms. A dream, maybe? But so what if it was? Her life is renewed, as her affirms. 

For my own part, when my father died in 2000, I went to St Bride’s Church, nearby my office in London’s Fleet Street, and asked my friend there if he’d join me in lighting a candle and saying a prayer. Afterwards, as we stood at the little side altar, the figure of a homeless man strode purposefully up the narrow aisle, matted hair and beard, ragged clothes. 

He deliberately walked between us, lit another candle and placed it in the stand next to ours and stood for a moment looking at it. Then he simply walked out again. We knew the local homeless well – we ministered to them. But we’d never seen him before nor seen him since. And here’s another thing: we were intimately familiar with homeless hygiene, but this one had no smell. 

Are there angels? Yes, absolutely. They have no hierarchy. They’re just ever-present servants, from the company of heaven. As apparent to a young woman called Mary, who stuck her head into an empty tomb some time ago and was told the person she sought had gone before her, as to me just a day or two ago as white and gold trousers went before me, taking two steps at a time. 

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