Blame my headmaster, says Tony Blair
We’ll pass quickly over Blair’s latest iteration in fashioning of a get-out-of-Hell free card for himself (‘I do not pass a single day in which I do not reflect on this and think of the responsibility’ – define ‘responsibility’, Tony). Instead have a look at this story I’ve heard him tell more than once:
Blair also revealed his first spiritual experience, as he remembered praying with his headmaster at school when he was 10 years old.
His father – “a kind of militant atheist” – had just had a stroke and was rushed to hospital.
Blair said: “I remember actually praying with the headmaster of the school. I said to him: ‘Before we pray, I should tell you that my father, he doesn’t believe in God.’
“And I always remember the headmaster saying to me: ‘Well that doesn’t matter, because God believes in him.’
“I was in a great state of emotion, and then at the end of the day my father was clear, he was going to live. But what I know is it made a – as it would, on a 10-year-old child – tremendous impact on me.”
If I was lying in a hospital bed, my children not knowing whether I was going to live or die, and a teacher took it upon him or herself to take advantage of impressionable children in ‘a great state of emotion’ in order to push their own strand of belief, I’d have some very harsh words to say upon my recovery.
As the adult Blair looks back at his ten year-old self, it’s as if he sees an escape route for his soul being opened almost at that precise moment. He certainly regards it as a pivotal event in his life.
In the end you accept there is a higher power than yourself and that is both something that should make you fearful, but something that also is a source of comfort.
Well bully for you, Bomber. Someone should tell him that faith is a way of life not a warm-but-slightly-scary blanket. Who does he think he is, St Linus van Pelt?
Tony, I know you’re a busy man with all your money to count and everything but couldn’t you spare five minutes to pass on some of this comfort to the mothers of children with two heads or the men on death row, some there for the ‘crime’ of being homosexual? It’s shame you’re not a little more fearful of and a little less comforted by your spiritual duvet.
Posted on April 10th, 2009 at 9:33am under Blair, Religion and theology
“I know people think me callous, but I’ve made myself feel every death. By day I imagine endless faces. By night..well, I dream about swimming towards a hideous…no. Never mind. It isn’t significant.
What’s significant is that I know, I know I’ve struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity…but someone had to take the weight of that awful, necessary crime.
I’d hoped you’d understand…
…I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.”
“In the end?
Nothing ends, Adrian.
Nothing ever ends.”