My Aunty Nora Now Knows

Editorial from Mar 2010 edition of Christian Worker

My aunty Nora was never on Facebook. This is hardly surprising since she died in June last year, aged 95, six months after her sister, my Mum, who also died last year but in January, aged 96 (picture right from 1978). She never owned a computer, nevertheless I believe there is a spiritual connection between my aunty Nora and Facebook, which I hope to make clear as we go along.

I don’t know if I hold some sort of record for Facebook but it must be close. I joined up on 9th February and I left on 16th, just one week later. They call that deactivation. I actually wanted off Facebook altogether but that apparently is enormously difficult to accomplish. Deactivation means that my password and signing up details are stored on their data bank and should I wish to reactivate all I have to do is log in again and use the original information and password. So, though I want to be off their lists, once on I’m always on unless I go through long and difficult hoops to erase my name completely. Once they’ve got you, you stay ‘got’, or to put it another way, ‘once in, always in’.

That actually doesn’t bother me. If they want to clog up their system for next 1000 years storing my details which I never intend to use again, so be it. I suppose they hope to lure me back like a lost sheep at some future time. But this ‘sheep’ wasn’t lost; he deliberately chose to walk away. Why?

Obviously I’d heard about Facebook from both friends and my children. Sarah is an avid ‘Facebooker’, posting cheery messages and penetrating thoughts almost daily. Arthur, being a typical young man, is not so energetic - or should that be covered by an ‘L’-word like ‘lethargic’ or ‘lazy’? You decide! Anyway all these good folks said how wonderful it is, but I was not at all convinced and resisted. However, I once taught at a brand new comprehensive school from 1972, when it opened, until 1981, when it closed. I was the third member of staff appointed to it, after the Headmaster and Deputy Head, and I was still there when the authorities decided to close it down and amalgamate the two borough comprehensives into one. It was all to do with the unanticipated falling rolls situation which caught everybody unawares in the mid to late 70s. The school was only extant for nine years, but some of the pupils have developed a fondness for it and have established a group dedicated to former pupils and staff. I was strongly urged to play a part in this venture and I thought that by joining I could make a useful contribution. So I joined mainly with that in mind. I also hit a few other buttons, as some of you who take CW will know. I was even asked if I wanted a ‘Barbara Fisher’ as a friend but I couldn’t imagine my sitting upstairs on my computer in my office and sending a Facebook message to her downstairs in the living room, so I had to decline her as a friend. So now it’s official: Barbara is NOT my friend.

I could write an essay on why I deactivated after a week but it can be covered by my being appalled at what I saw. Not, I hasten to add, that it was in any way salacious but rather it was so banal, vacuous and narcissistic that I simply couldn’t waste my time entering the Facebook world. Anybody who really needs to know what I’m thinking can email me and I’ll give them a reply, but, call me a stuffed shirt, I really don’t want to know what people were thinking as they rolled out of bed and cleaned their teeth. And as for my former pupils, the group forum was not what I’d thought it would be, and it was depressing to discover just how semi-literate most were, and how excruciatingly boring their lives were, after our best efforts to educate them. Some may find Facebook a fascinating whirl of never-ending interest and excitement but if I ever sink to that level I might join in the current clamour for legalising assisted suicide!

So what’s all this got to do with my aunty Nora? Well, there was a hint or two above in the way Facebook is set up. But before we get into that, let me paint in a little background.

Nora was the third child of six, born some 15 months after my Mum in 1914, so naturally they were raised in the same household by the same parents. She attended the Thirlmere Road church in Liverpool and, like five of the six siblings, was baptized. She and Mum used to work together in the Sunday School and when she was 21 my Mum and Dad bought her a Bible as a gift. It was returned to me from her estate last year and she treasured it. When I was doing the hymnbook project on Favourite Hymns of the Church she gave me her copy of the 1000 Hymns hymnbook which was once used in the churches so I could research the words, and she would often sing hymns to her dying day.

She was not anti-God or even anti-the-church but she gave up going because she got in with a group of friends who preferred Youth Hostelling and walking the hills, especially in the Lake District, at weekends. She was a spinster all her life and there was no male attraction in the group, but the hills seemed far more fun than church so she drifted away and I never ever saw her in church at all. It’s a common enough story of how the world gets in and chokes the faith which then withers and dies. She wasn’t a ‘bad’ lady, indeed she and her friends were full of good works, always helping those they knew needed it. She simply gave up on God, at least in terms of obeying the command to meet and remember Christ around the Table. She also did nothing to further the Gospel once she fell away. You couldn’t talk to her about it, and that wasn’t just me as her nephew - Mum, her sister, couldn’t either.

When she died I was asked to do the funeral and was speaking to a mutual friend who had been an evangelical Methodist minister before retiring and who knew her very well. His wife was to give a tribute to Nora during the service. I was trying to tell him how difficult I found it when taking such a funeral as it is easy to bury a faithful believer because you can be confident about their eternal destination. I was about to say that when I come to the part in the committal where we say, “And leave her soul with God her Maker in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to life eternal”, I stop after ‘God her Maker’ because I have no hope for them, when he interrupted and I didn’t make my point. His interruption was a knowing laugh and then he said conspiratorially, 'We know don’t we: ‘once saved always saved’?' It just wasn’t either the time or the place to have a deep theological discussion, because I knew both of us were anxious to break off the conversation having other things to do. I wondered, however, if he would notice that I did not consign my aunty Nora to eternal life after doing the best I could for her by leaving ‘her soul with God her Maker’. It was the kindest thing I could do for her. I usually privately thank God on these occasions that I am not the one passing judgement on the eternal resting place of those like my aunty Nora. In my imperfect judgement I would no doubt consign people to heaven whom He will not acknowledge and ignore those whom He will accept. Judging is His prerogative only but I could not perjure my beliefs in a vague hope I might have for a relative, which I would never entertain for any others.

The notion that once you have named the Name of Christ and received His grace, you cannot be lost no matter what you do subsequently is common amongst Protestant evangelical groups including Baptists, Methodists, Charismatics, Brethren, etc. They see it like Facebook. Once you sign on you’re permanently on the data-base and, even if you deliberately walk away and deactivate, God still keeps your name in the Lamb’s Book of Life (Rev. 20:12). It’s a message of easy grace and no commitment which encourages spiritual sloth, and though we don’t teach and preach this as being true, many of our indifferent members seem to operate on this principle. Just do enough to keep your name on the membership rolls and it will be alright on Judgement Day.

This ‘once saved always saved’ teaching hinges on Jesus’ words in John 10: ‘“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.”’ (Jn 10:27-29, ESV). This is a wonderful truth. We are safe in God’s care and keeping. He will keep us saved but He will NOT stop us choosing to leave His care. There are nearly 100 passages in the New Testament alone warning of the need to persevere and not fall away. It’s an involved study but the evangelicals would say that if a person falls away he was never saved in the first place, because he fell away. The truly saved cannot fall away. But Humpty Dumpty could not have fallen off the wall had he not been sitting on it in the first place. Galatians 5:4 warns Christians who wanted to revert to circumcision again for salvation that if they did so they would ‘have fallen from grace’. You cannot fall from a position you do not occupy. They had grace and they could fall from it. You can fall from grace.

Christianity is about perseverance and commitment. When we put our hands to the plough we must not look back if we want to be fit for the Kingdom (Luke 9:62). Christ comes first in our lives not Youth Hostelling and walking the hills at weekends, or going shopping when we should be breaking bread, or playing for and/or supporting our football team. It may seem like much more fun doing these things, especially if the singing seems slow and dull, or the sermons are usually boring, but we gave our lives willingly to Christ.

Like Facebook God will leave our names in the book in the hope that we will reactivate some time in the future. We won’t then have to go through the signing up process once more - we don’t have to be baptized over again - but unlike Facebook He will remove our names from His data base without us having to go though hoops to achieve it. Just lose your first love (Rev. 2:4-7) and drift away. It’s easy, as sadly I believe my aunty Nora now knows!

Graham