Word of the Day: ADGENICULATION (n.) the act of kneeling

I was only a child when I worked out that Christians of our sort didn’t kneel down. Each week we’d go from our Primary school to the local parish church for a morning service. The church was old, and it had pews with little doors on that latched shut. There were hassocks on the floor like a line of little cushions, each one decorated in bright colours by parish members.
We didn’t have those in our church, not the little locking doors on the pews, not the hassocks. And we didn’t kneel down.
As a teenager an elderly priest told me he liked worshipping with us because he didn’t have to kneel down. I wondered what took him so long to work out that you could pray without doing that.
As a young adult I started to develop my Benedictine tendencies in various places around the country. And I have knelt down a few times. I have a meaning for it now that I didn’t have when I was younger. I can see a time and place for rebellion, for Dissent, for going my own way.
And I can see a time, however brief, for kneeling. It can bring you level with another person, it can provide a steady base to help someone up. It can provide you with a private place within yourself to think and reflect. It can express somethings words don’t say; humility, respect, solidarity.
In this country, we don’t usually kneel for the national anthem, even though the words, God save the Queen, are a prayer. Most of us don’t stand to attention, hand over heart, either. If they are able to, people do stand and sing. But we’d don’t have to.
Now imagine you come from a country that has given less value to you and your ancestors since before the nation began. Imagine you’ve had to fight for your rights, to vote, yes, but the right to sit on the bus on a seat you choose, to live where you wish, send your children to the school of your choice, and much more the right to freedom itself and equality under the Law. Imagine that due to the colour of the skin you were born with your rights and opportunities have always been less than a person from the same country with a different coloured skin. Imagine you’ve tried to change this. Leaders have come and gone and injustices continue to go unchallenged. And then you hit on the idea to kneel down during the national anthem.
Whoa! What a crazy, disrespectful idea. Kneel down you say. How could you? How can you?
That’s nonviolent protest and it’s happening now in the USA. Remember it, not because you’re bothered now about national anthems and stuff but because one day you may have to decide to make a nonviolent protest about something on the way to being the builders of justice and the peacemakers you are destined to be.
And when that happens this might just come back to you and you’ll understand why standing up and being counted can be done by taking a knee.

From our Sixth Form Chapel this morning (29.09.2017)