As for top royalty, they are not always the best of adverts. Hunting
and shooting just for sport is utterly barbaric and anti Christian.
Cajoling Kate Middleton’s parents in to it is horrible. However, we are
all victims of past conditioning and programming from childhood days.
None of us is immune from what is actually ‘forms of brain washing’.
For myself I owe it to a Godly and wonderful mother to have learned
to respect all forms of life; and that the more vulnerable it was then
the more it needed to be helped or protected. Very sadly, having said
that, I possibly inherited via ones genes some undesirable traits. I put
stones in to an old lady’s milk jug until a mature fellow caught me and
gently explained the harm I was doing. ‘The penny dropped’ and I felt so
ashamed that I never did it again. Indeed, I once pulled a wing off a
fly, then overcome by the awful panic it was in, stamped on the poor
creature immediately. Later, I thought little about wild life until a
kindly teacher – a practising Quaker – took us out on nature walks and
thereby converted me to a lover of the same!
Consequently, when I think of members of the Royal Family - and
especially Prince Charles who in so many ways is so deeply sensitive –
being sent off to Boarding School to ‘rough it’ and develop ‘stiff upper
lips’, I realise that the buck must hardly rest with them. ‘Where Oh
where?’ I ask were those members of the clergy in influential positions?
I refer to those who were able to guide and groom future royalty along
Christ like lines? Where were the private chaplains, father confessors
and spiritual directors? Very sadly clergy who ‘soak up’ to curry favour
with royalty, would – like Esau the hunter of old! – sell their very
souls for ‘a mess of pottage’. Or in more up to date Scottish
colloquialism: ‘sell their granny for a bag of chips!
For myself, the nearest I ever got to royalty was in being invited to
be Rector of the combined parishes of ‘Aboyne, Ballater and Baemar’. But
then the Bishop – knowing my leanings – later got cold feet and felt
safer in appointing the other candidate instead. After all what bishop
in his right mind would put an animal rights advocate in to such an
influential post? As compensation he then offered me the post of senior
Diocesan chaplain based at Aberdeen infirmary. Well, I was given
the opportunity to visit the Queen Mother who’d swallowed a fish bone;
and I also could have stumbled in to the path of Princess Margaret whom,
I sense, ‘would not have been amused!
Animal Padre's
