BBC Radio 4 20170818

Although I have rural origins, at heart I'm a city boy.

I never learned to drive, so I've always got to know new places by walking their streets. You see more that way, you engage more directly with people, you smell what's cooking in a way you never could in a car.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I walked along the Klaverstraat, Buchanan Street and the Royal Mile - the busiest streets in Amsterdam, Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively.

Earlier in the year I spent three weeks in seven cities in the Iberian Peninsula, the last city being Barcelona, where each day I drank coffee, shopped and was jostled by the endless crowds of people up and down Las Ramblas – the street where yesterday afternoon a white van mowed down, killed, wounded innocent people.

I heard that news on the radio just after I had been reading a newspaper article about the hundreds of people killed in the mudslide in the city of Liberia in Sierra Leone. Death was present in both places, but the causes are entirely different. A mudslide a natural disaster. There is nothing malign in it; neither God nor nature is punishing humanity.

But when a man drives a car or a van into a crowd with the singular purpose of killing civilians, the cause and effect are not innocent. Some Christians might put it down to 'original sin.' I regard that term as a flag of convenience. The murder of the innocent is not
a consequence of the way God has wired humanity. It is either the work of a deranged mind, or a chosen act of evil intent.

There will be people today pondering whether cities or indeed holiday resorts are safe places in which to spend a holiday. But, of course, if we kept away from crowds, busy streets would become more not less dangerous. To walk again where people have been killed or injured certainly takes courage. But drawing on courage is much preferable to spending our life in fear. To live is to be at risk and there is neither a medication nor a religion which is a prophylactic against the evil others might do.

Just yesterday at my morning devotions I was reading how for what seemed like the umpteenth time, the apostle Paul - a true urbanite - was attacked in a city street and nearly beaten to death. But that didn't deter him. In the same way, when Jesus' disciples advised him against going up to Jerusalem because of the threat of violence, he declined their advice.

Perhaps in his own language he heard the summons which John Bunyan would later record in poetry: 'Who would true valour see... let him, let her, come hither.'