Message from Bishop Robert, 14 January 2025

Published: Tuesday January 14, 2025

Bishop Robert standing outsideI was fortunate enough to spend two days at the beginning of January visiting the city of Dublin. It was my first time and yes, I did do a tour of the Guinness factory, and I did sample a pint. It was of course delicious, and I am told it tastes better in Dublin than anywhere else in the world! 

The hotel in which we stayed was just opposite the General Post Office, the epicentre of the 1916 Easter Rising with its proclamation of independence. The front of the building still shows the marks of the bullets – a reminder of those on both sides killed and injured. We visited the castle while we were there and saw the room in which James Connolly was kept and cared for and where he was visited by his wife and children before he was executed for his part in the Rising after a trial of dubious legal validity. It put me in mind of a visit I made some years ago to one of our partner dioceses in India. The then Bishop told me of how he was not able to enter one of the churches of which he was now bishop because it was for ‘whites only’. These two situations gave me cause to reflect how often England as a nation has been on the wrong side of history. The Irish state for which the rebels of 1916 gave their lives came just a few years after the Easter Rising, a story repeated in India and elsewhere. 

These things of course are never simple. History never is. On all sides in war and conflict there will be acts of heroism as well as wrongdoing, there will be legacy of development as well as of suffering, all which shape who we are now. Yet as the popular adage says, those who can’t learn from history are bound to repeat it – it is this lesson that I take, alongside the hospitality of my short visit to Dublin, into the new year. 

The uprising in Dublin, as so many conflicts in past times and today, is formed so often by those who are convinced of the rightness of their cause. Such was absolutely true in Dublin in 1916 yet with hindsight, as with apartheid, with slavery and in so many other instances as we look back, we know not everyone was right. As I reflected on how we have so often been on the wrong side of history I was left wondering where might I be mistaken, might I be wrong today, what is it that I need to learn? 

I know of course that God is truth, that Jesus is ‘the way the truth and the life’ (John 14 v 6) and that Jesus’ prayer for me and for the Church is that we might be sanctified in that truth, (John 17 v 17) but I know that I am not God. As I read the scriptures and encounter people in every generation wrestling for the truth of God I know I must do likewise as I seek to follow Jesus in the way I live and to share the life that is promised in Jesus for all, a life of self-giving sacrificial love, even to the cross for our redemption. 

I begin 2025 determined to spend more time listening first to God, the source of all truth, and being prepared to rely more fully on God’s truth, instead of my own limited perspective. 

 

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One thought on “Message from Bishop Robert, 14 January 2025

  1. Dear Bishop Robert,

    I was most interested to read your Message from 14th January, both about your visit to Dublin and your pertinent observations about the Dublin Easter Rising. This had many parallels with the Irish Rebellion of 1798 to which I refer below. Whilst I deplore some of the methods employed by the IRA I can find some sympathy with their ambitions towards a United Ireland.

    In the late 60s I was employed by one of the Scottish Weir Group companies – Weir Pumps Ltd., initially as their Sales Manager for Eire. Amongst many other products, the company made precision stainless steel pumps for pumping beer wort which were used by Arthur Guiness in Dublin. On the several occasions I visited them, they often generously gave me lunch in their directors’ dining room where we had Guinness that never left the Brewery!

    My forbears were of mixed Irish and French ancestry, the Irish name being Teeling and the French, Cusin, who were Huguenot watch and clockmakers working in Burgundy and Geneva in the 16th and 17th C.

    The Teeling family were perhaps best known through Bartholomew Teeling (1774-98), United Irishman and Irish Army officer, who led the rebel forces during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. He was captured, along with Wolf Tone. Both were tried and sentenced to death for Treason. Tone took his own life whilst in prison, but Teeling paid the ultimate price. A memorial statue was erected in his honour in Collooney, Co. Sligo. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Teeling)
    My great-great grandfather was called Teeling Cusins, who died in 1839 at the age of 40 and my paternal grandfather, a colonel in the Royal Artillery, Albert George Teeling Cusins.
    Interestingly I have had recent email correspondence with the Teeling Whiskey Distillery in Dublin where we have exchanged several messages from which they have enlightened me considerably about the Teeling family connections.

    The Huguenot Cusin family left France upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. Some 250,000 Protestant Hugeunots fled for their lives to wherever they could seek refuge. The Cusin family went to Fife in Scotland, and added an ’s’ to the name – a practice common amongst immigrant Hugeonots. There were two Cusins clockmakers, both Thomas – uncle and nephew, Free of the Clockmakers’ Company in 1725 and 1739. I have their records from the Clockmakers’ Company of which I am now a Liveryman.

    After a career in the aircraft industry I trained in Antiquarian Horology at West Dean College in Sussex and have been restoring and conserving antique clocks for 30 years.

    Please forgive this rather lengthy response to your Message.

    Robert Cusins
    19th January 2025

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