FAITH FILES
WE’RE not just a number given that they are every 10 years, the Census seems to come round astonishingly quickly.
Surely they have not had time to crunch all that information we gave them last time and here we are supplying it all over again!
The census always brings an unseasonal reminder of the most famous census ever, which St Luke’s Gospel tells us about: “In those days a decree was issued by the Emperor Augustus for a census to be taken throughout the Roman world...everyone made his way to his own town to be registered.”
The historical background to the birth of Jesus Christ was set and Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem because that was the town Joseph’s family belonged to. Things were rather different in those days but imagine the seismic shift in our population this weekend if we each had to return to the town of our birth.
The census then was about tax. Today the focus is gathering the information the government, local authorities and other organisations need, to plan for the future and decide how best to allocate resources. Inevitably there will be some refusenics and those who see a sinister purpose in it but I would imagine that most of us will fill in the census form in the spirit in which it is intended, and in any case it is the law!
I find it awe-inspiring that all this data is being stored away and will, after a hundred years, become accessible to future generations.
Thanks to the diligence of the census enumerators in the past, we have access to fascinating information about our forebears that date back to the beginning of the 19th century.
However the public will have no access to the current census information in our lifetime and arguably as individuals we will be lost in a mountain of statistics in which we will just be another number that has no meaning to those who process them. In that sense we become anonymous – just one figure amongst many.
Thankfully, to God we are not just a statistic. The Psalmist says ‘you created every part of me; you put me together in my mother’s womb.’ Jesus says that ‘even the hairs of your head have all been counted.’ We are all individually loved and cherished by God and we don’t have to fill in a form to know that – it’s available to us right now.
Peter Singleton, Lay reader,
St John’s, Long Eaton