On Thursday, I had several conversations with the occupiers. They were the usual protest mixture that the internet age produces – pretty young women with Red Indian hairstyles and expensive educations; friendly, slightly moth-eaten, unemployed, graduate thirtysomethings; and rather tougher, more politically-minded public sector workers enjoying the ample leisure that their careers afford. They had already set up another camp in Finsbury Square, they told me. Yes, they would leave St Paul’s, they said, though they weren’t sure when. Would I like to join “our re-creation of the Athenian agora” at lunchtime?  I made my excuses and left.  What struck me about the drift of my conversations was the odd mixture of sincerity and calculation. The protesters genuinely did want to talk about poverty and inequality. But they were equally genuinely longing for attention and cameras. They were excited about Canon Fraser’s resignation. I doubt if, before he started exercising his famed “prophetic voice” to warn how it might all end up like Dale Farm, they had given the matter much thought. But now that Dr Fraser, the BBC’s favourite preacher, has conjured it up, the idea of confrontation has entered a lot of hot and empty heads.  Jumping into a taxi, I made off. My driver was not full of Christian patience. “That lot don’t like washing,” he told me, “Why not put some fairy liquid in the water-cannon and start firing? Then they’d run a mile.”  I must admit that I found myself in sneaking sympathy. The entire St Paul’s saga makes one feel quite cross with the increasingly large number of people who want to tell the rest of us about their consciences.  The protesters seem to imagine that, without their tented witness to the wickedness of the rich, no one would have noticed that capitalism is in its biggest crisis since the early 1930s. “Abolish wealth,” cried one of their posters. Don’t the angry campers realise that the West’s bankers and politicians are managing it nicely without needing any extra help?  Canon Fraser has such a tender conscience that he is walking away from the City of London just when it could use some tough ministry. No doubt his martyrdom will involve a book deal, a newspaper column and, in the Church of England’s own good time, a bishopric, but what good does it do to the cathedral or to the souls it serves?  As for the clerical colleagues he leaves behind, one has some sympathy for their dilemma. But they were not brave to take refuge in health, safety and fire regulations. And it seems precious to dither about the necessary decisions, leaving these nasty things to the City Corporation. The Church needs the legal action announced yesterday, but lets others take the blame for it.  In short, all the above remind one of the Pharisees attacked by Jesus shortly before he overturned the tables of the money-changers. They are those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others”.  I put more faith in all those other people I saw round St Paul’s this week. No one “occupies” or resigns or preaches in favour of them, but they can be seen every morning emerging from the City’s Tube stations. While the tent-dwellers are still asleep (or, as investigative infra-red journalism has revealed, not present at all), they pick their way past the bivouacs on the impeded highway to their office jobs.  Many of them work in finance, but that does not prove that they are greedy. It certainly does not mean that they are unaware of the crisis of global capital: their livelihoods depend on their bosses getting these things right, and on their own ethics and efforts, too. It is intensely annoying for such people – and for my taxi driver and the people who sweep the streets and serve in the coffee shops and keep the IT systems working – to find their City turned into a stage-set for a facile morality play so well projected by modern media technology that bishops and mayors and now even prime ministers on the other side of the world are forced to comment on it.  Jesus was famously served by two sisters, Martha and Mary. Mary talked and talked. Martha busied herself with practical, small things. So Mary got more of the kudos. Rudyard Kipling wanted to redress the balance. He wrote a poem called The Sons of Martha. They are the ones who make the world actually work: “They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose./They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose”.  If the West is to get out of our economic and moral mess, we must pay more heed to the sons and daughters of Martha – and ignore the explosions from the loose canons.
Our sympathy should be saved for the City of London workers who pick their way    around the tents of  the anti-capitalist protesters.