22 June 2022 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in tough times.
We have faith. We have courage:
We give our thanks for our existence: we recognise that we rely on forces beyond our understanding. We trust what this life brings: we trust ourselves: we trust our friends: we trust our families: we trust life: we trust the universe.
We release our past to the past: we release our future to the future: we accept our present: we give up our cares and fears.
We abandon our illusions of control. We acknowledge our complete dependence on providence and on the guiding Spirit. We relinquish our apprehension. We rely on that which we often do not fully understand.
We have faith. We have courage.
Keep us from all fear today. Open our hearts to the gifts of the moment and bind us to the One who holds us all in struggle and in hope.
And may the promise that those who trust in the Lord will always find their strength renewed echo in our hearts and minds this day and every day.
(The basic structure of these words, although I have adapted them, I found in the book: Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living by John Mc Quiston. Morehouse Publishing www.morehousepublishing.com ISBN 0-8192-1869-3.)
We will meet when the danger is over
We will meet when the danger is over,
we will meet when the sad days are done;
we will meet sitting closely together
and be glad our tomorrow has come
We will join to give thanks and sing gladly,
we will join to break bread and share wine;
and the peace that we pass to each other
will be more than a casual sign.
So let’s make with each other a promise
that when all we’ve come through is behind,
we will share what we missed and find meaning
in the things that once troubled our mind.
Until then may we always discover
faith and love to determine our way.
That’s our hope and God’s will and our calling
for our lives and for every new day.
From the Norwegian of Hans-Olav Moerk
Sculpture that speaks about the art of peace by Kenny Farquharson:
The big summer show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh is a retrospective of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The exhibition is a superb insight into one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. It also had me mulling some uncomfortable truths about the state of the world in 2022. In the unlikely event of me ever appearing on the TV show, Mastermind, Hepworth would be my specialist subject. For ten years when my kids were small our summer holidays were spent in St Ives, in Cornwall, where the Yorkshire-born Hepworth lived from 1939 until her death in a fire in 1975.
Every year we would visit her studio at Trewyn, where the wooden handles of her chisels bore the patina of her sweat. We would sketch her sculptures in the garden and I would read everything I could get my hands on about the St Ives school.
Next door to her studio was an abandoned cinema and it was there Hepworth worked on the greatest commission of her career: a monumental bronze sculpture for the pool in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Simply called the Single Form, standing 21ft tall, its meaning is elusive. Is it a sail? A wing? A sentinel? What is the purpose of the circular hole punched through the bronze?
Hepworth said she tried to reflect the nobility of the UN secretary-general Dag Hammaskjȍld, who commissioned the work, and provided a symbol of “solidarity of the future”. In the Edinburgh exhibition there is grainy black-and-white newsreel of the unveiling ceremony in 1964. We hear Hepworth, in her clipped middle-class English accent, make a speech that spans the decades.
“The United Nations is our conscience, she says. “If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure.”
Sobering words. As we look, appalled, at the butchery in Ukraine it is hard to escape the twin conclusion that the UN failed and its failure is our failure. When the aggressor is a member of the UN Security Council, armed with a veto on collective action, the organisation’s inadequacy is stark and undeniable.
The counter to Putin in Ukraine has come not from the global UN but from Nato and the EU, the principal arms of “the West”. In New York, around half of the ambassadors who file past Hepworth’s sculpture every working day have kept their distance from Kyiv, in thrall to either Moscow or Beijing.
The nation state, meanwhile, is making a comeback. Nato and the EU do not think and act as one. Individual states are engaged in push and pull over matters of life and death. Shared interest tussles with self-interest. The dynamic between individual leaders takes on new importance. Rather than speaking with one voice, the West is a chorus of individual voices.
All this adds new potency to the constitutional debate in places such as Scotland where statehood and union are contested concepts. Ukraine takes our familiar tropes and forces a re-examination of old assumptions, especially on shared security and defence. We now know who our enemy is, so who are our allies and how best do we organise ourselves against a common foe?
We should be well-equipped for this debate. We have been having it, in various forms, for half a century. How do we balance autonomy and co-operation? To what degree are we willing to share sovereignty with our immediate neighbours in matters of common interest. How much accountability do we demand of organisations to which we have surrendered powers? How do we regulate multinational relationships? What are our red lines, if any? Are our red lines today the same as they were two months ago?
It is simply not good enough to start with our previous constitutional conclusions and re-engineer them for new circumstances, with a fresh lick of paint. We may, if we are honest with ourselves, need a new conclusion or conclusions. Anything less is laziness. On defence is that we had become used to delegating our security to multinational organisations and trusting them to keep us safe. Entities such as Nato seemed almost to have a life of their own, floating above normal political discourse. Now we see them for what they always were: the lowest common denominator of what could be agreed between states with very different notions of what constitutes peace.
And what of the UN? What of Hepworth’s desire for a symbol of “solidarity for the future”? To write it off would serve only those who thrive in chaos. Damaged though its reputation may be, it remains the only global framework available for the rule of law and the parallel battles against disease, hunger and poverty. It is the best we have and we would be foolish to let it degrade further.
The UN may yet have a positive role to play in a post-conflict Ukraine. Any peace deal is likely to necessitate buffer zones between areas controlled by Kyiv and Moscow. Such buffer zones will need to be policed. This is a job the UN has been performing for decades. Meanwhile I think I have figured out the meaning of the hole punched through the bronze of Hepworth’s Single Form at the United Nations building. It is a bullet hole.
The wondrous gift:
This new day, this glorious revelation
of sky and cloud, earth and green,
this gift - this wondrous gift.
Earth and heaven have cradled this song.
Sunlight and starlight have bathed it;
loam and rock, peat and marsh
ocean and river, stream and pool
crescendo and trickle.
This song, my life, and offering
made gratefully, made hopefully, made joyfully.
Words by Carla A. Grosh-Miller