25 January 2022 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
A blessing for the days ahead:
The world now is too dangerous and too beautiful for anything but love. May your eyes be so blessed you see God in everyone. Your arms, so that you hear the cry of the oppressed and the forgotten. May your hands be so blessed that everything you touch is a sacrament. Your lips, so you speak nothing but the truth with love. May your feet be so blessed that you run to those who need you. And may your heart be so opened, so set on fire, that your love, YOUR love, changes everything. From: A Black Rock Prayer Book.
An affirmation for every new day:
Let me within my heart and soul AFFIRM that the Spirit is shaped by the mysteries and contrasts of the ancient landscapes, the climate, the rivers and oceans, the towering mountains and the quiet valleys…... that the Spirit is in goodwill, in small acts of kindness, and in being able to forgive……that the Spirit shines through our connections with, and support for each other, and our communities……that the Spirit’s wisdom is heard as we listen and value silence……and that each day we can be surprised by the utter availability of the Spirit of God at work everywhere.
(I have adapted these words from a beautiful affirmation from the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in Australia.)
*** Let us live in such a way, that when we die, our love will survive and continue to grow. *** Michael Leunig - one of Australia’s national treasures.
One step at a time: People say; what is the use of one small effort?
They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.
* These words are by the great American Christian activist, friend of the homeless and forgotten, and prophetic writer - Dorothy Day, 1897-1980 - whose name is still honoured by millions of us around the world.
In a fragile world we must turn to our fellow humans:
This was the recent heading (in the UK Guardian) of an article by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the prophetic and wise voices in our divided, fake news-filled world. This is his powerful reflection, and I hope that it inspires you in many different ways. It is a truly global reflection.
***Rather more than half the population of Afghanistan is facing levels of food shortage not seen for decades. Just under 1,500 people died in the Mediterranean during 2021, attempting to flee to a safer environment. The likelihood of wildfires is predicted as a risk comparable to severe flooding in parts of the UK in coming decades. About one person in a 1,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo has received full vaccination against Covid 19. And the challenge of the pandemic worldwide, the continuing background of loss and fear, still casts an enormous shadow.
These are statistics – not simply unconnected – that give a little flesh to the overall sense of 2021 having been a sombre year – on top of the level of anxiety, the unexpected personal losses and the sheer confusion experienced by everyone caught up in the pandemic. The human story is not looking much like a smooth record of upward progression just now. We are more fragile than we had been led to assume. And this means that we are also no less different from our ancestors than we normally like to think - and the more secure and prosperous members of the human race are less different from their fellow human beings than they find comfortable. Our ancestors, right up to the modern age, knew they were fragile. A brief period of dazzling technological achievement combined with the absence of any major global war produced the belief that fragility was on the retreat and that making our global environment lastingly secure or controllable was within reach.
But the same technical achievements that had generated this belief turned out to be among the major destabilising influences in the material environment. And the absence of major global conflict sat alongside the proliferation of bitter and vicious local struggles, often civil wars that trailed on for decades. But perhaps it is only in the past two decades that we have quite caught up with the realisation that global crises are indifferent to national boundaries, political convictions and economic performance. The vulnerability cannot be neatly cornered off. For the foreseeable future, we shall have to get used to this fragility; and we are going to need considerable imaginative resources to cope with it. In the past, people found resources like this in art and religion. Today it is crucial to learn to see the sciences as a resource not a threat or a rival to what these older elements offered. It is more than high time to forget the phoney war between faith and science or art and technology. Belittling the imaginative inspiration of authentic science is as fatuous as the view that the arts are just a pleasant extra in human life, or that religion is an outdated kind of scientific explanation. Just because inflated claims are made for science, and unrealistic hopes are raised, it is dangerously easy to forget why and how it matters, and to be lured into the bizarre world in which the minority report in science (about climate, pandemic or whatever) is given inflated importance just because we have been disappointed about the utterly unqualified certainty that we thought we had been promised.
And what matters about scientific research is that it is not undertaken to prove an existing view correct, and so to reinforce the existing power or advantage of some over others. People rightly look with deep scepticism at research purporting to show that racial, social or sexual privilege is somehow grounded in the natural order. Ideally, what scientific discourse offers is not the guarantee of indisputable results that will simply tell us what to do, but a method of meeting each other in a shared exploratory conversation that will not be derailed by the presence in the room of non-negotiable convictions about the natural world that would make discussion on an equal footing impossible.
Science helps us live with our fragility by giving us a way of connecting with each other, recognising that it is the same world that we all live in. We have to forget our self-protective habits in order to discover our shared challenges. But what science alone does not do is build the motivation for a deeper level of connection. We act effectively not just when we find a language in common to identify problems, but when we recognise that those who share these challenges are profoundly like us, to the extent that we can to some degree feel their frailty as if it were ours – or at least, feel their frailty impacting directly on our own, so that we cannot be secure while they remain at risk.
This is where art comes in. Like the sciences, it makes us shelve our self-orientating habits for a bit. Listening to music, looking at an exhibition, reading a novel, watching a theatre or television drama, we open doors to experiences that are not our own. If science helps us discover that there are things to talk about that are not determined just by the self-interest of the people talking, art opens us up to how the stranger feels, uncovering connections where we had not expected them.
What religion adds to this is a further level of motivation. The very diverse vocabularies of different religious traditions claim not only that the Other is someone we can recognise but that they are someone we must look at with something like reverence. The person before us has a claim on our attention, even our contemplation, and on our active generosity. The religions of south and east Asia question the very idea of a safe and stable self with a territory to protect against others; while for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the claim of a stranger is grounded in the conviction that every human being is the vehicle of God’s presence and God’s glory – “made in God’s image”.
Being more deeply connected will not take away the fragility of our condition, but it will help us see that it is worth parking the obsessions of tribes and echo chambers so that we can actually learn from and with each other; that it is worth making what local difference can be made, so as to let the dignity of the human person be seen with greater clarity. “Our life and death are with our neighbour,” said one of the saints of early Christian monasticism. That is the humanism we need if we are not to be paralysed by the fragility we cannot escape. *** Reflection by Rowan Williams
A Muslim peace prayer:
O God, You are peace: from You comes peace: to You returns peace.
Revive us with a salutation of peace, and lead us to your abode.
A Navajo blessing:
Be still within yourself and know that the trail is beautiful. May the winds be gentle upon your face, and your direction be straight and true as the flight of an eagle. Walk in harmony with God and all people.
A prayer from Uganda:
Spirit of life, revive your work in this land, starting with me.
From India:
Lord, you have lit up lamps in my heart that nothing can put out.
From the Hindu scriptures: May all be happy: may all be free from disease: may all realise what is good: may none be subject to misery. Peace to all.