17 September 2024 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
From the cowardice that dare not face new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truth, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver us. A prayer from Kenya
How should one live? Live each day welcoming to all. Mechtild of Magdeburg medieval mystic in the 13th century who was the first mystic to write in Low German
In the 1960s Jim Wilson from the Guild of Health came to speak to our prayer group in the village in East Anglia where my husband, John, was a GP. Jim introduced us to Contemplative prayer. It was a complete revelation to me and opened up an entirely new perspective to prayer. I use a mantra, a word or phrase, to expel the thoughts that inevitably come crowding in and so to rest in our Lord’s presence. Subsequently we practiced this with various groups and later when my husband was a Consultant Psychiatrist he introduced contemplative prayer to a carefully selected group of patients. Relatives and staff commented on the difference this made to them. When John died unexpectedly, just 8 days after cancer was diagnosed, my faith kept me going. I don’t know how people survive who have no faith. I remember going to the tiny chapel in the hospital and giving him back to God using the prayer book words ‘All things come from You and of your own do we give you’. I continue to practice contemplative prayer in the company of others through the Julian Meetings – words by Sheila Young, a regular reader of the Candle.
Pira Sudham, is an author of Thai descent. He was born in a village in Isan in north-eastern Thailand. At age fourteen, he left Isan for Bangkok to become a servant to Buddhist monks in a monastery where he attended secondary school. Pira, now eighty two, has given a life-time to community service projects – such as building water reservoirs, giving plants and young trees for village gardens and supporting children. This work reflects how his life was transformed by once reading the line from a book “poverty, like corruption, is a human condition which can be changed”.
Mentioning corruption, a friend overseas who is an environmental activist is witness to much corruption in his own country. He fully understands he cannot do much about it, yet he sees himself as a “mosquito” in the sense of being persistently annoying to those involved in corrupt practices. I wonder how many of us would be able to describe ourselves as ‘mosquitoes’ when we come up against corruption and injustice of all kinds locally and globally? Peter
The complexities and benefits of rewilding:
In the last few years literally thousands of articles and many books have been written on the subject of rewilding. Here in Scotland rewilding is taking place in many areas of our stunningly beautiful landscape. As I see it this is a positive development. This short reflection is by David Gomm who lives in Oxfordshire. Peter.
Rewilding is a far more complex process than simply not mowing the grass, although one can see why cash-strapped local authorities might latch on to this approach. Neither is rewilding about scattering handfuls of wild flower seed about. There has to be an understanding of the ecology of the area undergoing rewilding.
In the past, wild grazing animals which we have all but eradicated, would have kept the grasses down, allowing herbaceous and other flowering plants to flourish, supporting diverse animal populations. Without large herbivores (or specialised selective mowing), grasses will always come to dominate a ‘meadow’ eco-system, reducing the diversity of the flora and consequently of the fauna. This is what happened in the ‘meadow mutiny’ example of rewilding.
Rewilding is just a fancy new name for eco-system restoration. But restoration, and indeed conservation, is an act of process involving management and intervention. Conservation is often misunderstood as just keeping humans out and letting nature run riot. Because of the lack of grazing animals and of active management, attempts to restore small areas of woodland in some suburban districts failed as fast growing tree-species, such as birches, came to dominate the woodland just as grasses will come to dominate a meadow eco-system. Sometimes the custodians of these areas would not allow young birch trees to be cut down even though natural grazing of saplings would have reduced their number.
The miracle of the spider’s silk:
A good friend who is also a well known Scottish artist recently sent me this wonderful reflection which comes from Katherine Rundell’s book The Golden Mole (Faber & Faber 2023, ISBN 9780571362509)
Spider’s silk is a miracle thing; one we have long tried to replicate and cannot, proof that our invention, daring and beautiful and miraculous as it is, is no rival to that which the natural world already contains. Spider silk weighs almost nothing – a thread of silk long enough to loop the Earth would weigh less than five hundred grams – but is one of the strongest materials on the planet: five times stronger than a strand of steel of the same thickness. The silk that comes from any spider’s spinneret is liquid, but becomes solid on contact with air, and is so consistently fine that it was used in the Second World War to make the cross-hairs in military gunsights. If we were to make a vast web our of spiders’ silk as thick as a biro, it would halt a Boeing 747 mid-air.
