19th October 2022 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
Celebrating Wisdom
We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.
Emmeline Packhurst (1858-1928), British suffragette
Where there’s a will
One day seven years ago. I found myself saying to myself, I can’t live where I want to. I can’t go where I want to, I can’t do what I want to – I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), popular US artist
New Utopias
The 21st century must belong to women. We survivors of the most violent century in history wish for new utopias. The millennium which begins with this 21st century grants us at least the right to imagine good and better times. May this new era be more humane and plural where gender will no longer be a category for classifying people but culturally enriching criterion, with greater diversity for all societies. Let us celebrate then, this century, as our century.
Irma Arriagada, Chilean sociologist
Lucky and unlucky
I think everybody is equal. The difference is that those who have an education are lucky and they should have more of a conscience. But they don’t, they crush you if they can.
Dona Irma, street-market trader, Guatemala, in 1988
Imprisonment
Imprisonment in my country is always a possibility for any person who thinks and writes freely.
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer
The century of small things
Perhaps that’s what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Perhaps it will be the Century of Small Things.
Arundhati Roy, Indian Writer and activist
A brave voice
I am a good citizen. I never overspeed on the road. I never steal. I always cross the street in the rights place. But I’m definitely against the Government.
Dita Sari, Indonesian democracy activist who was often jailed by the authorities
Learning from living
What matters most is that we learn from living
Doris Lessing, British novelist
Cultural identity
We will demonstrate that we are flourishing cultures, and are changing the ‘cultural pollution’ we are submitted to and the image of backwardness and poverty that has been thrust upon us.
Rigoberta Menchu, Guatemalan Indian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Who’s who?
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf, British writer
The hovering spirit
This is a letter from Australia which I wrote several years ago to friends in different parts of the world. I think the letter is relevant today as we seek to discover our essential humanity in precarious times. The letter was included in an earlier book, A Time to Mend (Wild Goose publications 2013). Peter.
Dear friends in various places,
At present I am in the Northern Territory of Australia living alongside indigenous people. A place of the hovering spirit! Travelling under the bright evening stars in the stillness of this desert outback is to be in touch with something of that mystery which has been understood by Aboriginal people for over forty thousand years. Yes, forty thousand – and many scholars think a lot more than that!
Your own existence feels so temporary in this vast landscape, formed over tens of millions of years. Yet I also feel deeply at peace: held in nature’s beauty and in its silent invitation. This extraordinary landscape reveals its truth through desert skies, flame-red rocks, ancient pathways and hidden springs filled with sweet water. It has a cosmology all of its own.
Throughout the millennia, Aboriginal people have developed an understanding of this cosmology: the natural forces of earth, the inhabitant flora and fauna, indeed the total cosmos in which men, women, animals and natural phenomena are linked. And today this vast canvas of knowledge, which was essential for human survival through the centuries, continues to be evoked in song, poetry, ceremony and amazingly beautiful ritual painting. In fact I have just returned from spending a couple of hours with an Aboriginal elder who is also a fine painter.
As I try to take in these dimensions of knowledge I become more and more convinced that the survival of the human race is dependent on us recovering at least some awareness of their sacred interconnectedness with all that lives. It’s not possible to do that in the same way as Australia’s indigenous people, and it would be wrong to try to do so, yet in beginning to accept that we inhabit a sacred universe (and not one that can be constantly dominated by human greed) we awake to these paths of interdependence and interconnection.
Aboriginal spirituality is so grounded and practical. The Australian author David Tacey wrote a book about emerging spiritualities within his own country: Re-enchantment. In this book, David makes a strong plea for an earthed spirituality, and in reference to Aboriginal knowledge of the scared says this:
For Aboriginal people, the ‘natural way’ to live involves also a supernatural, mythological or imaginal dimension, and yet this supernatural dimension is eminently realistic, since it commands respect for the land, restrains human brutality and urges us to relate to the environment with love, reverence and awe.
I think this is immensely helpful as we seek to discover a spirituality of connection with the natural order. In Christian thought we are sometimes starved of imaginal dimensions in our attempts to connect theology and the good earth. Yet we need not be. It is hugely exciting that we can listen to cultures such as that of the Aboriginal people and in a certain sense be transformed by them, even if our understanding is limited. And if it sounds like a contradiction, then it is!
I am grateful for this experience of living in a remote community. The warm winds of the hovering spirit are around and this vast silent land lying beneath a cloudless sky has at its heart many songs and many teachings.
The finished house
In the finished house a flame is brought to the hearth.
Then a table, between door and window
Where a stranger will eat before the men of the house.
A bed is laid in a secret corner
For the three agonies – love, birth, death –
That are made beautiful with ceremony.
The neighbours come with gifts –
A set of cups, a calendar, some chairs.
A fiddle is hung at the wall.
A girl puts lucky salt in a dish.
The cupboard will have its loaf and bottle, come winter.
On the seventh morning
One spills water of blessing over the threshold.
George Mackay Brown
Come Spirit, on us breathe, with life and strength anew:
find in us love, and hope, and trust, and lift us up to you.
Part of a longer hymn written by my friend Anna Briggs of the Iona Community
