22 May 2024 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
Forgive us for that narrowness of vision which sees only the clouds and misses the RAINBOWS. From women activists in Guatemala.
Tell me what you want to do with your one wild and precious life. Mary Oliver
Who brings about peace is called the companion of God in the work of creation. A traditional Jewish saying.
Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Austrian poet and novelist.
God of ancient calm, touch the empty spaces within us where we are vulnerable enough to meet you. From an Australian prayer.
We saw a stranger yesterday,
We put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place,
And, with the sacred name of the triune God,
He blessed us and our house,
Our cattle and our dear ones,
And as the lark says in her song:
Often, often, often, goes Christ in the stranger’s guise.
Celtic rune of hospitality
Centuries ago Christ spoke about the constant need for forgiveness. As one writer put it “To forget is human, but to forgive is divine”. In every continent the gift of forgiving one another is needed more than ever, for we are living through “an age of revenge”. Half the time we do not know what we are doing by hurting others and day-by-day further wounding our precious planet – the source of all life. We have disconnected from that enduring light of forgiveness, and the great task for our human family in the years ahead is to rediscover it. Peter
The Myth of Purity
Over the years I have been influenced by the work of Mohsin Hamid. Mohsin (52) is a British Pakistani novelist and writer. His novels are Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Exit West, and The Last White Man. Among the writers who have influenced him are Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. Here is some of his thinking on “the myth of purity” which today undergirds some of our emerging Nationalisms in many parts of the world. Moshin argues that the time has come to seek to reverse, at least partially, the emotional polarity of these two words ‘Myth’ and ‘Purity’, to extol impurity’s benefits and denounce purity’s harm. Peter
“Biology is instructive here. Every child is a combination of genetic material from two different sources. Every child is impure, a mix. Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamental human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before, to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking, culture and politics the same applies. Of Asia and Africa’s influence on European cuisine – and visa versa. Of the foreign-born in Silicon Valley. Of the green revolution. Of cutting-edge research in medicine. These are not victories of purity, designed by like-minded people of similar appearance and narrowly shared ancestry. These are what can be achieved when humanity mixes.
Climate change. Mass migration. Rampant inequality. None of the most pressing and daunting problems today facing humanity have simple answers. As a species we require creative new approaches, yet-to-be imagined leaps forward. But while we might not yet know what the solutions to these challenges are, we should already suspect from where the breakthroughs are most likely to come. They are likely to come from mongrelisation.
From profound impurity. From people and ideas at risk of being suppressed and marginalised by the purity-obsessed people in our time”.
From my Guguletu Journal:
In 2005, thanks to the Iona Community, I spent some time in the township of Guguletu, near Cape Town in South Africa. This week I was re-reading parts of that journal – “It is April the 14th and this morning I was in the principal’s office in one of our local schools here in the township and this was on the wall – in English, not Xhosa which is the main language in Guguletu. It was in large, bold print. I thought at first it was a Bible text. Perhaps it is!
“The Lord looked upon my work and was very pleased. Then he looked again and saw my salary. He turned away and bowed his head...and wept”
And that same Lord must be weeping over the lack of basic school equipment, over parents unable to give their kids a decent meal and over the young mums with AIDS who were buried in the local cemetery last Saturday”. Peter
