I wrote this in March 2020, and stopped.
” Writing in February (2020), I did not believe the world would turn in such a way as if nothing else matters, to be able to think of nothing else, but as a contagion which has afflicted the earth and its people in a hundred varied ways.
It is as if the inequality of this earth is magnified a hundred times, in categories and root causes so varied as to defy conventional wisdom and rational logic – yet it is these many variations of logical thinking that are mirroring one another that stands out in the world today – how can we make valid comparisons of the tragedy enveloping Italy and Iran, with the quiet desperation of other societies that has none of the visible realities of news, measurements, and tests to sign-post their evolving fate.
We ask if this is primarily a medical or socio-demic, that if the realities of the science that confronts us are in fact the same all over, then what is this? What is the ……”
15 months later, picking up where I left off, today, the prose seemed then to be so much more in touched with the troubled world, and in awe of the force of nature sweeping through the world, in squeals as well as in silence, in suffering of a very public and visceral nature, and in subdued resignation.
I had chanced upon inequality of the passing storm, except that it stayed.
Since then, the focus has very much crept back to individuals or groups of individuals, searching from within, for meaning, for purpose, and for sustainability. If the raging sufferance that is sweeping through the world can be safely cocooned from the immediacy of my life, am I contented, and do I still need to be a citizen of the wider community, to transcend the selfishness that pervades and prevails over an unending path of destruction, that attrite the spirit that is far more pernicious than the physical demands of loss? A rhetorical question.
One is immediately comforted by that lodestone which is within – the Kingdom of God, the pearls of pearls, the little mustard seed that can, and will ……. “The Kingdom of God is here, and now, lived on earth and within us.”
“the decisive battles of God’s kingdom are fought in solitude”
Josef Neuner
Yet the Desert Fathers acknowledged the unspeakable truth that living in the Oasis of the Desert is but a mirage, because the real world has to be lived in, the present, the here-and-now, even as we nurture our agency to create a cocoon of the desert oasis from within.
The real world has to be lived, because it is ultimately in community, that we will find our true being. And so this contradiction as to what is self, what is community, the safety of isolation versus the mission of community-living, challenges us to walk the path of truth, to navigate in a time of upheaval, not for self, but for others.
“If you love those who love you. What reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?”
Matthew 5:46
The quiet nudges that Jesus presses us on towards strangers, challenges us each and every day, not to set boundaries, but to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” (Matt 3:3)
In C S Lewis’ collection of addresses, The Weight of Glory (HarperCollins, 1949), he wrote about membership in the Mystical Body of Christ as the new creature and community, not the old.
The society into which the Christian is called at baptism is not a collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body of which the family is an image on the natural level. ……. That is just how Christianity cuts across the antithesis between individualism and collectivism. There lies the maddening ambiguity of our faith as its must appear to outsiders. It sets its face relentlessly against our natural individualism; on the other hand, it gives back to those who abandon individualism an eternal possession of their own being, even of their own bodies.
from CS Lewis, Membership, in The Weight of Glory, read to the Society of St Alban and St Sergius, Oxford, 1945.
Lumix G9, Olympus Zuiko 300mm May 2021.