it’s informed by genuine spirituality. If it provides a home for authentic experience. If it opens a window into ‘the other’.
True religion will always make room for a spirituality that will develop us, individually and collectively. A way to find ourselves. The American scholar Barbara Brown Taylor puts her finger on it: ‘Religion is the deep well that connects me to the wisdom of the ages. Spirituality is the daily experience of hauling up living water and carrying it into a dry world.’3
As someone once said: ‘Sitting in church on Sunday doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.’4
2
Greet the day
Morning has broken Like the first morning, Blackbird has spoken Like the first bird. Praise for the singing, Praise for the morning, Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.
Sweet the rain’s new fall, Sunlit from heaven, Like the first dewfall on the first grass Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden Sprung in completeness where his feet pass
Mine is the sunlight, Mine is the morning, Born of the one light Eden saw play; Praise with elation, Praise every morning, God’s recreation Of the new day.12
How many mornings will we get?
No one can tell.
The accident of birthplace has a say on the number of our days. But, roughly speaking, we might find the sun rising and peaking through our curtains about 26,000 times. We might lay down to rest 26,000 more.
At the end of it all, most of those days we will never remember. And a few we will never forget.
Nearly a century ago, the poet and children’s author Eleanor Farjeon wrote the words to a hymn which beautifully captured a sense of gratitude for a new day. She imagined the first morning in Eden, with Adam and Eve taking in the birdsong, the dew on the grass, the breaking light. Much later the hymn became a hit for Cat Stevens, who continued to perform it under his new name, Yusuf Islam, after he converted to Islam.
Whether we give God a name or whether we don’t, giving thanks is a good way to start the day.
What might happen on any given day? No one can tell. Every day is something of a surprise. All we can know for sure, as each new morning breaks, is that she is here again. She is ours.
‘Give thanks for her,’ says the cartoonist Michael Leunig, ‘as you make your way.’3
3
LIVE THE QUESTIONS
BE PATIENT TOWARD ALL THAT IS UNSOLVED IN YOUR HEART AND TRY TO LOVE THE QUESTIONS THEMSELVES, LIKE LOCKED ROOMS AND LIKE BOOKS THAT ARE NOW WRITTEN IN A VERY FOREIGN TONGUE. DO NOT NOW SEEK THE ANSWERS, WHICH CANNOT BE GIVEN YOU BECAUSE YOU WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO LIVE THEM. AND THE POINT IS, TO LIVE EVERYTHING. LIVE THE QUESTIONS NOW. PERHAPS YOU WILL THEN GRADUALLY, WITHOUT NOTICING IT, LIVE ALONG SOME DISTANT DAY INTO THE ANSWER.1
RAINER MARIA RILKE
4
Read the News
Are things getting better? Or worse? Is history going forwards... or backwards?
Your answer may depend on anything from personality type to the headlines you woke up to on the morning news. Or, on who’s asking the question. And where they’re standing. But mostly your answer depends on what you mean by the question. Do you mean: is the world a better place today than last year, or are things better in the twenty-first century than, say, in the nineteenth? Or in ancient times?
For example, in 1980, smallpox, which has existed for 3,000 years and was once one of the most feared diseases on the planet, was eradicated. The polio virus, which as recently as the 1980s, paralysed 350,000 people a year, is now almost gone too.
Or take life expectancy. If you’re a woman in sub-Saharan Africa today, and you are asked if things are getting better and you compare yourself to the life of your grandmother, you may well say, ‘yes’. Today, you will probably live until you are fifty-seven – that’s sixteen years more of life than your grandmother, who might have made it to forty-one.
This kind of news doesn’t make the headlines because it didn’t happen an hour ago, or even yesterday. It didn’t happen with the sickening thud of a bomb blast or the flash of a paparazzi camera. This is not twenty-four-hour rolling news but another sort that we rarely notice until, some time later – years, decades, centuries – someone decides to call it history.
Journalism is sometimes referred to as the first draft of history, but first drafts don’t tell the whole story. In a world of 24/7 news, we can miss the bigger picture.
Each year, Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest people, publishes a letter on behalf of his philanthropic foundation drawing on the latest research, from child mortality to economic growth. Recently Gates wrote:
‘By almost any measure the world is better than it has ever been – by 2035 there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.’1
That sounds unlikely, but on the other hand, maybe Gates can see a more distant news cycle with a greater circumference.
Stand back a little, adjust your view and some days you might capture the faint outline of a more promising image of history.
5
Imagine it
Human beings are makers. We invent stuff: tools, machines, meals, stories, art, ideas, religions, cultures, mischief. Our capacity to create came in a ‘cognitive revolution’ around 70,000 years ago, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari.1 That’s when Homo sapiens’ capacity to create took off. And creation is one of the things that marks us out.
The engine of making is the imagination. And the fuel of that engine is a question. What if? A question that sends us way beyond straightforward invention.
What if I were you? In order for us to understand one another, we each need to imagine what it’s like to be the other. Otherwise we do one another harm, trample over each others’ feelings. To hurt someone else deliberately is a failure of the imagination. When we cry at weddings, view movies, watch our children play, we are imagining life through someone else’s eyes.
Wouldn’t it work better if? It takes imagination to plan anything: to develop a road system; to make a garden; to choose a school for our kids; to decide how much garlic to add to the casserole. To think ahead.
Couldn’t
