Complete Assemblies for Secondary Schools
ISBN 034042954 2; First Published 1988
Introduction
Here is something for the younger visitor to this website.
The author sees the advantages of reflection and advocates a calm and reflective cast of mind.
In presenting human beliefs and values, these prescriptions for life well-lived look head on at some of the ultimate questions which all human beings should ask at some time or other. Issues are raised rather than dogmatic answers given. It is open for readers to disagree with some of the ideas. Most are incontrovertible. Many of the suggested answers will be well known to most adults but there are timely reminders, sometimes harking back to a slightly more innocent age, of how to live a good life. It is not easy to fashion a short-cut to experience, which in many ways is the greatest teacher.
Reflection as an academic discipline and a mental habit should typify mature thinking and can be inculcated from an early age. We are more likely to go down tracks that are suited for us if we have reflected on them and have ingested ideas that informed the wisest and most caring among our elders and betters.
In ‘Reflecting’ a panoply of thinking is laid out, topic by topic, in which right-thinking, occasionally with a religious bent, is there for our edification. Some approaches one might well know or suspect but reminders are ever timely and there is often a poem or a saying that will light up an inherent truth. Each story ‘concentrates on a single point, presenting human beliefs and values in such a way as to encourage young people to consider important moral and social issues and to take a reflective approach to life.
The values imparted in these lectures are timeless. It is perhaps not surprising that this book was published before the age of the internet and at a time when the idea of Reflection was more of a part of the mental equipment with which people normally tackled the ups and downs of life.
It may be thought that there is a slight irony in these moral tales in that much of the wisdom of the past quoted seems to be saying: ‘look to the future not the past’.
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Life’s Journey
Life is often thought of as a journey, and all of us travellers on life’s road. We would be foolish to set out on any journey without knowing where we are going, without being properly prepared and without knowing the way. And for a very important journey – especially one we had never undertaken before – we should take advice from those who know most about a journey, consult maps and rely on trustworthy directions
Change of Direction
If people feel that they have at last discovered the real purpose in their lives, then they will think all the upheaval is worthwhile.
No turning back
We cannot change the past, but we can from it. The illustration of this principle is taken from the C.S. Lewis books about Narnia, the most famous of which is ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. It was full of spells and people’s fingers tingled as with electricity when touching it. There was a spell for the refreshment of the spirit and it was as if, felt Lucy, who was reading it, it was more like a story and she wanted to read it over and over again but the magic of the book then came into play; one couldn’t turn back, the right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned, but the left-hand pages could not
Journey’s End
However pleasant a journey may be, it is good to arrive at our destination. We rarely travel just for the sake of it but because we want to get somewhere. It can be a relief when they are over and we have arrived somewhere. One can enter a caveat here when remembering the feelings of gloom that afflicted the explorers Sir Richard Burton and William Dalrymple when they accomplished their goals.
The journey of life is very different! Most of us want to prolong it, and we would rather not reach our destination at all. Perhaps that’s because we are unsure where we are going and what there is, if anything, at the end of the road.
Travelling companions
The moral is taken from Aesop’s Fable: ‘The Bear and the Travellers’
A bear confronts two travellers, the nimble one scrambles up a tree and the other plays dead. The bear sniffs him and moves on and the other, coming down from the tree asked him what the bear had whispered in his ear: ‘He told me never again to travel with a friend who deserts you at the first sign of danger.’
The test in the days of Big Game Hunting was whether you could risk going with someone ‘on a tiger shoot.’
Should one completely avoid ‘fair weather friends’ or are there ‘horses for courses’?
A Time and a Place for everything
‘For everything there is a season…
Many people feel that life must have a purpose and that time is our most precious gift.
Ends and Beginnings
Clement of Alexandria, a second-century Christian writer. said ‘The Lord has turned all our sunsets into sunrises’
In nature, the plant dies, but its bulb or its seed puts forth new shoots the following year. Human death can be seen as a new beginning – from the humanist point of view that we go on in our children and in all the ways we have influenced the world we leave behind. Each end in life, whether from school, or work, or having new experiences in retirement is a death in its own way but howev4r painful it is also a new beginning, a resurrection to new life.
Live for Today
One thing the following ancient Indian poem is saying that if today is well-lived both our memories and our plans receive a fillip
Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its busy course
Lie all the virtues and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement.
For yesterday is but a dream,
Tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well lived makes yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision if hope.
Look well therefore to this day
Babies
‘Every Child that comes into the world
Brings the message that God has not yet despaired of man’
– Rabindranath Tagore
‘Every time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?’
– R.D. Laing
Children
You may give them love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
– Kahlil Gibran:
Teenagers
When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly impatient of restraint. They have detestable manners, flout authority, have no respect for their elders. What kind of creatures will they be when they grow up?
– Hesiod, 8th century BC
The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone know everything.
– Peter the Monk, 13th century
Adults
I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high,
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky.
It was a childish ignorance.
But now ‘tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy
– Thomas Hood
Community
St Paul reminds his readers in Corinth that everyone in a community is important, and therefore should be treated with respect. We depend on each other to do our work well.
The analogy is the body: if the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? God arranged the organs in each body as he chose. If all were a single organ, where would the body be? There are many parts, but only one body. God has so composed the body that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.
Old People
Mrs Gates was a dear old lady.
She would toddle out of her house whenever she saw us in the back garden.
She would accept ice-creams from us – childlike – over the fence;
And in return, she would press us to take apples,
And biscuits for the dog.
She would ask us the same questions and tell us the same stories
Over and over again.
We loved her – with her woolly hat and squint eyes.
There was no harm in her.
Then one day, three young men forced their way into her house,
And stole her savings.
They pretended to be workmen, checking the gas.
They did her no physical harm,
But after that she was afraid to be alone
In the house where she had come as a bride, fifty years before.
She would imagine there were people hiding in the wardrobe
Or under the bed.
She would tremble like a leaf;
And when I put my arm round her, she felt frail as a bird.
There was no room in the old people’s home,
So they put her in hospital – in a psychiatric ward.
She didn’t survive long there.
Tolerance
Tolerance comes from recognising and accepting that we are all different; we sometimes act as though we expect everyone to be just like us. We should respect people’s right to their point of view and we should accept that we are not perfect. Only when we come to terms with our own limitations will we be less critical of other people’s failings, because we don’t expect them to be
Growth
People cannot grow unless they are happy and even when their material needs have been satisfied, they still need many other things. They want to be liked and to like other people, to feel valuable, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, to feel free and to feel responsible, above all not to feel lonely and isolated
– W.H. Auden
Loneliness
Be a friend – the rest will follow
Tests
They can be of intelligence, skill or character
On Training
St Paul in Corinthians uses the analogy of a sportsman to describe his religious life. The dedication. discipline and effort. Run straight for the finishing line, do not waste punches
Keep Calm
It is possible to train ourselves for instance through yoga or meditation to be calm and self-disciplined.
Words
Prescriptions in Islam: ‘Beware of your tongue; it is like an arrow that often goes off course’ and ‘a person who listens to gossip is bound to be a gossip himself’; is the latter true.
One of the basic teachings of Buddhism Is ‘Right Speech’
Telling Lies
Five ways of looking at a lie
To speak or not to speak?
And then a scholar said, Speak of talking
And he answered, saying:
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts:
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live
In your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed
Unfold its wings but cannot fly.
There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being
alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they
would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought
Reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell in not
in words.
In the bosum of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.
Silence
We love to chat, but sometimes ‘silence is golden’.
Silence and solitude are necessary if we want to have an inner life – a spiritual life. Many people feel the need sometimes to leave behind their busy working lives and homes, to go on a retreat to a place of quiet.
The following passage was written by a monk in Algeria. It is the practice for them to go into the Sahara Desert to be alone in prayer
The great joy of the Sahara is the solitude, and the silence, true silence, which penetrates everywhere and invades one’s whole being, speaking to the soul with wonderful new strength unknown to men to whom this silence means nothing.
When one speaks of the soul’s desert, and says that the desert must be present in your life, you must think not only of the Sahara or the desert of Judea. Certainly, it is not everyone who can have the advantage of being able to carry out in practice this detachment from daily life. But if you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life. Every now and then leaving people and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life. You must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God.
Prayer
Sometimes people find that God is easy to reach, and their prayers are very fulfilling. At other times it might be more difficult. The important thing, for people who value prayer, is to keep at it
Contemplatives
Sheila Cassidy, a Christian doctor in Chile, discovered that time spent in quiet prayer was not such a waste of time:
Unable to sleep after I had worked all night at the hospital, I used to take the little bus which went up into the hills and then walk up the steep dirt road to the monastery. The monks became used to me sitting in my poncho and jeans in the front row of the empty church…Thus we prayed together many times, the monks and I, high above Santiago.
The presence of contemplatives in an active society is always disturbing. The folly of their life spent in prayer and manual labour is a curious sign of the existence of God in a world so preoccupied with its own affairs. I used to look at these men, the old ones who had wasted their lives in this crazy way and the young ones who were freely choosing to do likewise, and wonder what on earth God wanted of me.
It was a good place to come to pray and to think because, it being a long way, I had to be very desperate before I decided to go home. Sometimes they gave me lunch, and sometimes I took an apply and some cheese and sat on the low wall outside the church and overlooking the city stretched out below me. The stiff and sunburned I would walk down the hill into the setting sun and know in some incommunicable way that my day had been well spent.
It’s a help
Let us pray:
There are all these walls between us – husband and wife, parent and child, neighbour and neighbour and neighbour, friend and friend.
Walls of self. Walls of silence. Even walls of words. For even when we try to talk to each other, new walls begin to rise. We camouflage, we hold back, we make ourselves sound better than we really are. Or we are shocked and hurt by what is revealed. Or we sit privately in judgement criticizing even when we pretend to agree/ But with you , LORD, there are no wall.
You, who mad me know my deepest emotions, my most secret thoughts. You know the good of me, and the bad of me, you already understand.
Why, then do I turn to you?
Because as I talk to you my disappointments are eased, my joys are enhanced. I find solutions to my problems or the strength to endure what I must.
From you perfect understanding I receive my understanding for my own life’s needs.
Thank you that I can always turn to you. I’ve got to talk to somebody, God
Listening
Many people believe that God speaks to us through our inner promptings – when our conscience pricks us or when special thoughts come to us
IN THE SILENCE
Seek me in the silence
For my voice is not in the earthquake
Wind or fire
But a still small voice
Speaking softly
To your heart
I speak
In the silence of the dawn
Before the busy world awakes;
In the noontide
When earth takes its rest;
In the evening
When the dusk falls softly;
During the night watch
To waking hearts.
But I will not shout
To make my voice heard
Amongst the clamour
Of earthly things
Of crowding thoughts.
You must listen
You must learn to love the silence
For it is then that I speak to you
In the quiet of your heart.
HUMAN NATURE
In the image of God
In what sense are human beings made in the image of God?
We are creative, we have brains with which to reason things out. We can plan ad change the environment in which we live, we have a conscience and the ability to tell right from wrong, we can enjoy personal relationships and experience love.
Each of us therefore has immense privileges and responsibility for the rest of creation
Being Ourselves
There has never been anyone quite like me before and there will never be again.
Its hard work ensuring that the mask doesn’t slip.
The most relaxing people to be with are usually those who are confident enough to be themselves. You can trust them because you know that they are genuine; you know where you are with them.
Why aren’t we all like that, all of the time? Perhaps it comes with maturity. Perhaps we need to try out various images before we can understand what our true self is like. Or maybe we are ashamed of ourselves and think that no one will accept us as we are.
Selfish Greed
The people who first told the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent knew that humankind had lost its innocence. They knew that even when we have so much, we want more. They knew that when we’re forbidden to have something, that’s the one thing we want. Selfish greed is the original sin.
Making the best of things
There is a Jewish story of the King who had a beautiful Diamond with had a flaw in it and he promised his daughter in marriage to the man who could repair. An artist used the flaw to depict the stem of a rose whose head he incised into the diamond. He got the prize.
Don’t stare
A teacher was convinced that everyone noticed that she put on a non-matching pair of shoes…how much worse if someone has a real physical disability
FORGIVENESS
Guilt
How do we cope with it when we know we’re in the wrong?
Forget about it? Psychologists tell us that guilt has to be recognised and dealt with. Even if it sinks out of sight into our subconscious mind and affect the sort of person we are. Try and do better? Not as easy as it sounds. Pray for forgiveness? ‘Comfort’ has become a nice, soft, cosy word but it really means ‘with fortitude’ or ‘with strength’. People ask for God’s power to give them a clear conscience and His strength to help them overcome their faults in future. Go to confession, a counsellor or a friend? People can find it helpful to openly admit guilt. To do something that makes up for what we did wrong and try to put things right is advised.
A fresh start
A spring-clear of ourselves and our consciences regularly is advised; just as spring brings warmth and renewal after the long winter months
Forgiving others
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you
– Letter to the Ephesians
Humility
When we’re too full of ourselves, we cannot see our own faults. We can only understand other people’s faults when we are able to admit to our own
All you need is love
One mustn’t deal with people as one deals with inanimate objects. All men need love; even bees can’t be handled without care. Mutual love is the fundamental law of human life. If you feel no love – leave people alone – A digest of what Tolstoy wrote
The burning flame
When love beckons you, follow him
Though his ways are hard and steep,
And when his wings enfold you, yield to him…
And when he speaks to you believe in him
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so he is for your pruning….
…..But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your
laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears
– Extracts from Kahlil Gibran
Love
St Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians speaks of three things which will endure for ever: faith, hope and love – but says the greatest of them is LOVE.
Love is inexhaustibly patient
Love anticipates a person’s needs and meets them
Love doesn’t mind when someone else has the limelight, responsibilities, popularities, or privileges
Love is not anxious to impress
Loe does not blow its own trumpet
Love is not aggressive but courteous
Love does not insist on its own way
Love is not touchy, or easily rubbed up the wrong way
Love keeps no list of the faults and failings of others
Love doesn’t gloat over the mistakes of others in order to put itself in a better light, instead it is glad when others are right
Love throws a cloak of silence over what is displeasing in other people
Love trusts that in everything God works for good
Love looks forward to the future glory, promised by God
Love is not shaken even by the worst of storms
Love is eternal
Giving
You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
There are those who give little of the much that they have =
And they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
And there are those who have little and give it all.
Thee ae the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.
It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding.
You often say, ‘I would give, but only to the deserving.’
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture,
They give that they may live, but to withhold is to perish.
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.
For in truth it is life that gives unto life – while you who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.
– Khalil Gibran
Be thankful
Even if our family has no car and lives in rented accommodation, we would still appear rich to two-thirds of the world’s population
Disaster Funds
It is a sad comment on human nature that our interest has to be captured by exciting news items before we react to human suffering. That we will give to disaster funds rather than to those charities which are working on long-term development projects designed to avert such disasters.
World Hunger
Just as we look back on slavery in amazement and disgust, will people in the future look back at us and wonder how we could allow so many human beings to die of starvation at a time when there were world food surpluses when we have the technology to send people to the moon?
Slavery was only abolished because of campaigners who spoke out against the cruelty, and refused to be put off. Let us hope that enough of us will be concerned with the food crisis that the governments of the world will unite in a concerted effort to give every human being a fair share of the earth’s resources
The Brotherhood of man
The Pope in Africa in 1986 said the youth of today want ‘Peace…fraternal solidarity without restriction of race and frontiers. They want to unite in order to overcome hunger in the world’
Humanists argue that we all belong to the human family and are therefore responsible for our ‘brothers and sisters’ wherever they are in the world. Religious people would go even further. They link this principle of the ‘brotherhood of man’ to that of the Fatherhood of God’.
One God reigns over all the nations of the world and has pleasure in all his children, In the eyes of the Creator all his children are equal; his goodness is poured forth on all…All peoples and nations are one family, the children of one Father and should be to one another as brothers and sisters! If all men are obedient to this principle, the greatest unity and understanding would be established in the hearts of mankind’
Racial Harmony
An Indian artist writes:
We strolled round the streets, at home amongst the black-and crowds, passing women in saris, black robed Greek s, ladies wearing bright tie-heads, swaying their hips as they walked…a rainbow was stretching behind the smouldering houses , lightening the sky with a faint newness…the air was still fresh and untainted after the rain…the different colours of the population were a gift to me, and I thought it must be realty boring to live in a monotone area where everyone was black or white or brown.
One truth
There is a Hindu story of the five blind men who lived in an Indian village.
One day a prince set an elephant in front of them. He told each of them to feel the animal and tell him what the elephant was like. The first, who felt its foot, said the elephant was like a pillar. The second who felt its ear said ‘No, it’s like a fan’. ‘ ‘Nonsense.’ Said a third, who had felt its tusks. ‘it’s round, hard and smooth, like the handle of a plough. The fourth felt its tail and was sure it was a rope. ‘Don’t be daft’, said the fifth, who had felt its trunk. ‘The elephant is like a snake’.
The Baha’I Faith preaches the oneness of God, the oneness of religion and the oneness of humanity. It believes that there is truth to be found in all religions; and its message is that this truth is able to unite a divided world.
When you meet those whose opinions differ from your own, do not turn away your face from them. All are seeking truth and there are many roads leading thereto. Truth has many aspects, but it remains always and forever one. Do not allow differences of opinion to separate you from your fellow-men or to be the cause of dispute, hatred and strife in your hearts. Rather, search diligently for the truth and make all men your friends
Peace
‘Peace be with you’ is a greeting which is found in many religions.
Each of the words for peace ‘Shalom’ (Jewish) or ‘Shanti’ (Hindu) does not describe a lack of noise and conflict so much as a positive state of harmony, well-being and fulfilment.
Brian Wren, the poet, is making the same point
Tell them that PEACE
Is the shouting of children at play,
The babble of tongues set free,
The thunder of dancing feet,
and a father’s voice singing
Strength to love
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were the greatest spokesmen for peace of the twentieth century. Although they resisted ethe evils which they saw in society, they refused to fight evil with evil. They believed that it is always wrong to use violence. Yet they both met violent deaths. They remind us that pacifism is not for weaklings, but demands courage, strength, self-restraint and faith.
Violence only leads to destruction but love can reform society. Martin Luther King speals of his faith in this ‘soul force’ – the power of love. For him, love was not ‘sentimental and anaemic’ but a force to be reckoned with
Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering, We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and will still love you…But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.
Turn the other cheek
If we always try to get own back, the matter doesn’t usually stop there. It usually gets worse.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seek to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it….Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
– Martin Luther King
Remembrance
If Remembrance Sunday reminds us of the tragedy of war, then perhaps it will help us to keep the peace
Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse…
Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!.
Suffering
Why? There are many answers. Abdul Baha of the Baha’I religion puts two major ideas forward
If a person eats too much, he ruins his digestion. If he takes poison he becomes ill and dies. If a persona gambles, he will lose his money, etc
The second is a religious idea
Consider the great sorrows endured by Christ and by his apostles. Those who suffer most attain to the greatest perfection. When a person is happy is may forget his God. When griefs overwhelm him, then he will remember his Father who is in Heaven and who is able to deliver him.
The point of pain
Man is so sick with sin, so thirsty for pleasure, that if there were no hedge of pain he would soon become satanic.
Nothing oud interfere with his desires. He would be perfectly prepared to trample over dead bodies if only he could satisfy his requirements.
A challenge
The Controller in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World discusses the convenient, comfortable, stable, sterile New World with the Savage, who represents the old world and says ‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin’ to which the Controller says: ‘In fact, you are claiming the right to be unhappy!’
Other people’s suffering
In the rush and bustle of everyday life, it is very easy to be blind to the suffering of others- even of people among whom we live
In the Greek myth Daedalus tells his son Icarus when they escape from unjust imprisonment on Crete by making wings of feathers not to fly too low or the sea would dampen the wings, or to fly too high or the sun would melt them
W.H. Auden reflects on this as he looks at a painting by Brueghel called Icarus
A ploughman might have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure….and the expensive delicate ship must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to go and sailed calmly on.
Every cloud has a silver lining
People who think like this show us a way of coming with suffering.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right that t be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we righty know,
Thro’ the world we safely go
– William Blake
Goodies and baddies
Robin Hood was in a battle with Owen of Clun who was an evil man, with eyes black as his soul, and in a desperate fight Robin just got out from under the portcullis which thundered down on Owen’ head. All very satisfying but in real life, we must never give up the battle between good and evil while recognising that sometimes it is not easy to work out where the real evil lies
St George
St George seems to have been a Christian soldier in the Roman army and was adopted as the emblem for England by Richard the Lionheart. He was struck off the official canon by the Roman Catholic church as so little was known about the historical figure but the myth was that he slew the dragon that was eating two sheep a day till the sheep supply ran out and it was about to claim as its next victim the King’s lovely daughter, then St George stepped in, and slew it, the moral being that one sometimes has to fight the good fight, no matter what the risks.
St Michael
St Michael was an archangel in the Book of Revelation and threw down the Satan that is the dream many people have that Good will overthrow Evil in the long run
First, the bad news
We can get pretty depressed reading or seeing on TV of the things that go round in the wider world or the crimes on our own doorstep. But if these small groups of people have the power to ruin lives, so the vast majority of people have the power to improve lives.
God
God was there already, it was not necessary for us to create God. Some people feel him in their lives. It is like the air one breathes to which we give scant attention till we have gasp for air.
Experience
The sense of being guided on an important decision, the love of our parents, the feelings of awe and wonder at the world in which we find ourselves are not measurable in a laboratory but are the fruits of our experience.
Images of God
We must have some idea f God and if we don’t what is it that we are rejecting? It is easier for humans to relate to a person like Jesus than to a concept outside time and space etc.
Awe and Wonder
The sense of awe and wonder at the splendour of nature was one of the first religious feelings experienced by human beings.
Colonel James Irwin gives us some of his thoughts when he was on the moon:
Each night, hen we bedded down in the lunar module, I would lie awake for a few minutes and reflect on the beauty of what I had seen and try and etch in my mind a lasting impression of the majesty of those mountains.
Coming down to earth, we too can be inspired by the wonders of nature, if only we would quieten ourselves to take it in
Miracles
Do you believe miracles? It all depends on how you define ‘miracle.
o me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continuous miracle,
The fishes that swim – the rocks – the motion of the waves – ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
An easy option
Is religion really an easy option, for the faint-hearted to give them courage? But perhaps it is for the truly courageous. The Day pf Pentecost when the fire of belief took hold of the disciples in a great wind-and-fire sort of a moment and they were thereafter armed to endure the suffering required of their faith.
What are they worth
Franz Jaggerstatter, of the small Austrian village of Radegund, was a peasant farmer and caretaker in the Catholic Church; he was the only man in the village who refused to vote in favour of the Nazi takeover of Austria and he refused to fight for the Nazis because it ran contrary to his beliefs as a Christian. He was beheaded in 1943, leaving a wife and three daughters.
The Inner Light
Do you ever know that something is right, even when there is no proof? Do you ever sense that there is something you have to do even if your friends think that you are mad to do it? There are times when we have an inner conviction like this, an inner certainty of a truth we cannot prove or explain, something that we don’t even fully understand.
Some people have the courage to follow their inner light.
There’s a light that is shining
In the heart of a man,
Ther’s a light that was shining
When the world began.
There’s a light that is shining
In the Turk and the Jew
And a light that is shining, friend
In me and you.
There’s an ocean of darkness
And I drown in the night
Till I come through the darkness
To the ocean of light.
You can lock me in prison
But the light ill be free,
‘And I walk in the glory
Of the light’, said he.
– Sydney Carter wrote a song about George Fox, founder of the Quakers
In the darkness
And there always is a light
As we plot our way through weeks and years,
Through the storms of our calling,
Through failure and disappointment,
Even in the dark nights of suffering,
Even in the face of death,
We pray, and there is light,
A greater light than we expected,
Guiding us to havens and to rest
– Frank Topping, a Methodist Minister
The Light of my life
They have the ability to look on the bright side of life and cheer us up, as well as enlightening us.
There are certain people who are lights in our lives and there are great people who are recognised as lights of the world, acting like beacons on a hill warning us of disaster if we continue to lead selfish lives and spreading the message that there is hope for the world in the ways of justice and f peace
