Hope in a darkening world

The world is getting darker. Here in the northern hemisphere this is increasingly apparent, as the sun, obedient to the onset of autumn, has been rising later and setting earlier, in slivers of daily increments. On warm, summery days, those early dusks can feel somewhat dissonant; on other days, though, rain and cloud have simply added to the sense of growing gloom.

But last weekend, regardless of the weather, the world turned darker. Last weekend our news began to fill up with horrifying, heart-rending scenes from Israel and Gaza, and with increasingly hardline actions, and polarised, violently opposed positions containing antisemitism or islamophobia. And away from these, buried in the news - as much as in broken masonry - are the victims of earthquakes in Afghanistan, and those suffering wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Yemen, Syria and so many more places. Last weekend the world turned darker, and I laid aside the cheery blog I had started writing, and simply sat in wordless horror.

But in the midst of all this, my normal life has continued, as normality does. The sun rises, work continues, I share a meal with friends; good things happen. On Wednesday we celebrated the blessed and happy memory of St John XXIII - good Pope John. Sixty-one years ago, his was one of the interventions for peace in the Cuban Missile Crisis: six months later, and only two months before his death from cancer, he published his final encyclical - Pacem in Terris - Peace on Earth. His opening line, forged from his direct experience of two World Wars, revolutions, genocide and the precipice of nuclear annihilation, is nonetheless filled with hope, and quiet faith... Peace on Earth - which humanity throughout the ages has so longed for and sought after... 

And I remembered one of the orientations from our 1994 General Chapter, which, reflecting on a world in profound and disturbing transition, called us to rekindle our hope and keep it alive. Re-reading that document, I am reminded that Hope holds fast to the essential human values... Such hope finds its strength in the faithfulness of God...

When I first prayed with the cross I received at my perpetual profession, I was especially drawn to its 'underside', on which are the words Spes Unica - one and only hope. And I need to hold on to that hope, founded in Jesus' pierced and broken Heart, believing that somehow, in Jesus' pain and woundedness, in our pain and woundedness, and that of the world, lie the seeds and the hope of redemption and new life. And in here, too, lie humanity's deepest longings for peace...

Let us pray together for this peace, and work for it, too, within our own contexts.