Keeping The Peace

Mohandas Gandhi said: “There is no way to peace; peace is the way”.

Picture Screenshot of movie Ghostbusters

 included under Fair Use provisions

I loved the first Ghostbusters movie. The evil god Gozer demands that the team choose a form for him to take. Ray thinks of the most harmless thing he can remember, so Gozer appears on the streets of New York as a giant Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. Ray actually brought this monster into being just by thinking about it. But that couldn’t happen in reality could it?

When he was a small boy I gave my son a set of Lego bricks and showed him what to do by putting together the stupidest box with a window, pretending to be a house. I didn’t see much of him for a couple of days until he emerged from his room with the most amazing starship that it is possible to make with only Lego. My son is an artist. Same set of bricks for both of us, but he saw a starship while I saw a box with a window in it. We each live in a world of our own thoughts. Reality for us is not found in objects but in the significance we give to them.

Here’s another thing - you can’t have an argument on your own. Try it if you like – you won’t get far. For a good argument you need an opponent. Conversely, by taking sides, you perpetuate an argument. Walk away and it stops. You can go further and actually love your enemies, and who knows – they may become friends.

We are living in difficult times, when hopes of ending poverty, bringing peace and keeping the Earth green seem to be slipping away from us. All too easy for us to get drawn into the game of blame and counter-blame, anger and recrimination, and in so doing we become part of the problem. If we want to bring healing and peace to the world we need peace in our hearts, peace in every step of the way. Our thoughts can change the world.

"If in your heart you make a manger for his birth

Then God will once again become a child on earth."

- Angelus Silesius

Further reading: http://www.dailygood.org/

Another Lego starship. From https://www.toptoysboys.com/bennys-spaceship-lego-set/

The Colour Of Love

 Some people are born colour-blind. They can't see the difference between red and green for example. Colours are muted and drab. The richness of vision that most people take for granted is unknown to them - the luscious green grass or the beautiful blue of a summer sky. Recently special lenses have been developed which cleverly demark the boundaries of colour frequencies so that some colour-blind people can see in full colour for the first time. If you haven't seen the YouTube clips of people putting these glasses on for the first time, you should watch. It is very moving. It is life-changing.

There is another sort of colour-blindness that is less well understood, because it's the colour of love that goes unseen. Once you know this colour you can see it everywhere - in the sun and the wind, in trees and flowers, in the faces of the people you meet. It is life-changing. Some of the things that used to seem so important no longer matter. Little things do matter: a kind word, a helping hand. Jesus described it as like finding treasure in a field. In the end it's the only thing that counts. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says the Kingdom of God is spread out upon the Earth but people don't see it.


So how do you get glasses that reveal the colour of love? It's not that easy, and there's a price to be paid. You could compare it to when Neo gets ejected from the Matrix. In every case I can think of, a person's life has had to be unplugged from the system in some way. Some may actually die for a few minutes before being revived; some may lose everything they had; some may renounce normal life for holy orders; some escape common reality using hallucinogenic drugs. Even then, you still have to really want it. Seek and you will find.

The choice is yours:the red pill or the blue one.

A Good Death

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Kathryn Mannix said: “There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookmarks astride our lives; one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.”

In the film of the same name, Shirley Valentine stays on after her holiday in Greece, but as a waitress not a holidaymaker. A holiday needs an end or it is not a holiday, just another day. In the same way a life on Earth must have an end if it is to be worth living. Good people, like a good book, should have a happy ending. It is the job of hospices to ensure as far as possible that those with terminal illnesses have a good death.

What a wonderful thing the hospice movement is. Thanks to the skill and care of the doctors and nurses who work in palliative care, patients nearing the end of their lives can spend their days in comfort and pleasant surroundings, in a friendly environment. So they may arrive at the point where they have taken care of business, settled their outstanding grievances, said goodbye to family and friends, and are ready to make the transition to the next level of reality.

A hospice close to where I live has just launched a joint scheme with a nearby major hospital to provide volunteer visitors for those about to die, and whose family or friends cannot be with them all the time - or not at all; I am privileged to be one of those volunteers. The benefits of this scheme are three-fold: first, it frees up the nursing staff to attend to other patients without having to monitor the dying one; second, it allows family members to leave the bedside for meals or to rest, knowing that they will be called immediately if required; third, and most importantly, the patient feels that they haven’t been left alone to die.

One of the saddest calls I took when I was with with a well-known crisis helpline, was from a woman with no family, dying alone at home. She didn’t like to think of her body lying unattended for weeks before being discovered. I felt strongly that it was morally wrong, in any society at any time, that the old and sick should be allowed to end their days alone and uncared for. I still feel the same way. The Compassionate Companions scheme I have described here will help to address this issue.

Dorothy House Hospice

I started by praising the hospice movement. You may ask, why do we need hospices when we already have good hospitals? In a nutshell, hospices are there for the dying, hospitals are for the living. Hospitals are geared towards keeping people alive and making them better. They don’t always succeed but they will try their hardest. Dr. Christopher Kerr said: “If you have an aversion to dying, medical school is a pretty safe place to be. They never mention dying.”

Having said that, things are changing, in the UK at least. In the last twenty years, palliative care in our hospitals has taken a great leap forward. Specific pain relief and symptomatic treatment often means that a patient can remain conscious and relatively comfortable even as their health declines. I hope that will also help the rest of us who still have lives ahead of us - to know that death is nothing to be afraid of.