Cry havoc and the unleashed dogs will do the rest. Theirs is a mission of destruction and savagery. Few generations have been spared the experience – remote or close at hand – in a world of flowers and squalor.
We look for beginnings of the planetary globe that is our home and less often we look for endings. Religious texts supply in narrative form what is inaccessible in other ways. Not everybody is convinced that Earth is the arena for a contest between good and evil but such a view is as much part of us as up and down and warm and frozen.
It takes words like futility, iniquity, idiocy to do justice to evil. In their precise unvarnished way these words give notice to evil that its mask has been removed and it is seen for what it is. Emptiness, unfairness and self-centredness have nowhere to hide.
This changes the nature of the discussion. If it is difficult to know about our beginnings, it is also difficult to investigate evil. We know it to be a negative, parasitic quality that is around us today. And without a Genesis 1-3 or Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ we stumble in the dark about its beginnings. Better, perhaps, to look for understanding in what we see today. Better to seek for meaning in the cosmos that remains a distortion of goodness.
Meaninglessness is too awful to contemplate. To see our lived experience on Planet Earth as just one minor occurrence among many is a heavy burden to carry. A faith that enshrines hope alongside faith and love unfolds a meaning for us all. We should not underestimate the alliance of meaning and hope.
LIVINGSTONE’S PRAYER BOOK
David Livingstone’s prayer book is one of the treasured possessions of the Scottish Episcopal Church in Stornoway. St Peter’s church was built in1838 and achieved incumbency status in 1985. In April Stornoway signed up for the construction of a £49m deep water terminal.
ST KILDA WATCHDOG
Ministry of Defence construction work to replace the present workshops etc on the ‘edge of the world’ St Kilda is having an eye kept on it by conservationist Conor McKinney from Northern Ireland. The islands are owned by the National Trust for Scotland.
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