Life is a Mosaic

Daniel Spitzer, the 19th century Austrian journalist and satirist, once wrote, "Happiness is a mosaic picture made up of nothing but inconspicuos little joys."

And I agree with him, up to a point. Happiness can be made up of "inconspicuous little joys". But I'd like to extend the metaphor to encompass the whole of our lives, which can be compared with a mosaic in their rich variety - containing sorrows as well as joys.

Nearly 30 years ago, I was working on a cross-stitch sampler to commemorate the first ten years of my marriage. I wanted it to be a surprise for my husband, and spent every lunch-hour at work stitching away. It comprised a rectangle of  "quilted" squares, with the following words in the middle: "Marriage is a patchwork quilt: bits and pieces of two lives come together to form a new whole. Some meet perfectly at the corners, while others must be stretched to fit. The dark pieces set off the light, and the rough add texture to the smooth. And if Love is the thread that stitches the pieces together, it will last a lifetime."

And today, nearly three decades later, these words are as true as they were then. No-one's life is full of unalloyed joy. All of us have encountered pain, sorrow, grief and suffering, as well as joy, elation and happiness. Yet as the sampler says, "The dark pieces set off the light, and the rough add texture to the smooth." Exactly like a mosaic. 

I also think that the mosaic / patchwork quilt metaphors can remind us to step back and consider the whole picture, rather than being so focussed on a particular tessera / cotton patch / life event that we cannot see the whole. Cannot see the wonderful balance in our lives, or the presence of the Spirit. This stepping back can help us to detach from our emotions, to enable us to react in more skilful ways to stuff which happens to us. Or at least, so I have found.

Self Deception

Last Sunday evening, my husband and I attended a screening of a live performance of Good, a play about the Holocaust by British playwright, C.P. Taylor. It was both astonishing and disturbing. There were only three actors – David Tennant, who played the protagonist, Professor John Halder, who gradually turns from a liberal minded man in 1933, whose best friend was a Jew, into a high-ranking member of Hitler’s SS. The other two actors were Elliot Levey and Sharon Small, who both played multiple characters, without changing their clothes or leaving the stage. It was a tour de force of brilliant acting, against one, very minimalist set. And, like I said, very disturbing. It demonstrated superbly how the slow drip, drip of evil propaganda can change someone’s opinions, while still enabling them to justify their actions to themselves as “one of the good guys”.

I don't believe in evil as an independent power in the world. No-one is born evil - there is no such thing as original sin. I believe that every human being has the power to choose between good and evil. However, the choices that each person makes will set them on a path towards a life filled with good deeds or evil ones, and the farther one walks along the chosen path, the harder it is to turn aside. As the Native Americans believe, "it depends which wolf you feed." C.P. Taylor’s play was a brilliant and chilling illustration of this in action.

I have to believe that there is a divine spark "that of God" in everyone, but perhaps those people we call evil choose to ignore its promptings. There are many degrees of evil; for example, I do not believe that the majority of German people during Hitler's Reich chose evil consciously, although the dyed in the wool Nazis certainly seem to have done. But the Nazi propaganda machine awakened the latent anti-Semitism in many German hearts, giving them someone to blame for their hard lives, and enabling them to believe its lies, and close their eyes to what was going on.

The Nazis were obsessed by an ideal: the supremacy of the Herrenvolk, the German race, and the elimination of all others. And this ideal led to death and destruction on a large scale. It seems that if we allow ourselves to become obsessed by an ideal, it skews our judgement and corrupts our reason. If we idealise something or somebody, we don't see it / them straight. Examples of this are littered throughout history.

I believe that it is only by the exercise of compassion, by being open to the hearts and minds of others, by recognising that each of us is "unique, precious, a child of God", that the closed mind and consequent intolerance can be avoided. Because the problem has not gone away. Intolerance is alive and well in our society. If we are not careful, we can fall into judgement and “othering”, seeing other people as somehow less than we are ourselves. It can lead to all sorts of -isms: sexism, racism, homophobia.

Why do we do this to ourselves, to each other? We are all human beings, each one unique, each one worthy of love and justice and respect, each one with unique gifts to offer the world. Or that is what I believe... 

Finding Enough

 The American poet, Walt Whitman, once wrote, "I have realised that being with the people you love is enough."

Perhaps this is self-evident. In which case, why do so many of us spend so much of our time and effort chasing after rainbows? More money, more food, more social media, more everything. We seem to find contentment, which is another way of saying "the consciousness of having enough", very difficult to discover.

But with Whitman, I believe that "being with the people you love" is enough. If we are lucky, there will be a place we can call "home", a place where we know we belong. But it need not be a physical space. For me, the word "home" signifies the company of loved others, in front of whom and with whom I can be myself - rather than a particular building made of bricks and mortar. It's more about feeling "at home", at peace, seen and heard for who we truly are.

Whereas "home" in the purely physical sense of "the place where you live" can be very far from a real home. There are far too many dysfunctional families for that. And the scars of childhood (wheter physical, mental, psychological or spiritual) are far too frequently felt by far too many people for me to believe that "home" means "the environment in which you were brought up" or "the environment you live in."

One of my favourite books by Celtic poet and theologian John O'Donohue is Eternal Echoes: Exploring our hunger to belong. In it, he writes about what I believe is the true sense of "home" - a place where we belong. He has much to say about longing and belonging and about "home" as a place of sanctuary and belonging, where we feel safe and can grow into our best selves. He wrote, "The word home has a wonderful resonance. Home is where you belong. It is your shelter and place of rest, the place where you can be yourself."

I believe that everyone needs solid roots (a safe and happy home, a loving family and/or friends, and a solid moral and ethical grounding) if they are to grow into wise, virtuous human beings. If one or more of those elements is missing, it will be that much harder for the person to grow up grounded and able to nurture others in their turn. Of course, it is far from impossible. Many people overcome all kinds of deprivation and cruelty and thrive in spite of them, but I do believe that those fortunate enough to grow up with solid roots will, perhaps paradoxically, find it easier to step out on their own as grounded adults.

       

  

The Ascent of Man

Fifty years ago today, the first episode of Jacob Bronowski's ground-breaking series, The Ascent of Man, was broadcast on BBC2. I can dimly remember watching it and wondering at how far we had come as a human race. 

(image: Wikimedia Commons)

The thirteen episodes followed the development of humankind through the lens of our understanding of science. The first five programmes dealt with our evolution from the earliest stages of human life to the height of the Middle Ages. Episodes six onwards covered the beginnings of modern science, from Galileo's discovery of Copernicus's theory of a heliocentric universe, through the laws of Newton and Einstein, the effects of science and technology as seen in the Industrial Revolution, and Darwin and Wallace's theories on the origin of species, to developments in modern chemistry, biology and physics.

In episodes 11 and 12 in particular, Bronowski shared his misgivings about what people do with their imperfect knowledge of science, which can lead to dreadful, or at best, ambiguous, outcomes - the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and modern developments in genetics, such as cloning. It was a fascinating series, and the book which came from it is well worth reading.

I wonder what Bronowski would have made of the developments in our world in the fifty years since the programme was broadcast - the many ways in which we have raped and pillaged the natural world in the name of human progress, let alone the many examples of "man's inhumanity to man" to quote Robert Burns. Sadly, we will never know, as he died the year after the programmes were broadcast.

Interestingly, the series was commissioned by David Attenborough, then Controller of BBC2, who has been a staunch speaker on the high costs of human progress in terms of the rest of the world with whom we share this planet.