Freedom Lost

 This week's quotation, by Heinrich Böll, reads, "Freedom is never given, only gained."

And that is true. But very sadly, freedom can also be taken away. As we have seen this week, when the Supreme Court in the United States ruled to overturn the 1973 case Roe v Wade, which granted women in the US the hard-won freedom to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

Like many others, I find this a shocking decision. An article in The Guardian on 24th June stated, "A reversal of this magnitude is almost unprecedented... The extraordinarily rare move will allow more than half of states to ban abortion, with an immediate and enduring impact on tens of millions of Americans."

Which will severely restrict the freedom and personal autonomy of very many American women. I find it mindboggling that the law should be able to dictate whether or not a woman can choose to terminate a pregnancy. Surely it is her body, and therefore her right to choose? The case will be implemented state by state and, according to The Guardian article, twenty six of the fifty US states are expected to implement the changes more or less immediately. Meaning that the women who live in those states will either have to travel hundreds of miles in order to have a legal abortion or, in a terrifyingly retrograde situation, try to "self-manage" an abortion.

I pray that that this awful decision may soon be overturned, and for all women affected by it in the meantime.  

Time: the Angel of Humankind

 This week's quotation is by the 18th century German playwright and poet, Friedrich Schiller. He wrote, "Time is the angel of man." Which I have translated as humankind.

And it has left me scratching my head - what does he mean?  Is the knowledge that we have limited time on this earth, and so we had better make the best of it, the angel? Or the message from the angel? 

Or does he mean that time is a gift from God, as the messages of angels often are?

Or that the things we experience in time can be messages from the Divine?

I think I'm going to go with the first one that occurred to me: that we need to be aware that our time on earth is limited - each of us has exactly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and a limited span of life on earth. So it is up to us to make the best use of it we can, doing things which nourish our bodies, minds and souls and those of others. 

Because I do believe that wasting time can be seen as a sin. I have blogged about this before. It is up to us to make the best use of the time that we have, because we never know when or if that time may be cut short... by illness, or injury, or even untimely death. 

The greatest regret we may experience at the end of our lives is that we did not spend our time wisely, being our best selves, doing what we can to make the world we live in and those around us happier, more contented. Then one day, that opportunity may be taken from us, never to return...

So let us resolve to make the best of the time that we have, to spend it wisely, so that when our time to leave comes, we can give up our mortality contentedly, knowing that our sojourn on this earth has made it a slightly better place, for ourselves, for other human beings and for all living creatures.

Finding the Spiritual in the Natural

 I rather like the words of the 12th century Cistercian abbot (and later, saint) Bernard of Clairvaux. He writes, "For the spiritual does not come first, but the natural." When I googled the quote to check for the accuracy of the translation, I came across another, which underlines it: "What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scriptures, I learned in woods and fields. I have no other master than the beeches and the oaks."

And I felt like reaching out across the centuries and giving him a high five. Because that has been my route into the spiritual life also. I can remember my father taking me out into the garden when I was young and telling me to look, really look, at a flower. To wonder at the intricacies of the petals, the slenderness of the stalk, which yet supported it, the stamens with their yellow pollen, so attractive to the bees, and the leaves, busy in the work of photosynthesis. And the roots that I knew were beneath the soil, gaining sustenance from it. 

I will never forget his question: "How can we not believe that this has been designed by God? Surely such wonderful intricacy could not occur by random accident."

This is something I have always sensed - this feeling that the natural world is too well-organised to be random, that the complicated inter-relationships between plants, fungi, animals could be accidental. As I wrote in Gems for the Journey, "Growing out of the fairy tales and legends of my youth, Elsie Proctor's wonder-full book Looking at Nature, and J.R.R. Tolkien's powerful evocations of Middle-Earth, I have always found it easiest to sense the presence of God / the Spirit in the natural world."

My grandfather wrote in my autograph book (do you remember the craze for autograph collecting, back in the late sixties?) "One is nearer God's heart in a garden, than anywhere else on earth." This quote, which I later discovered was by Dorothy Frances Gurney, chimed in with what my father had told me, and I accepted it unquestioningly. And have not seen any reason to doubt it since. 

This was brought home to me once again last week, during our time in Pembrokeshire. The place we were staying was near the sea, and outside the village of Solva. It was on the first floor of a converted barn, and one of its features was that all the rooms had sloping walls above a certain height, set with Velux windows. On the first night, I read a comment in the visitors book about the stars through the window, so I deliberately left the blind up, in the hope that if I woke up, I would be able to look up and see the stars in the sky directly above me. And so it proved...

There was hardly any visible night from street lamps, so the stars were vivid points of light in the velvet blackness. And there were so many of them! I had to get up and go through to the balcony outside to see more... And I had never seen so many stars. Not only the brightest ones that we can usually see, but countless fainter ones, filling the gaps inbetween with pinpoints of radiance. I wish I could have taken a photo to share with you, but my phone's camera wasn't good enough.

Seeing them all made me think of the line in Tolkien's poem about Earendil: "the countless stars of heaven's field / were mirrored in his silver shield." A perfect description of what I was seeing. I bowed my head and gave thanks.

The Importance of Rest

I love this week's quotation, from Psalm 116: "Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you."

Which fits in beautifully with my mood at this moment. I'm just back from a gorgeous week's holiday in Solva / Solfach in Pembrokeshire. The weather has been glorious - blue skies and sunshine every day, and we walked along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, visited St David's, poofled around Solva and generally had a wonderful time. The Lord did indeed deal bountifully with us. And I am so grateful. When we awoke to an overcast sky this morning, we knew our holiday must be over.

Most importantly, I have rested, relaxed, and not worried about anything. We got up when we felt like it (except on one day, when we had to be at the RNLI station in St Justinian for a boat trip out to Ramsey Island, at 10.00 am); ate what and when we felt like - Pembrokeshire has several *wonderful* icecream shops - and I felt my soul exhale. 

No-one is meant to work and work, 24/7. We all need a regular interval of peace in which to be still and allow our souls to catch up with us. Not often a whole week, but I try to ensure that I have one day in the week when I do not do anything work-related. I might go out for a day-trip with my Dearly Beloved, or might just go for a walk in the Forest, then do some writing and some crochet. 

When did you last rest?