Thursday, March 15, 2018

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

I spent an hour in a coffee shop talking to a determined young man yesterday. So much passion for making the world better. So little idea where to start.

In the song Sensual Thing by the band The Four of Us, they say:

I wanna burst outside this canned reality
I wanna turn it around and see it like the way it's meant to be

I love that lyric. It has overtones of St Paul's famous lines:

Now we see through a glass darkly
Then we will see face to face

St Paul himself was using one of Plato's allegories when he wrote. Plato imagined prisoners chained together in a cave, aware of a light behind them but unable to turn round.

All three authors' lines have the idea of searching and longing. If only we stood in the right place, read the right books, met the right people, we would find the world made complete sense.

But we can't. We're facing in the wrong direction and can't turn round. One day we will find out if there is a God (if there is one). If there isn't we will never find out.

So meantime all that is left to us is to try and make sense of the world the way we're facing. Make ourselves a bit fitter. Stretch ourselves for Sport Relief. March for victims of a fire.

I hope my coffee-shop companion gets to channel his anger. The world will be better if he does.

Whether you make sense of the world using one of the great stories of faith or simply sitting in a darkened room, all we got is canned reality and we can't burst outside it, only make a difference within it.

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