Change
transform
turn around
renew
metanoia

I love the arrival of a parcel in the post. Even more so when the parcel is a book. The book arriving in the post today is The Cry For Myth by Rollo May (1909 – 1994). One of my favourite books of his is The Courage To Create – he is an existentialist psychologist and well worth reading. In The Cry For Myth he is making a case for the need to embrace our myths as frameworks for helping us find meaning as human beings in what can often feel like a meaningless world;

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

He laments the fact that myth has become synonymous with falsehood saying

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood

This is especially interesting to me as I contemplate a switch in my career as a priest as I feel strongly that the Christian myths are (in Tillich’s words) stories that cannot be proved but yet believed. The great themes of life, death and rebirth or resurrection are key to our making some sense of our existence and they become devalued if we attempt to ‘prove’ them or if we simply dismiss them as falsehoods. I am optimistic that a post modern world may yet reclaim the myths that the modern world dumped out of the bath along with the baby believing that only that which can be proved can be believed.

Lazy day
load lifted away
each step
a little lighter
each sky
a little brighter
whistle a happy tune
grinning like a loon
hey ho silver lining
her eyes always shining

Reading a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called So Much Happiness from a book by Roger Housden called Ten Poems To Set You Free (highly recommended) it reminds me of a quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky;

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

Nye’s poem is making the same point – she begins,

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

she then continues to make the point that we tend to gravitate towards the negative. Trouble or sadness have a weight that occupy us whereas happiness just happens and when it does we have to lift our eyes to engage fully with it. Happiness is only fleeting when we fail to follow it. We have to grow wings and take flight and the beginning of wings is to be found in counting our joys. There is sufficient sadness in the world to keep us chained to the floor – but just one whisper of happiness can break those chains and set us free . . . . .

So Much Happiness – borrowed from Bloodaxe Facebook page here

There are certain sounds that evoke certain feelings that result in specific actions that are scarily predetermined – a bell rings and the dog salivates expecting food – a child laughs and I’m smiling from ear to ear and crawling around the floor thirty years younger . . .

And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may ask yourself – Well, how did I get here?

David Byrne – Talking Heads – Once In A Life Time

one door closes
another door opens
knock knock
who’s there?
opportunity
opportunity who?
opportunity knocks

I remember so clearly sitting in front of a little black and white TV with my Dad as we watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon and make his mark on history forty one years ago today. The amazement on my Dad’s face and in his voice intensified my own sense of wonder. This was the stuff of Science Fiction and here we were witnessing an unprecedented act of human endeavour. We had reached out further than was imaginable and in doing so everything would change – anything would become possible. Every act of greatness begins with just one small step.

One Small Step

Sometimes we journey between here and there not knowing who or what or where we may be and become yet always there is a knowing that wherever we are we are where we need to be at least for the moment we comprehend it and if we feel that we are somewhere we are not meant to be then invisibly and without warning we will find ourselves somewhere quite different . . . .

Still shaking the lag of the jet;

My room and the vastness around it,
awake in the oncoming night,
are one. I am a string
stretched taut
across resonating distances.

Rilke