大象传媒

Good morning. I was recently showing a group of my students a sequence of books including the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, all published for use in worship during the Tudor period and that tracked the progress of the English Reformation. The students were initially drawn to the bindings, the archaic spellings and the illustrations, but I wanted them to see something else - literally, the writing between the lines, the crossings out and corrections made by the books' owners. These additions and, yes, defacements were more than signs on a page. They were frozen moments in time at which living, breathing men and women had leaned forward and in a stroke of the pen had marked-out their faith, their loyalties, their identity. Some strokes had been set on the page calmly, neatly and deliberately; others were written swiftly, passionately - even furiously, perhaps; each mark offering a tantalising shadow of the inner world of the person who made it.

Musing over those traces leaves me wondering about all the marks that we make and traces that we leave. What kind of window into our minds and hearts might future generations be able to track across our use of social media, our phone and GPS records, and heaven knows how many emails? Perhaps, paradoxically, the web of detailed information would be so dense that something vital would be lost. Presuming to know all about us, might not future generations lose that sense of wonder that, briefly, my students experienced in the presence of the unknown former owners of those books?

May our passage through this day, O God, be traced across the lives of others as encouragement, support and love. Amen.