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Good Morning,

Today is the Sabbath before the Jewish New Year. On it we always read Moses’ final speech before his death: ‘You stand this day all of you before your God’. Those simple words contain a double challenge.

In the first instance they’re about inclusion. Before God everyone, young or old, man or woman is equal. Our task is to create communities like that on earth.

But Moses’ words also resonate inwardly: ‘All of you’ implies ‘the whole of you’. It’s easy to bring the nice parts of myself before God, the parts which mean well and try hard.

Yet there are other aspects to our human reality. None of us can avoid ever being thoughtless, callous, or even cruel. Most of us have rooms in our hearts we’re afraid to enter because they hold guilt, or pain.

It takes courage to allow the light of truth and conscience to shine into those facets of our personality and experience too.  

Near the close of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero turns to the selfish Caliban, who plotted against him and his daughter, and says ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’. It’s a raw and honest moment.

We usually find it easier to blame wrongs on others, or on circumstances. Even when someone else is to blame, it’s hard to recognise that how we treated them may have contributed to how they, in turn, treat us.

We all have our inner spaces of darkness. We need to acknowledge them to if we wish to learn and grow through life.

God, give us courage to face our truths.