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Good Morning

I’ve been reading Hillary Mantel’s novel about the French revolution:  A Place of Greater Safety.   And there’s a passage which has stayed with me, because of the time of day I read it.

One of the characters is in a busy room, and he turns his head away from the babble towards the door.  Outside is Paris, and as he sits there, the pictures and people of the city begin to crowd his mind: a million different lives.   He imagines the rich and the poor, courtiers and abandoned children, prostitutes and wig-makers and gravediggers; prisoners crying in the Bastille, and nuns; freed slaves and a wife who no longer loves her husband. 

I read the passage in bed, late at night, when I should have been asleep.  Late at night - that uncertain, weary time when the world outside is no longer muffled by our daily habits, and the narrow focus of home life.  It’s the time of night when the separation between my life and countless lives unknown to me - seems thinner.  My grandmother used to say, on stormy nights, ‘God keep all the poor sailors at sea on such a night.’    And my imagination would immediately leap beyond my own protected, comfortable world.  Beyond the world I know.

In the morning, says the Psalm, ‘the dawn shall bring us light. God shall appear and we shall rise with gladness in his sight.’   This morning, my prayer is that some of that light and gladness might touch us all, somehow.  I pray it for my neighbour through the wall, and the man sitting on the train to work.   For families bombed out of their homes, and living in tents.  For a child alone and afraid.   For a woman in darkness.  

In Jesus name,  AMEN