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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Canon Rachel Mann

Good morning.

As the new year begins, many of us decide to go on a health kick. We have an understandable and reasonable desire to change diet or fitness regime and work off the calories of Christmas.

Getting fit is one thing. However, both social and traditional media can promote barely obtainable ideals about beauty, health and vitality; advice is dispensed readily to older women like me on ways to turn back the years. There is now a flourishing market of biotech companies which want to reverse ageing or enable us to live forever.

The search for an ‘elixir of life’ is as old as civilisation. There is a reference to it in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh as well as in ancient Chinese and Indian texts and scripture. In medieval Europe the search for the ‘philosopher’s stone’ was the search for the elixir of life.

As someone with a long-term health disability, you might think I long to rejuvenate my body or have an endlessly extended healthy life. Certainly, at times, I have wanted a better quality of life. But I remain suspicious of a search for a formula that could extend life indefinitely or grant instant health.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus offers his disciples ‘living water’, a spring gushing up to eternal life. As I see it, this not so much an elixir or quick fix to our health concerns, but an invitation to live our lives with character and grace, whether you are well or not. To live well is something available to all, whether able or disabled.

God of life, whatever I face this day, grant me the character to meet it with grace, that I may work for the flourishing of all people.

Amen.

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