REAR-VIEW MIRRORS AND WINDSHIELDS

Looking back on 2016 one can of course cite many horrors and many disappointments. But when one either looks more closely at  what’s happened in the world at large, a large number of blessings also become apparent: in India 800,000 volunteers planted 50 million trees in one day to help the country reforest 12% of its surface, while for the first time ever, 93% of the planet’s children learnt to read and write. One does need to be careful about absorbing “news” from media, especially television, internet and even print. Newspaper editors long worked on the principle “if it bleeds, it leads”, and this has now spread to almost all media. Social media, on the other hand, are sometimes even worse, as they can spread the steaming private rage of individuals faster than any (other) epidemic. One of the rare exceptions is the French daily La Croix, which resolutely continues to inform rather than titillate or judge, which invariably explains both sides of difficult questions, and which pays as much attention to good news as to catastrophes. (Le Monde, of which someone who worked there in the Fifties once said, “It’s not a newspaper, it’s a university”, still informs very well but has moved further away from impartiality – leftwards – and is temperamentally gloomy.)

For individuals, looking back on a year gone by is usually a bit nostalgic, slightly (or deeply) sad, rueful, or cautiously thankful. It’s a collective version of the eve-of-birthday mindset; it’s the painful travail out of which new year’s resolutions will shortly be born.

None of this should properly apply to prayer.

God does not ask us to apply ourselves more energetically to doing better at everything. God does not ask us to judge the rest of the world, even politicians. God does not ask us to hate our nasty enemies with more intensity and if possible to wipe them off the face of the earth. God does not ask us to be revenged on those who did ill to us or to our loved ones.

God asks only one thing: that we return His love. With every fibre of our being. And this is largely done not by increased activity but by allowing Him to visit, to move in, to take over. It’s almost passive, but it does take concentration: we ask Him to open our doors and windows so that He can enter and take up residence.

Once we embark seriously on doing that, resolutions become superfluous.



The illustration is William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" (1849-53) in Keble College Chapel, Oxford. Note that the door on which Christ knocks is overgrown and clearly unused to being opened, and has no handle: it can be opened only from the inside. Our inside.