Letters - 22 and 29 December 2023
From A Christmas wish to Relevant message?
A Christmas wish
If each country spent the billions they spend on killing us in wars on the sick, homeless, the poor and hopeless and bereft people of their counties, what an amazing, wonderful world we could create. No families, huddled in shelters, in camps larger than cities.
This is my wish for Christmas.
I don’t have a magic wand and it would take time and commitment, plus a genuine desire for it to work. I would love to read how you think this could be accomplished.
Frances Prestidge
Quiet garden meditation
I was walking in the garden of Peterborough Meeting House and observing the trees, bushes, flowers. In stillness, it suddenly came to me that all these plants were there waiting – patiently waiting for rain, for sun, for insects, for spring to bloom, for birds, and who knows what else. They are waiting in stillness, patiently, because everything has to happen at the right time. And they know it!
This reminded me of we Quakers, who wait in stillness too, patiently, for whatever has to happen next. We wait for that ‘little voice’ that speaks with or without words to us. Sometimes it speaks and sometimes not – it is not yet the right time.
All these plants in our garden need nourishment in order to grow. They need compost that will feed them, make them strong and healthy. We need nourishment too but sweet food is not always available to us. We need ‘compost’. The things that we buried, forgot, do not want to remember, do not like, or do not like to see, are slowly but surely turning into ‘compost’. We cannot rush the process. We have to be patient and wait. No matter how much we turn them, water them, they will become compost only at the right time – when they are meant to, when they are ready, when we are ready. Only then we’ll be able to see them as they really are and let them go. Only then will we be able to move on and see them not as half-rotten things we desperately try to forget but as a nourishing soil that helps us grow, makes us understand life a little better.
Danina Stefan
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.