Edges Issue 18: The Complications In Our lives

EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 18

Ju1-Aug 1999

THE COMPLICATIONS IN OUR LIVES
Father John Michael Hanvey shares his thoughts

In a moving short poem, the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas imagines himself having to write a single word to describe what it is like to be a human being. The word that appears on the blank page is "Lonely". This is such an un-welcomed sight that he instinctively moves to rub it out

" My hand moved to erase it: but
the voices of all those waiting at
life's window cried out aloud
'It is true' ".

Apart from being part of the human condition, loneliness can be the result of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and hatred. The case of the black child trying to "wash himself white" because of the racist taunting at school, is a microcosm of what happens in so many other areas of life. A bombing in Brick Lane, the heart of East London's Asian community, or blowing up a pub in Old Compton Street, the Gay centre of London, are both disturbing events that can lead to the unthinkable, genocide and ethnic cleansing in 1999. Whole groups of people can feel so alienated, displaced and lonely.

I have been fortunate recently to impose a period of aloneness and separation on myself, to look again at who I am and who I could be under God's grace. I was with myself, a not always comfortable travelling companion and I was looking in rather than out. I found that this time was about re-discovering lost angels; angels of gratitude and openness, angels of passion and tenderness, angels of love and darkness. The whole mish mash of what it means to be human, and to feel it as if for the first time. Trying to live the here and now to the full, as a gift, was something that came back to me, but it felt different from before. As the poet David Wagoner writes

"....Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger"

Since I went on my free choice journey into my own desert, two of the young people I have worked with have died. Both took their own lives and both died in their own lonely Calvarys. One in the small locked room of a hostel, the other in his father's home. We can never probe the deep down depths of another, nor our own depths sometimes. These two young people both died alone, after long and desolate battles with addiction.

I hope with the arrival of the Kosovan refugees into our country, we will all be challenged beyond faiths, race and prejudice to share with them and so many others in the dark corners of life, the extravagant love of God. Also, to reflect on our own particular loneliness and to see it as gift rather than curse, and use it to journey inwards, so as to grow more aware of those others who come into our life, who also tread a lonely furrow.