Shared past

As I was sitting in a concert in a church last week my eye was caught by a brass plaque on the wall above the pulpit. It was a memorial to a long dead worthy of that church. What first caught my eye was the man's name... Abercromby Dior. Now there is a name ahead of his time - not just one but two designer labels in one person! The Scottish custom of using a surname as a first name was alive and well over 100 years ago.
What next attracted my attention to the plaque was that under the name was the phrase "Bengal Civil Service". He died in 1879 so it would seem that in the mid nineteenth century he was active in Bengal. The British Empire is very often viewed today with regret rather than celebration. Yet here in this simple plaque in a small Scottish village church was mention of a man who probably gave the best years of his life far from home in what would have been an insanitary and inhospitable place because of a sense of Christian duty. He was though of highly by the church to merit the plaque and so my guess is that he saw his Christian duty to be to bring order and civilisation through the empire.
There was much in the British Empire that was not good but very often today we loose sight of the many dedicated individuals who used the mechanisms of their time to try, in their own small way, to make the world a better place. I believe it is important not to forget that the history we share with many other parts of the world is like all life - a mixture of the good and the bad.

Hate

Hatred is irrational
raw and spiteful
venom unleashed
from deep inside
where old hurts have been cherished
and polished
to be flung back
with added bile
red
purple
black
incandescent glowing
ready to explode

Hate can be extinguished by love
but it will take so much love
that much love will be melted and burned away
leaving hurt and bruised lovers
while the hating still smolders
awaiting the final damping down
with even more love


(Just because it is difficult to overcome hate with love doesn't mean it is impossible or that we shouldn't try. But we must not underestimate how costly it will be....)

Creed

I believe in God
the father almighty
most of the time
but sometimes
I wonder
what life would be like
if I didn't.

If there was no moral origin to the universe.
If there were no origin in love
and no destination in love
just a rabid struggle for supremacy
without rules
in the short years of life.

If we lived and accumulated
and bonked and fought
and hid and cried
knowing that nothing meant anything
and all was ephemeral floss.

If the big brother house
were the model for life
and the animal instincts
we have mostly civilised
became rampart serpents
in the evolutionary struggle
of not so sociable
social Darwinianism.

As we trudge onward
on our return journey
to the primal slime....

I'd prefer to believe in God!


(The image accompanying this entry is one of the series of engravings by William Blake illustrating the story of Job)