That is the general trend – though all these assertions have to be qualified when we come to a country like Zimbabwe. Yet the general movement in today’s world is towards more and more individualism.
At the same time we have never been so linked to others as we are now. The whole world is interested in who will be the next president of the United States. We hear of a civil war in Syria and the destruction of whole communities in Burma, of hurricanes and tsunamis, of the Olympics and the World Cup. We suffer and rejoice together – or at least the information is available to enable us to do so if we so choose.
But there is a cost. The move towards a global society has shaken the roots and loosened the bonds people enjoyed in an earlier age. It is common knowledge that a person can experience terrible loneliness today. I know a man who, on his release from prison, had no one to welcome him. He is lonely and lost and thinking of suicide. Families can no longer cope so they close their doors and their hearts as the only way to survive.
At the beginning of November some Christian churches remember the dead. First there are the ‘saints’, those who were examples of living their lives for others. Then there are all who are known to us: our relatives and friends. Finally we remember all the dead in every place and time. We don’t know them but God does. We have one reading (from Revelation 7) that symbolically gives us a picture of the huge number of people we are recalling.
Another from I John 3 says frankly what life will be like ‘has not yet been revealed’ and a third, from Matthew 5, describes the sort of people who make up the great throng; they are those described in the Beatitudes, which has also been described as a self-portrait of Jesus. We are familiar with this list of the poor in spirit, the gentle, those who mourn (the mothers of Syria), those who thirst for justice, those who show mercy, are pure of heart, make peace among people and suffer persecution ‘in the cause of right.’
A key thought, it seems to me, and a very old one is that all these people, including us, are connected. Call them saints, call them ancestors. They are the dead and they are not sitting about playing harps or mbira. They are busy. They are pushing things ahead for us and with us. There is no reason to be lonely.
Post published in: Faith