CHAOS BY NATURE

Monday 1st June, 2020

I watched in awe and admiration as the SpaceX rocket lifted off at the NASA base in the USA. The incredible genius and achievement of humans. The docking of the two astronauts' space craft at the International Space Station. It is simply mind boggling to behold. Throughout history humans have achieved remarkable creations and inventions. When I think of the Gardens of Babylon, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, both of which I have seen, or think of the developments of science and medicine and note the photographs of outer space or look on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or stare at Picasso's Guernica I marvel, I am awed. The fact that I can go on a virtual tour of the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China or that via 'an app' I can see and talk with a cousin in Australia is equally awesome. Just thinking of my voice carrying across the world to Venezuela overwhelms me. These are utterly stunning facts.

Yet at the same time I am also overwhelmed by the fact that people are starving in the world and dying from lack of simple available medicines. I am horrified by man fighting man, man enslaving man, man exploiting man and man exploiting nature.

To counteract these latter it is awesome to see people coming out on to the streets to protest against injustice. Sadly many injustices and crimes go unseen, unnoticed and undetected. I am faced by this weird human dilemma. The beauty, the awesome creativity and constructions, the composing of a Beethoven Symphony, an Utrillo painting and St Mark's Cathedral in Venice....these set against the horror of Dachau, the evil of rendition, the mayhem of terrorist attacks and atrocities. Good and evil, horror and awe, beauty and wretchedness.

The riots in the USA over the murder of George Floyd...good to see people coming out to protest, yet so sad to witness looting and burning and destruction of properties. Perhaps the latter is necessary to make the message of the former heard? Has not humankind the wit, power, intelligence and generosity of spirit simply to repudiate the destructive?

That SpaceX rocket: phenomenal yet it too has a cost. The environmental damage, the actual expenditure which could have been used to relieve much human suffering...beauty and the beast: this is man's dilemma. We need the wisdom to know the difference and the wisdom to discern the right course and the courage to walk it.

We have had the wisdom and I note it in the Declaration of Independence, in the Charter of the United Nations, in the achievements of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa of Calcutta and countless others. It is in our hands to bring justice and peace: we all count.