Blog for 1st March

We were in the car with our daughter and her partner, insulated from world news on a lovely weekend away, when he looked at his phone and said ‘it’s started’.

Along with many other people, I suspect, our hearts sank. I have so many questions. What was the point of killing an 86 year man when nature will take its course in a couple of years? A fatuous query, perhaps.

At church this morning, we were invited to think about Thomas Merton’s concept of the True Self and the False Self. Merton suggests that inner conflict if left unchallenged or unresolved projects itself outwards, causing chaos and destruction. The last words of the Rector’s sermon were ‘surely to God we can find a better way of doing this…’

At my table, the critique was robust. We talked about cycles and whether humanity is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. We mentioned WW2 and the flowering of humanity afterwards – and that even though that generation recognised the horror of all of it and so many tried to make things better, this was not a neutral or kinder period of time – it provided the field for the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

We talked about hope, founded on the love of God for our ‘true’ selves, that both opens us up to that love and enables us to face our unspeakable false selves. This is not useless striving sited in transcendentalism for me, rather a situated becoming true to the original blueprint – neither moving forwards nor backwards, but multidimensionally changing density, like ink being painted into a pencil drawing.

There’s a lot there to think about, but just a quick flicker of more of Deleuze here. In the very moment that we conceive of a ‘present’, it is past – it joins all the other moments hanging in the store room. Ready for access. I think of the past as a field of emergent possibility in the first two syntheses of time.

The third however is about the future. This a line, a cut – a separation, what will emerge from the field – what will be ‘actualised’. The event may be repeated, but this not the same event. Representation is a multidimensional concept. It is different – not because of comparison of the two. But because difference is a creative force.

This give me hope when considering humanity’s destructive behaviour. We can’s repeat the same destructive patterns. We re-present and re-pres-ent. We both make in our own image and make actual (and present, in terms of time).

Good behaviours are a multiplicity, as are bad. We change our behaviour to fit the context. It’s easy to lose hope and feel powerless, and yet, although we have been here before, this time it’s different. The power of difference as creative force I think lies within our gift.

So again – we can do what we can where we are and with what we’ve got. There will be a continuity here that in its representation creates, maintains, obstructs or destroys. That is up to us. Open the window of hope so that you can let your true self shine and be shone upon… let’s be the change we want to see.