Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland

Radio Scotland

October 2007

Good morning.

The streets of Rangoon were filled with monks and lay people who decided they would not live under the reign of a brutal and privileged military elite. Acts of courage can be seen in shaky video clips from mobile phone cameras. We remember old black-and-white photos from Czechoslovakia in the late sixties, or the Philippines or South Africa. Rebellions sometimes fail. But sometimes the great behemoth collapses – whose permanence was something that had been taken for granted – its hold on men and women - illusory.

And the rest of us? Who woke up and considered our faces being shaved in the mirror? We’d told ourselves that the stories of men and women being transformed in their encounters with God in a flaming bush or by a meeting with Jesus were mere legends. We’ve grown past all those things – all those school assembly talks by visiting priests and ministers.

Heroes were figures of yesterday. They had feet of clay. So we don’t’ hope anymore – we look at statistics – at trends. “Where are things going?” we ask. "What are we compelled to do next?"

Our politicians say more or less the same thing under different party banners. We have a suspicion that the markets are really the only things which matter – no doubt some expert – some regulator can be conjured up to tell us what to do now.

The old hopes do spark slightly when the streets of some oppressed corner of the world fill with people – people who act with tremendous courage in the face of their oppressors.

We don’t live in Rangoon, or Prague or Manila. We live in Penicuik or Dumbarton. Nobody drives military machinery down our streets. It’s we who have consigned ourselves to mute obedience.

But when we consider that things don’t necessarily need to be this way, doesn’t it dawn on us that new possibilities for authentic living are there for the taking?

Doesn’t the face being shaved in the mirror suddenly develop a twinkle in its eye?