Bill Darlison's weblog

 

Cancer 1: Turning Back

 Mark 6:30-44

The apostles came back to Jesus and told him everything they’d done and taught. There was so much to-ing and fro-ing that they’d not had a chance to eat, so he said to them, ‘Come. Go off by yourselves to a secluded place and rest for a while.’ They went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted spot, but many people who’d seen and recognized them as they were setting off ran on foot from all the towns and arrived at the place before them. When Jesus disembarked he saw a huge crowd and he was moved with pity for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. He began to teach them many things. It was already late and his disciples came up to him and said, ‘This place is off the beaten track and it’s getting late. Send the crowds away so that they can go into the surrounding towns and villages to buy themselves something to eat.’ Jesus replied, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said, ‘It would cost six months’ wages to feed them all!’ He said to them, ‘Go and see how many loaves you have.’ When they’d found out they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ He told the people to sit in groups on the green grass, so they sat down in groups of fifty or a hundred, looking like so many garden plots. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke the bread and gave it to his disciples to distribute. He also divided up the two fish. They all ate their fill and, after five thousand men had eaten, there was enough bread and fish left over to fill twelve baskets.  

  Mark 8:1-10

 In those days, when once again there was a big crowd of people with nothing to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, ‘I’m concerned about the crowd because they’ve been with me three days and they’ve not eaten. If I send them off home hungry they’ll faint on the way, and some of them come from far away. His disciples replied, ‘Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy these people in this lonely place. Jesus asked them, ‘How many loaves have you got?’ ‘Seven,’ they said. He gave orders to the crowd to sit down on the ground, and taking the seven loaves he gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to the disciples who distributed them to the crowd. They also had a few little fish, and when he’d blessed them he told them to distribute these too. They ate their fill, and they collected up seven baskets full of leftovers. There were about for thousand men. Finally he let them all go.     

 Story: The Monkeys and the Caps 

 

Aurangzeb sold caps for a living. He would travel to a village, set up his stall in the market place and sell his caps to the locals. One day, while travelling from one village to the next, he was very tired. The sun was shining, and he’d had a busy morning, so he put down his heavy sack of caps and sat down in the shade of a mango tree for a snooze. After an hour or so he woke up refreshed, but when he picked up his sack he found that it was empty. ‘Where are my caps?’ he thought. ‘I’m sure this sack was nearly full when I went to sleep.’  Just then he looked up into the tree and he saw a gang of monkeys each with a cap on its head. ‘Hey, those are my caps!’ shouted Aurangzeb. ‘Give them back to me!’ But the monkeys just seemed to mock him, imitating his shout. So he pulled a funny face, and each of the monkeys pulled a funny face, too. But they wouldn’t give him back his caps. He picked up a stone and threw it at the monkeys. They responded by throwing mangoes at him. He was really angry now, and in his frustration, he took off his own cap and threw it to the ground. The monkeys took off their caps and threw them to the ground! They were imitating him! Without further ado, Aurangzeb picked up all the caps from the grass, put them in his sack,and went on his way, thinking how clever he’d been to outsmart the monkeys.           

 Fifty years later, Habib, Aurangzeb’s grandson, was selling caps. He’d inherited the family business. He was travelling from one village to the next on a hot day, and he felt he needed a rest. He sought out the shade of a mango tree, put down his sack of caps, and sat down for a snooze. He woke refreshed after an hour, but when he picked up his sack he found it was empty. ‘Where are my caps?’ he asked himself. ‘I’m sure this sack was nearly full when I went to sleep.’ Then he looked up into the trees and saw dozens of monkeys, each with a cap on his head.  How could he possibly get them back? Then something stirred in his brain. He remembered a story his grandfather had told him many years ago, about how he’d outwitted some monkeys by getting them to imitate him. So Habib stood up. He put up his right arm; the monkeys put up their right arms. Habib put up his left arm; the monkeys did the same. Habib scratched his nose; the monkeys scratched their noses. He pulled a face, rocked from side to side, stood on one leg. Each time the monkeys copied him. Then…….Habib took off his cap and threw it to the ground. The monkeys didn’t respond. So Habib tried again. He put up his right arm, his left arm; he scratched his nose, he pulled a face, rocked from side to side, stood on one leg. Each time the monkeys imitated his actions. Once again he put his hand to his head, took off his cap and threw it to the ground. No response from the monkeys.           

 Feeling miserable, Habib picked up his empty sack and began to walk back home. He hadn’t gone far when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked round and saw a monkey with a big smile on its face. ‘Do you think you’re the only one with a grandfather?’ asked the monkey. 

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‘War is God’s way of teaching Americans Geography.’ (Ambrose Bierce) 

Last Thursday, the 21st June, would have been my father’s one hundredth birthday. He was born on 21st June 1907 but, sadly, he died just a little short of his 72nd birthday, in April of 1979. The 21st of June is also the anniversary of my ordination as a Unitarian minister. I became a minister on 21st June 1994 at a ceremony held in Unitarian college Manchester, where I had been a student.            

So, the 21st June has special significance for me. But the significance of the day extends beyond my own parochial concerns. June 21st is the day of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the day on which the sun seems to change direction. Since last December, the sun has been moving higher and higher in the skies of the northern hemisphere; now it begins its slow journey downwards, the days becoming gradually shorter and shorter until, on December 21st, when there is barely any daylight, it will change direction once again.

These two solstice points – along with the two equinoxes – always had great significance for our ancestors, who were much more aware of these celestial cycles than we are, and who celebrated the ‘stations’ of the sun with parties and bonfires, singing and storytelling. Ancient sites in Ireland and Britain testify to the importance of the solstices to ancient peoples. Newgrange is primarily associated with the winter solstice, but Stonehenge marks the summer solstice, and there would have been plenty of activity around these two sites on Thursday last, as well as on the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath, and at Dowth in the Boyne valley. In some parts of the world, there have been revivals of ancient dances, in which men and women move in snake-like procession through the streets, imitating the undulating movements of the sun in its yearly cycle through the heavens.           

Today, Sunday the 24th June, is St. John the Baptist’s Day, exactly six months before Christmas Eve because, you remember, St. John the Baptist was said to be six months older than Jesus, and the Gospels consistently contrast these two figures, associating them, in my opinion, with the two solstices. Jesus, ‘the light of the world’, is born when the light is born in December; John is associated with the midsummer, when the light starts to decline. As John himself says in the Fourth Gospel, ‘He (meaning Jesus) must increase, but I must decrease’.              

On the day of the summer solstice the sun enters the zodiacal sign of Cancer, the Crab, but the crab is only one of a number of creatures that have been used as images of this sign: the tortoise, the crayfish, and the lobster have at various times and in various cultures been used to represent Cancer. These creatures have one thing in common; they seem to be embodiments of the principal of reversal, because they appear to be constructed inside out. The crab’s skeletal system is on the outside – as anyone who has tried to eat one will be aware. What’s more, the crab moves in a strange way, scuttling rather than walking directly, moving forwards, backwards, and sideways in an apparently random fashion. This may give us a clue as to why Jesus is shown making such an apparently ridiculous journey in chapter 7 of Mark’s Gospel. The text tells us that he went from the region of Tyre and Sidon to the Sea of Galilee through the middle of the Decapolis. If you consult a map of the area you will see how strange this journey is; it has been compared with travelling from London to Cornwall via Manchester, and it has given scholars no end of trouble for centuries, and fuelled numerous theories. It shows that Mark didn’t know his geography too well, they say, or that he was probably not a native of the area. But, in reality, it is a little joke by the Gospel’s author. It shows a crab-like, scuttling, to-ing and fro-ing movement, and it is Mark’s way of putting yet another Cancerian signature on this section of his Gospel.           

The zodiacal sign Cancer reflects the crab in a number of curious ways. People born at this time of the year often present a hard shell to the world, as a means of protecting an extremely vulnerable inside. Cancerian people are highly emotional, but guarded and defensive, with a strong sense of family identity, an appreciation of traditional values, and a concern for history and ancestry. The past has an enormous influence on the strongly Cancerian person, and it is absolutely appropriate that the world’s greatest literary celebration of the past, Marcel Proust’s A La Récherche du Temps Perdu – Remembrance of Things Past – should have been written by a Cancerian. Proust was born on July 10th 1871, and, according to his biographers, he spent much of his time wrapped, crab like, in a cocoon of blankets.     

Cancerians are nurturers and protectors, figuratively putting their arms around those close to them, in an attempt to shield them from life’s vicissitudes.      America, ‘born on the 4th of July’, is a Cancerian country. This sounds absurd to the modern ear: ‘How can a whole country be represented by a single image, and have a collective identity?’ we ask. And yet, on one level, these attributions do seem to be appropriate. The iconic images of American life – ‘the flag, mom, and apple pie’- are all connected with Cancer, as is food in general, and popcorn, another iconic American image, is itself an expression of the Cancerian desire to eat forever and never get full or fat! In the figure of the zodiacal man, Cancer is shown as being associated with the stomach. (Incidentally, archetypal Cancerian Proust was constantly plagued by his stomach. Apparently he informed his doctor that he couldn’t even drink a whole glass of Vichy water at bedtime without being kept awake by intolerable stomach pains. And what is it that sparks off the remembrance of things past? A madeleine, a plump little cake which looks as if it had been moulded in a scallop shell! And what job did Proust say he would like to do if he weren’t a writer? Bake bread! Cancer again. The universe is a strange place!)   

The Crab manifests in other ways in the American psyche, and I was amused in the 1980s when President Reagan began proposing his ‘star wars’ project, whose intention was to place a ‘protective shell’ around America to keep out all enemy missiles: ‘protective shell’ was the actual term used. The so-called Monroe Doctrine – American isolationism – is another political expression of Cancer, as is the persistent call for those ‘family values’ which all American politicians must claim to espouse if they are to have any success whatsoever at the polls. Even the apparent obsession of American visitors to Europe with discovering their ancestry, and explaining with some precision that they are one eighth English, two fifths Danish and three tenths Cherokee, reflects the sign Cancer, and it is strange to think that Mormonism, the one major world religion which can claim a uniquely American birth, has a preoccupation with genealogy as one of its distinguishing characteristics. You may be inclined to retort, rationalists that you are, that the American obsession with genealogy is simply a feature of their colonial past. A good try, but it won’t work. You don’t find nearly the same preoccupation with ancestry among Australians and New Zealanders.     And, of course, we may tend to think of Americans as great world travellers, but, in reality, they are not. Only 21% of Americans hold passports. While researching this figure on Google, I came across the following on a website called Yale Global: 

 As the world becomes accustomed to the American way of life, Americans are tuning out the rest of the world. US citizens have paid less and less attention to foreign affairs since the 1970s……… The number of university students studying foreign languages has declined, and fewer Americans travel overseas than their counterparts in other developed countries. News coverage of foreign affairs has also decreased. Why are Americans withdrawing from the global village? 

‘Withdraw into your shell.’ It’s a perfect image of Cancer. Yesterday, having completed this sermon, I settled down to read the Guardian, and what did I find? An article by the American novelist Sara Paretsky which reinforces this very point.  

 In America today, we seem to prize the self-reliant ideal more than ever. In fact, so much do we prize it that we don’t want to pay taxes to support the common good. In one hyper-wealthy Silicon Valley town, where houses commonly sell for more than $2m, the streets are full of potholes: when I visited, I was told that town residents would rather ruin their own cars than pay taxes so that someone else could drive in safety.The American dream is of a private home with a private yard, in which each child has their own room, their own iPod, their own computer, and, by the time they’re 12 or even younger, their own mobile phone. We spend our waking moments plugged into our Game Boys. We seem to withdraw as far as possible from each other encased in our own worlds.      

Strange, isn’t it, that another great icon of America, Walden, by Thoreau, which every American child has to read, and which has become a Bible of self-reliance describes a withdrawal from normal society and an attempt to live in virtual isolation. Thoreau was born on 12th July 1817, making him a Cancerian.    

Withdrawal, ancestry, traditions, clannishness, food; these are all associated with the sign Cancer – although I must stress that they are not the exclusive concerns of people born in late June and early July; they are human preoccupations and tendencies, and all human beings have to come to terms with them. These are the principal themes of this little section of Mark’s Gospel (from 6:31-8:26) as even a cursory glance will show. The only episode that seems a little out of place is the account of Jesus walking on the Water, but even this relates to Cancer, since Cancer is a Water sign and Jesus’ ability to walk on the water is a symbolic account of the spiritually evolved person’s dominance over the turbulent emotions symbolised from time immemorial by the waves of the sea. In addition, one of the decans of Cancer, that is, one of its surrounding constellations, is Argo, the magical ship of the Jason and the Argonauts which was said by the Roman writer Manilius to be ‘the ship that conquered the water’. Here Jesus, whose name, by the way, is just another variation of the name Jason, is shown making a symbolic conquest of his own.           

 But the dominant image of this whole section concerns food. It begins with the account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (which occurs, you notice, after Jesus asks the apostles ‘to withdraw’ for a while), and it goes on to discuss the Jewish obsession with dietary laws, the tradition of ritual cleansing before food, and later it deals with ‘the leaven’ or yeast of the Pharisees. We’ve only got time today to look very briefly at the feeding stories. Notice, there are two of them. This has given headaches to traditional commentators for many years, some scholars suggesting that Mark included two accounts of the same event, showing himself to be less than a competent historian – just as Jesus’ strange journey shows Mark to be a poor geographer. Liberal scholars who view the Gospel as ‘exaggerated history’ will often explain these stories by saying that all the people really had food hidden away, but they were too mean to advertise the fact; but after listening to Jesus they were ashamed of their selfishness and willingly shared what they had and everyone was satisfied. But this kind of explanation – harmless enough in its way – is rather patronising to the Gospel’s author, implying that he allowed evangelistic piety to cloud his judgement.           

 But the author of this Gospel was no fool to be patronised, still less was he a poor historian or a poor geographer. In my view he was nothing short of a genius, and he knew perfectly well what he was doing. He deliberately has two feeding stories because he wants to make a very important point relating to Jewish clannishness. The stories are indeed the same except for a few details. But the details are crucial to a proper understanding of their meaning. Bread and fish are used in both – for reasons which we will discuss on another occasion44 – but while the feeding of the Five Thousand takes place in Jewish territory, the feeding of the Four thousand occurs in a predominantly Gentile area. And the numbers are significant. In the feeding of the Five Thousand, the predominant numbers are 5 and 12 – ‘Jewish’ numbers – the ‘five’ reflecting the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, considered to be Judaism’s holiest books; and the 12 representing the twelve tribes of Israel. So, in this incident, Jesus is shown feeding the Jews. The predominant numbers in the other incident are 7 and 4, readily identified as ‘Gentile’ numbers: the Jews believed that there were 70 Gentile nations (the zero is irrelevant in this kind of numerology) scattered around the ‘four corners’ of the earth.            

So, the two stories show that God’s spiritual ‘manna’ is to be distributed to all people, not just to the Jews, and read together, they constitute an attack on the narrow exclusivism and parochialism which characterised much Jewish thinking at the time the Gospel was written, and which have characterised much religious thought and practice before and since that time. Taken together, these stories ask the same question the monkey asked in the story I told the children this morning: ‘Do you think you’re the only one with a grandfather?’ Or, to put it another way: Do you think that your people are the only people who have traditions? Do you think that God only speaks through your prophets and your religion? We will explore these vital issues again next week when we will have another look at the Cancerian section of Mark’s Gospel. 

 

 

 

Cancer 2: Opening Up

Mark 6:45-52

 Straight afterwards, Jesus urged his disciples to get into the boat and go on ahead to Bethsaida while he was releasing the crowd. Taking his leave of them he went into the mountain to pray. It was evening and the boat was in the middle of the sea, and he was alone on the land. At about three o’clock in the morning, seeing that they were struggling to make headway because of a contrary wind, he went towards them walking upon the sea, as if he meant to go past them. Those who saw him walking on the water took him for a ghost and screamed out, because they all saw him and were very frightened. But he began to speak to them straightaway. He said, ‘Take heart!  It’s me! (Greek: ego eimi, literally ‘I am’). Don’t be frightened!’ He went up to them in the boat and the wind abated and they were all utterly astonished., because they hadn’t understood about the loaves and their hearts were hard.

Mark 7:24-37

From there Jesus went to region of Tyre and went into a house where he hoped to escape notice. But it wasn’t possible for him to remain hidden for long, and a woman whose daughter was possessed by an evil spirit heard about him and she came and fell down at his feet. She was a Greek – a Syrophoenician – and she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first; it’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She replied, ‘Yes, Lord, but the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps!’ And he said to her, ‘Because of what you’ve just said, go on your way. The demon has left your daughter.’ When she went home she found the child lying on her bed, and the evil spirit had gone.           

 Leaving the region of Tyre he went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, up through the middle of the Decapolis. And they brought to him a deaf man with a speech impediment and they begged Jesus to lay his hand upon him. Taking him privately, away from the crowd, he placed his fingers in his ears, and touched his tongue with spittle. Looking up to heaven he sighed aloud as he said, ‘Ephphatha!’ (which means, ‘Be opened!’ ) The man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosed, and he began to speak correctly. Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone, but the more he told them to keep quiet, the more they proclaimed it. They were completely amazed, saying, ‘He’s done everything well; he makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak!’ They came to Bethsaida where they brought a blind man to him, begging him to touch him. Taking the blind man by the hand, he led him outside the village. He spat into his eyes, put his hands on him and said, ‘Can you see anything?’ The man looked up and said, ‘I can see men, but they look like walking trees!’ Then Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes once more. This time his sight was restored and he could see clearly. So Jesus sent him home and told him not to enter the village.  

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  ‘It is well to remember that the whole universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.’ (John Andrew Holmes) 

 

Last week I explained how the zodiacal sign Cancer was associated in the ancient world with the stomach and food and how it also symbolises the natural tendency of the human being to be isolated, to build a barrier keeping out unfamiliar experience and unfamiliar ideas. And it is this aspect of the sign’s symbolism that I want to look at today.     

The traditions we inherit and pass on, the prejudices we develop, our natural instincts, act like the crab’s shell to cut us off from what we consider to be alien or strange. It is probably a survival mechanism, built into our genes, but one objective of the spiritual life is to identify and then try to eliminate those instinctive factors which work to give us short term survival advantages, but which have now outlived their usefulness and which actually impede our development as a species     The visceral – ‘gut’ – reactions, which all human beings exhibit in the presence of the unfamiliar, are a feature of our emotional life. They come unbidden, up from the depths, and we have little immediate or conscious control over them. We instinctively prefer those people who look like us, talk like us, and who share our assumptions and our outlook. This is why the story of Jesus walking on the water is so appropriate in the Cancer section of the Gospel. It is astronomically appropriate because one of the constellations surrounding Cancer is Argo, the mythical and magical ship of the Argonauts which, according to the Roman writer Manilius was the ship ‘which conquered the waters’. But this story is also related to the idea of overcoming our emotional reactions to things, because Water has perennially symbolised the turbulent emotional life of the individual and, by walking on the water, Jesus is demonstrating his mastery over those instinctive responses to life which will often override our intellectual convictions and which are the cause of so much emotional turbulence. Walking on the water is not a marvellous demonstration of the uniqueness of Jesus, a proof of his divinity; nor is it a misapprehension on the part of eye witnesses who saw Jesus walking on some kind of rocky outcrop and mistook it for a miracle. It is, rather, something we are all called upon to do: we too must learn to conquer the internal emotional turmoil which militates against any genuine acceptance of unfamiliar customs and people.             

There are three more miracle stories in this section, and although they seem like separate incidents, they must be taken together to get the full impact of the lesson the Gospel writer is trying to teach us.            

The first one is the story of the woman who asks Jesus to cast out a demon from her daughter. It is important to remember that this woman is a Gentile – a non-Jew – and it is for this very reason that Jesus initially refuses her request. ‘It’s not right to give the children’s food to the dogs,’ he says. This, of course, is a terrible insult, and the fact that it is uttered by Jesus himself has proved quite embarrassing to conventional commentators, who try to soften it a little by saying that the word used is rather an affectionate term for a dog, and anyway, Jesus was really only testing the woman’s faith. Does Jesus really come out of it better if we assume that he is playing some sort of game with this distressed woman? If she had been unable to respond cleverly to his insult would he have refused to heal her daughter?           

The significance of this story only becomes apparent when we read it in conjunction with the story of the deaf man, which follows. After putting his fingers in the man’s ears and touching his tongue with spittle, Jesus says the Aramaic word Ephphatha, and the man finds himself able to hear properly and to speak coherently. 

It is unusual to find Aramaic words or phrases in the Gospels. Aramaic was the first language of the Palestinian Jews, and so would have been the language of Jesus and the apostles, and commentators regularly point out that it is present in the Gospels – which were all originally written in Greek – because these would have been the actual words that Jesus said. But, as we noted in the story of Jairus’ Daughter, Aramaic is almost certainly used for emphasis in the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel writer is saying, ‘I’m writing this word in another language, so pay attention to it. It’s important’.

 The word Ephphatha means ‘Open up!’ (It was from this word that we took the name of our monthly magazine Oscailt, meaning ‘open’ in Irish.) What Jesus is saying to this deaf man is the Gospel’s message to you and me. This man was suffering from a physical deafness; we are suffering from spiritual deafness. Our ears are closed to the entreaties of those who live in foreign countries, whose skin colour is different from our own, whose way of life does not correspond with ours. We are deaf to the words even of those who live in close proximity to us, but whose traditions are different from ours. We don’t hear what they are saying, and so our opinions about them and their customs are garbled and worthless. The Jewish exclusiveness displayed by Jesus in his encounter with the Gentile woman dramatically illustrates our own clannishness, our instinctive conviction that ‘blood is thicker than water’, that ‘charity begins at home’. It’s a shocking reminder of our own refusal to listen attentively to the unfamiliar voices. It is only when we are prepared to open up that our prejudices can be eroded; and only then that the impediment in our speech will be removed and our opinions will be worth listening to. We have to break the shell of our own tribalism and exclusiveness.           

This theme is explored further in the final scene of this section, the Cure of the Blind Man (Mark 8:22-26). As Jesus enters Bethsaida a blind man is brought to him and, in response to the man’s entreaties, Jesus restores his sight. This seems to be just another example of Jesus’ amazing power to heal. But the story is different from all the other miracles recounted in the Gospels, because it is the only one in which Jesus is shown failing at his first attempt. He takes the man to one side, rubs spittle on his eyes, and asks him, ‘What do you see?’ ‘I see men but they look like walking trees,’ the man replies. Jesus rubs the man’s eyes again, and this time his sight is restored and he can see everything clearly.           

The blind man, like all the characters in the Gospels – when the Gospels are read as psychological, spiritual treatises and not as historical reminiscences – is you and I. We have received the first rub of the spittle, and we can see – that is, we have the sense of sight – but we don’t quite see people, we see walking trees – or, in contemporary language, ciphers, zombies, humanoids. We recognise their general shape and their mobility, but we have yet to grant them fully human status. What we need is a second metaphorical rub of the eyes to correct our vision, to remove the residual film which prevents us seeing people as they really are, as ends in themselves, and not as means to our own ends. Einstein expresses the same sentiment as Mark, but less dramatically and more philosophically, as follows: 

A human being is part of a whole called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.             

The function of all spiritual practice – from whatever tradition it comes – is to help us to narrow the gap between self-awareness and other-awareness, to remove that residual film from our eyes which is deluding our sight. But how, practically, do we achieve it? Like so many of the spiritual lessons contained in this Gospel, it takes a lifetime to learn, but I suggest, as a starter, that whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer we pay particular attention to the first two words: ‘Our Father’. Forget the dispute over the word ‘Father’ and whether it is sexist or not. This is just a distraction. The important word is ‘Our’. God is ‘our father’, not ‘my father’, and throughout the prayer we ask ‘give us our daily bread’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses’ as ‘we forgive those who trespass against us’. This prayer is written in the first person plural. It’s not about me, it’s about us.           

Be conscious of those moments – and there will no doubt be many, no matter how spiritually evolved you consider yourself to be – when you figuratively retreat into your shell, when you act and think as Jesus is shown acting with the Gentile woman, when you cut yourself off from somebody with the thought, ‘He, or she, or they, are not like me. Their problem is nothing to do with me. I am white, I am Irish, I am European, I am male, I am civilised.’ This happens more frequently than we might suspect. An essay in the book All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum, describes a subtle example of it. It concerns a man called Nicolai Pestretsov, a Russian soldier who was stationed in Angola, whose wife was killed when she came out to visit him. Nicolai’s colleagues fled after the attack, but Nicolai didn’t. The South African military communiqué said, ‘Sgt. Major Nicolai Pestretsov refused to leave the body of his slain wife, who was killed in the assault on the village.’ What impressed Fulghum about this report was the air of disbelief that seemed to lie behind the words. It was as if the journalist were saying, ‘He showed concern for his dead wife, refusing to leave her body, putting his own safety at risk – and he’s a Russian! Imagine that!’ As Fulghum comments, the journalist couldn’t quite get beyond the words, Russian, Communist, Soldier, Enemy, to see a person. To the journalist, Nicolai was just a walking tree.           

We too have to try to fight against the tendency to see people as walking trees. Try doing this. Every day select one person that you casually encounter, and make a special imaginative effort to tell yourself that this person, whose name you do not know, whose history and circumstances you do not know, is a thinking, feeling, hurting, doubting, frightened, rejoicing human being, just as you are. Wish him or her well with a silent blessing.            

The Dalai Lama, born under Cancer (6th July 1935), and therefore no doubt acutely conscious of his own tendency to build a shell around himself, said, ‘My religion is kindness’. Kindness has to be our religion. To be kind is to treat people as kin, as family, regardless of their genetic distance from us, and this takes practice and effort. And we can practise it daily, in the ordinary events of ordinary life. Here are two small but recent examples from my own life.           

Last week I was in Oxford for Maud Robinson’s valedictory service. On Tuesday morning I went to breakfast in the college dining room and was met, very early in the morning, with a big smile and a cheery ‘hello’ from the steward, who inquired after my health, indicated the breakfast fare on offer, asked me my name, and generally made me feel welcome and at ease. Indeed, he made me feel like a human being.           

A month or so ago I ordered a book from Amazon, but they didn’t have a copy so they put me in touch with Bon Bon Books who did. When I received my copy a few days later, there was a little note which said, ‘Dear Bill, I hope you enjoy this book’, signed Ian from Bon Bon Books. I was really charmed by this, and said as much in an email to Amazon when they asked me to rate the service I received from this private seller. Yesterday I received an email from Ian thanking me for giving his company a five star assessment. Now we are Ian and Bill, not just customer and bookseller. How different from the anonymity and indifference which characterise so many of the commercial transactions we undertake.               

The lesson? Make the people you encounter feel human. That’s all. Then you’ll be making a significant contribution to the transformation of the world.            

These little exercises and practices – and others that you may devise for yourself – are designed to take us out of our natural solipsism, the feeling that I exist in a way that is different from the way that others exist, and to bring us to an appreciation of our connectedness ‘in mystery and miracle, to one another and to the world’.            

And it can all be summarised in that one word in Mark’s Gospel ‘Ephphatha: Open Up’.