THE PARTICAPATOR

How empty our world would be without love.

Our creator did not keep a distance but became an observer who walks with us on our daily paths. The light that shone so brightly on the night of the birth of Jesus still shines upon us today. There is a glory that we can see and a love we can experience.
As I write in my lighted room with my warm coffee I am also aware of those in prison cells needing love; and those whose lives are filled with misery yet find the endurance to keep carrying on.

I am reading about a man who was a professor of psychiatry; after finding being a doctor too painful, a writer who entered into the lives he was writing about. "In Atlanta, while studying the first ten black teenagers to integrate that city's public schools who had started a group called Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee" he offered his services to them as a physician and psychiatrist so that he could interview the students. He was refused but asked again if there was anything he could do to help the cause. "Yeah, you can keep the place clean!" So he did.
He swept the floor, scrubbed the bathrooms, vacuumed and dusted and as he did he was reminded of the parents of these boys who did similar jobs. Eventually after a year he gained their trust and their respect.

He found in many "disadvantaged" people a reservoir of inner strength that defied explanation.
He described their lives as showing "moments of transcendence and grace".

At church I was reminded of the potential of faith to bring light into our darkness to guide us into a path where we discover that hopes can be dashed and uncertainty is a reality. At times we may lose sight of the love that shines around us all but even when our lives seem out of control faith reassures us that we will find a way through the night into the dawn of a new hope.

"How far that little candle throws his beams
So shines a good deed in a naughty world." The Merchaant of Venice. --- Shakespeare