But the Good News Is ...

Thinking I could time it between sleet downpours, I have just returned, freezing and drenched, from walking down our lane to post some letters. I set off optimistically. It is that time of year when, even allowing for freak weather conditions, there is an occasional hint of something better in the sky, a moment of pearly blue or of iridescent sunshine breaking into the grey.

Such moments happen in the lives of nations too. Hope dares to show its face when, in attempts at conflict resolution, powerful people shift their positions in regard to one another, be it ever so slightly. Such moments can change the whole landscape of international relations, and hence the lives of millions. We have glimpsed this happening at the Geneva peace talks where, on Saturday, parties to the Syria conflict momentarily changed their seating arrangements. First, the government representatives and their opposite numbers sat on opposite sides of the table, across from one another. Then, briefly it seems, they sat side by side before moving into separate rooms to consolidate their positions and make their separate cases to the UN mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi. While these manouevres may prove to have been a diplomatic sleight of hand, or simply happened by chance, is it too soon to think that they might also be a landscape-changer?

The government’s ceding (or offering, depending whose side you are on) of the right of passage out of Homs for women and children means that although women and children are still currency for use in other people’s power games, everybody seems to have remembered, if only for a moment, that they are also human beings.

It is the remembering that matters because remembering is about returning to a familiar place, a better one perhaps, or seeing a familiar face, once a friend but now an enemy, and wanting a new and better, more truthful and compassionate life with that person. When a line of blue appears while it is still raining, one remembers Spring. It is not a moment of eager anticipation about longer warmer days about to come, because winter is still too much with us, but of remembering what the lanes and fields look and smell like when the light changes and there is a suspicion of warmth in the air.

There is a difference between right remembering and simplistic nostalgia. Right remembering orientates people towards truth about the past, making for the possibility of a new and different future, a new reality in the present. Where Syria is concerned the future remains uncertain. Winter is still too much with us, with a worst case scenario in which Homs could yet become a new Srebrenica. Hope is not really hope if it loses sight of present reality.

So we, and the Syrian people, hover between seasons of light and darkness, and between conflict and healing. As these talks continue, which all people of faith pray that they will, there is the faintest possibility of some kind of new beginning for this troubled region. It would be beyond our wildest dreams if this were to happen, but wild dreams and the will to heal are bound up in hope and worked out in a determination to stick with, and believe in, the work of a holy God.