Morning

Source: nedhardy.com

What gets you out of bed in the morning? In a way, I find this question harder to answer as I get older. It has to do with old habits wearing thin. The things that used to get me going are either no longer relevant, or no longer exist. When it comes to relevance, after 43 years of being together I’ve finally had to accept the fact that my husband really does not like hot tea, so to trek back upstairs to bring it to him the minute the pot has brewed is a waste of time and effort. I now pour it and leave it for him downstairs. Then there’s the other reality. The children have long since left home and now lead lives of their own at some considerable distance from ours. The only reason for getting up early for their sakes has to do with fitting in with international time zones. This we manage to do at other times of the day.

But I still get up an hour earlier, and I still have a reason for doing so. For one thing, there is the silence, both external and internal. We live in a silent place. In other words, silence is consistent. It is a given. There is no ambient traffic noise. There are no times of the day when we are even particularly conscious of noise, apart from the change of predominant bird cry. Buzzards are very active at the moment and the swallows have not yet started marshaling the troops for the long flight south. They will get noisier when they do so in a couple of weeks time. Also, we have cut down the old elder in which the crows used to nest, as well as fight with the magpies. Their departure has made the silence almost palpable.

External silence has the effect of quelling internal noise. In the first hour of the day the busy mind is subdued. It has not yet woken up to mundane preoccupations, although it is not asleep either. In fact, I find that it is more awake than at any other time of the day. It is open, in every sense of the word. For me, the first hour of the day is a time of openness to the Real Presence, but it is not a mental vacuum which I expect God to fill. Instead, I find that I am involved in a kind of three-way dialogue between the mind, the senses and God. But rarely is anything said. Instead, the heart is allowed to have its own mind, to speak from its concerns and from its fears.

Today, it spoke of North Korea and the US, and of the threat to our very existence which the leaders of these two nations represent. The mind, and my personal fears, being quelled, I was able to sense the impact of the situation on its most helpless victims, the ordinary people of North Korea. What came to mind was a picture of its baby-faced leader peering through what seemed like an old fashioned pair of binoculars while two of his adjutants stood by. One wore an army uniform. The other was dressed in a thin fleece type jacket. The army character looked thin. His companion was emaciated. Their leader was wearing a warm well cut heavy coat. He looked very well fed.

The memory of this picture, seen either on line or in a newspaper, speaks to me of the deeper evil, and of the most pressing danger, which is at the root of this crisis. It is the total disregard for other human beings which comes when two narcissistic leaders are sated or infatuated with power. No doubt if these two leaders were to disappear, others would replace them, so the solution to the crisis does not lie in praying that they, and the danger they represent, will simply go away. In fact, when we are engaged in the kind of three-way dialogue I have been describing, the idea of a ‘solution’ to the crisis of potential nuclear holocaust recedes a little. We realise that something more than a solution is needed, because a solution would be no more than a political construct designed to get these two leaders out of the impasse they have created and so allow the rest of us to breathe a sigh of relief, at least in the immediate present.

But whatever calming devices are deployed, in respect to the two antagonistic leaders, they will not make a jot of difference to the suffering endured by tens of millions of North Koreans. Their suffering will not be diminished, even for a moment. The silence of the early morning tells me that it is their suffering which matters most when it comes to any kind of meaningful solution to the Korean crisis. There is no particular logic for thinking this, and it will appear naïve to many, but for those who know the value of silence, engaging together in God with the suffering of ordinary North Koreans is vital spiritual work. If you have read this far, please reserve an hour of mentally uncluttered time to join me in this work.