CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: We dream of an ideal society - where people feel connection and belonging
Last Monday I sat in Kirkwall Library exploring the life of Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959). I think it’s worth reflecting on as the general election approaches.
We dream of an ideal society, where people feel connection and belonging; where there’s compassion, justice, integrity, hope; where people love one another.
To the deeply-sensitive poet, the island of Wyre where he spent his young boyhood was such a society, an island Eden. He sensed ‘a complete harmony of all things with each other’. Christian religion was central to his boyhood, and aged 14 he had a profound religious experience in Kirkwall.
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Soon, the family moved to Glasgow in search of work. The squalor and deprivation of the slums horrified Edwin. Despite his desperate prayers, both his parents and two of his brothers died. He drifted from faith, but later recovered his belief in God and immortality, and somehow retained ‘one foot in Eden’.
Muir had a profound conversion to the beauties of socialist ideology, with its vision of restoring Eden through progressive social improvement. But studying the struggles of the past showed him that ‘if this was how history had worked…. how could it be expected to work differently in the future’.
Later, he absorbed the philsosophy of Nietzsche who promoted a future dominated by a social elite with no compassion shown to those seen as lesser mortals.
We too may look to ideologies to change society, or align ourselves with elite ‘in groups’ claiming to have the only answers. But we may find as Muir did that such visions are ‘false in being earthly and nothing more’.
So far, so bleak as we look for inspiration from Edwin Muir. He has ‘a vague sense… that Christ was the turning-point of time and the meaning of life to everyone’. But one day in Rome he sees a plaque depicting The Annunciation. An angel tenderly tells a young woman that she will bear the Son of God. ‘Each reflects the other’s face till heaven in hers and earth in his shines steady there,’ Muir writes.
This taught him something new. The church ‘did not tell me by any outward sign that the Word became flesh’. In fact, earth and spirit are one. Jesus came among us. His story can be our story. Not by ideology but through the living presence of God will we once again stand, two feet in Eden.
And so Christians voting on July 4, remember that in God, something of the future is present. Change does not spring from human thought alone, but comes through a wisdom, an energy kindled in us by God, Source of all goodness. And the opportunity to put a cross on a ballot paper is a sacred act.
