Divine Dialogues

 Deep speaks to deep. Monk in the Market Place … and the Simpsons (DLT) is eliciting divine phone dialogues from surprising people in different lands. It seems my honesty about my ‘Shadow’, and the capturing of divine golden threads in an ordinary person’s life has given people permission to freshly explore their own lives and callings.

 A friend from Germany commented on the cover picture. ‘You are holding on to the pilgrim posts but you don’t need to do that any more’ he said. ‘You have established posts by which people may live their lives and these will survive, but you yourself must move on. Not to another post, not just yet to heaven, but to God’s hands leading you into gardens of delight.’

 A friend who was thrown out of Apartheid South Africa as a student commented on the chapter on Lindisfarne. ‘This is a parable for the world’ he thought. My experience is not just about misunderstandings, it is about power and possession. An island is a mirror of Palestine and Israel and so many other of the world’s cockpits. The struggle is for all people to free themselves of possessiveness while protecting what is precious.

 Someone who has been asked to head up a commission on a united Ireland thought that in order to spread understanding people need to appreciate that the Irish have empathy whereas the English (he did not say ‘the British’) have a colonial mentality. The Roman Empire planned to make Chester its furthest military outpost from which it would manage the two islands of ‘Greater Britain’, but it had to withdraw. So Ireland continued the empathy of the extended families in its tribal system, whereas Britain made feelings subservient to large-scale planning. This attribute enabled them to develop a large empire.  One is not all good and the other is not all bad. Acceptance that each has treasures to bring to a future shared table is necessary.