The volume of email -and emotive nature of those emails- increases exponentially by the day and Jo Johnson hasn’t helped.
Gadzooks, I’ve even started getting piles of letters again, and all about BREXIT.
They fall into two categories: those outraged that we are leaving the EU and want to stop it, and those outraged that we haven’t already left yet and fearing a great betrayal.
I thought most people had busy lives: jobs, children to collect, feed and entertain, friends and relatives to visit and look after, Morris Minors to restore, or whatever; where on earth do they get the time to write so many letters & emails, or go to meetings and marches?
I have to -but then that’s part of my job.
How can we maintain a proper sense of proportion?
As the political temperature reaches boiling point here’s a coping strategy. It’s the one I use myself.
Go out into the garden and look directly overhead into the night sky (it helps if you’re in the New Forest unpolluted by street lights) and contemplate the Milky Way, our own galaxy, where our sun is just one of its 250 billion stars (and to get some perspective on what a billion actually is, consider that a billion minutes ago Jesus was still preaching in Galilee).
Just a week or so ago we discovered the oldest known star in a corner of the Milky Way, 13.5 billion years old, just a few hundred million years younger than the Creation itself. It is composed only of hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium: The heavier elements didn’t appear until later –their manufacture required the enormous pressures created in the lives and deaths of generations of massive stars.
At the beginning of this month we discovered that the Milky Way had consumed another Galaxy some 10 billion years ago, so millions of stars are in our galaxy that weren’t even born here.
…and another thing, a year ago we discovered thin strings of gas between galaxies, doubling at a stroke the ordinary matter in the Universe. From our observations and calculations we always knew that it was there, but now we’ve found it. Which, still leaves the question however, of what has become of the other 85% of the Creation?
The Milky Way and other galaxies are not rotating in the way that we expect, and the only explanation is that there is an awful lot more stuff and energy out there that we just can’t see.
Contemplating all this might suggest our own complete insignificance in the scale of the Creation.
On the contrary, our bodies -composed of large molecules made from stardust that has taken generations of stars to create, are a measure of our importance to the Creator and his purpose.
Consider Ecclesiasticus 43:32:
“There are yet hid greater things than these be, for we have seen but a few of his works”
In any event, it puts BREXIT in perspective.