This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Columba and Kherson
Nearly forty years ago I spent a week on the Island of Iona in the abbey established in the year 597 by an Irishman called Columba – not a saint for the fainthearted or those who courted romantic notions of living in an easy community, contemplating holy thoughts. He is said to have frequently stood up to his neck in the sea – toughening himself for the missionary task rather than seeking his own self-fulfilment.
So, when the church remembers Columba in its calendar today, it is this realistic faith and faithful realism that jumps out. Faith is not a form of mystical self-help, aimed at making me feel better.
But, not everyone chooses to stand in the water up to their neck. The images from Kherson following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam are appalling. This single action changed the known world for tens of thousands of people. Notions of human control over their own lives were swept away.
In the midst of this tragedy there is a warning also for those of us who watch on our screens and weep with sympathy and horror from a distance. What Robert Kaplan calls ‘the tragic mind’ must open our minds to our own vulnerability, however secure our own life might feel. Stuff happens … and everything changes.
Fifteen hundred years ago, Columba and his monks knew that tomorrow might not come – so, they lived for today, building for tomorrow, but knowing they might not see it. Living by faith meant embracing the uncontrollable world today, knowing that beauty can still follow after the horror.
The brutal fact is that all the dispersed people from Kherson may have left is a choice to live for today while relying on others to hold and enable their tomorrow. Faith, in this sense, means recognising this lack of control and then being held by those who do have the power to shape a future out of the chaos.
In one sense, the Bible that inspired and challenged Columba in his world is no stranger to this way of being. God’s people constantly have to move into an uncertain world where the dangers cannot be wished away – where faith means committing to action that might not work. Insecurity is the norm on a finite planet.
Columba is long dead. Kherson is in massive pain. Those observers who commit to a future hope will recognize that living by faith also means enabling their neighbor to live. What the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka called the “solidarity of the shaken”. And that is anything but a selfish preoccupation with ‘me’.
