Thought for the Week: The light and the dark
Harvey Gillman meditates in Menorca
The harbour is still. The tramuntana – the wind from the northern mountains across the sea, cool in the winter – has fallen. I sit on a rock and look out on what is one of the deepest harbours in the world, that of Mahon, the capital of Menorca. I reflect it is good to be here in the calm, the peace, the harmony of light, and rock, and the gentle green that dominates this island, a biosphere reserve, where over two hundred species of birds and one thousand species of plants have been recorded.
On the other side of the harbour are ruined fortifications. The island has been subject to invasion, pillage, forced conversion, enslavement and rivalry between colonial powers for most of its history. Its main cities were destroyed in the seventeenth century and six thousand of its inhabitants were enslaved by pirates. For most of the eighteenth century the island was ruled by Britain, a colonial power that left some beautiful architecture – for the rich – and splendid roads for everyone. I was at first delighted to learn that Menorca was neglected as a developing tourist destination by Franco and his fascist government because it had withstood his onslaught in the Spanish civil war longer than any other region of Spain. In the prison whose ruins I can see in the distance, however, local Franco supporters were massacred by Republican forces, before the fascists took over and murdered the Republicans. This economic neglect kept the island from being dominated by tourism, but now it is suffering greatly from economic decay and many of its younger inhabitants are leaving. Yet, during my stay here, I was amazed by the friendliness of the local population.
I am constantly overwhelmed by a sense of paradox. I can sit on a rock and be aware of the connectedness of all things: the beauty of the harbour, of the many coves and inlets of the island, the richness of the flora undisturbed by chemical pollution. Yet the very ruins, which have a beauty of their own, are the results of greed, longing for power and the desire of human beings to kill each other. I wonder whether I am just being a romantic, imposing my own need for harmony on a world, which, for all its beauty, is enmeshed in cruelty. Can the sight of asphodels cover the bloodshed for so long on this or any other lands? Is the spiritual life and its revelations of beauty, peace, justice, love and human solidarity just an escape by the sensitive from an insensitive universe?
My faith, growing more minimalist as I get older, will not allow me to believe this. As I sat there meditating on these things, the word solidarity came to mind. If I sit in worship, I am sitting with others. If I am carried away by a sense of beauty, that beauty must recognise pain also, in others and in myself. Bloodshed will not wash away the asphodels, nor the bush spurge, nor the sound of the blackbirds in the woods, nor the smile offered by strangers as I ask my way through the country lanes, bordered by wonderful dry stone walls. But asphodels will not wipe away the blood either. An ocean of Light and an ocean of Darkness.
Epiphanies must relate to daily life, worship to testimony, the divine to the human. The spiritual life is a call to see paradox, where the world sees only contradiction; possibility, where the world so often offers only despair.
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