Thought for the Week: The supermoon
Alastair McIntosh reflects on times of great upheaval
Monday night was a bit of a letdown for watchers of the sky across the greater part of Scotland. It was billed as the night of the ‘supermoon’ – that time, once in a generation, when the moon comes close enough to be bigger and brighter than we have mostly ever experienced.
But like in politics, with Harold Macmillan’s ‘events, dear boy, events’, the weather intervened. We knew the moon was out there, somewhere; but unless you were lucky enough to get a transient break in the cloud cover, your horizons would have had to shrink back to the visible.
Perhaps it is like life itself. We are in a time of great upheavals, of crushing inequalities, but we differ greatly in what we see, and some might even give up looking.
Information technology, and with it the loss of filters on what counts as news, is a liberation in many ways. But a flipside is that we have narrowed down the world we listen to. On the internet news is tailored to our tastes, partly with and partly without our knowing. We follow and unfollow, but in so doing we can put ourselves in echo chambers.
Such social stratification sets us out of touch with wider realities. Our eyes get so accustomed to the glare that we lose the ability to see by gentle moonlight. Even when the ‘supermoon’ comes out, the clouds around have thickened.
Where does all this leave us? In what ways can we listen out more deeply? In the Quaker tradition, you can find three levels of listening.
There’s the listening to the ‘me’, in being clear about our own thoughts and feelings.
There’s the listening to the ‘we’, in seeking out the point of view of others.
But deepest of all, there’s the listening to the underlying Spirit – to the movement of the spirit that is life itself.
The great Welsh poet RS Thomas said:
‘He is such a fast
God, always before us and
leaving as we arrive.’
Perhaps that is the fleetness and the vision that we need today, if we are to catch the supermoon of life.
This reflection was a Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Scotland on 15 November.
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