Pilgrim's Progress column with Erik Peeters: The World Around Us
I write in a moment of odd juxtaposition. Outside my window the sun is markedly more present than it has been, flowers and even trees are beginning bud, and nature is generally signalling new beginnings, the re-emergence of life from winter.
Inside, my computer screen is filling up with news of the start of another war, the United States engaging in another experiment in regime change by violence, as if experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq taught us nothing.
And the brunt is again borne most by people who have had the least say in the unfolding of events – whether civilians in Iran or Israel, in Qatar or Bahrain or Lebanon.
And I can’t help but wonder at the insights this juxtaposition offers. The more we have come to understand the created order in which we live, so powerfully illustrated by David Attenborough in many excellent nature documentaries on the BBC, the more it has become apparent that life on earth has been created to flourish in vast and complex interconnecting networks – you might, like me, remember the very basic food chains we illustrated in primary school – networks in which each individual part, down to beings as small as a single cell, contributes something vital to the survival and the thriving of the whole. Where those networks work, life thrives.
And yet, when it comes to social problems we human beings incessantly, pathologically, grasp for conflict, division and violence for solutions. Where creation constantly demonstrates that no-one is safe unless all of us are safe, no-one flourishes unless all flourish, we humans persist in the belief that I am safer if my gun is bigger and I shoot first. As we enter another spring, another journey towards Easter, my prayer is that we might finally begin to learn the lesson that creation has been teaching us for millions of years.
Erik Peeters, Wakefield Cathedral