麻豆约拍

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with novelist and poet Zahid Hussain

Good Morning.

Many of us know a loved one who has suffered. Sometimes that suffering is felt most keenly by those around them.

My brother was diagnosed with epilepsy in early childhood. Many of the opportunities I have taken for granted were never open to him. But it is my mother who has felt the full weight of his suffering, of not being able to hold back the tide of his seizures when they became a status epilepticus, an unending seizure which could only be halted by making him unconscious.

Today he鈥檚 in a healthier place, but I am drawn to the notion that the suffering of one is rarely singular.

Nowadays, it feels to me as though our world is also in a constant state of pain.

Climate change, the extinction of species, floods and forest fires.

We鈥檝e left scars in the belly of our planet plundering it for rare metals in our lust for the latest phone. I鈥檝e seen the squalor of entire towns and cities devoted to producing goods for the West - and the East.

We have to change.

But you know, it is true that we may be the problem, but we are also the solution.

I may hate what we have become, but I would hate more to give up and let our despair rise above our heads and drown us.

Lord, grant us your most treasured gift: hope. Hope so that we can push back the darkness and fill the world with light especially when we most fear we don鈥檛 have the fortitude or the energy to reach you.

Amen.

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