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Good morning. The acclaimed American writer Toni Morrison would have been 90 today. When she died in 2019, Barack Obama, who gave her the Presidential medal, said it had been a privilege to breathe the same air as her. Her peerless writing amplified the voices of both West African and African American characters, perspectives and customs, and as such, hers was a profound and challenging presence not only in American literature but in the English speaking literature of the last century. Toni Morrison wanted to tell the stories of people she called ‘disremembered and unaccounted for’. Her narratives, characters and reflections uncovered silenced lives, brought them into the light, revealed their beauty and their truth even often in situations of crushing injustice and inequality, wilfully maintained by those whose lives it suited. The inspiration for Toni Morrison’s most famous novel ‘Beloved’ was Margaret Garner, the 19th century freed slave. In her lifetime she was subject to unjust laws, enacted in a society that violently supressed her and her family. But her story erupts from the pages of Morrison’s prose, like modern day Scripture. In the gospels Jesus promises that the things hidden in darkness will be brought into the light. Even in an age of social media where it might seem that there’s nothing hidden at all any more, it’s the vocation of any who want to help build an open and just society, that the hidden lives and suppressed stories of people from every background are heard and honoured.

God, to whom darkness and light are both alike, give us the grace and energy to seek your presence in the hidden corners of our world. And help us remember that all are precious and mysterious souls made in your image to the glory of your name. Amen.