In Tenebris Lux

Hello everyone –

A great deal of unsettling news has been reaching us through the news media over the last few weeks. From around the globe, scenes of chaos and despair haunt our TV screens on a nightly basis. Dealing with these global realities of life in the 21^st century isn’t an easy task, but it is a task that can be accomplished with the aid of historical perspective, mixed with a generous helping of hope and wisdom. This fortnight’s quotations, drawn from various sources, have provided comfort, inspiration, and a greater sense of perspective to me, and now I am sharing them with you.

Reflections from BABYLON 5 (The Best Science-Fiction TV Series of the 1990s!)

By J. Michael Straczynski (Creator/Producer/Writer)

“We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon, and see the line of ancestors behind us, saying, ‘Make my life have meaning.’ And to our inheritors before us, saying, ‘Create the world we will live in.’ I mean, we’re not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future.”

-- Captain John Sheridan in Episode #37

       All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation. This had the feeling of both.

       G’Quon wrote, “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities – it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.”

       The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation.

       No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

-- Closing Monologue from Episode #66

“Hope” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune -- without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Some Poetical Wisdom from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

From “Ulysses”:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From “Locksley Hall”:

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.

From “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”:

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue,

I have seen her far away--for is not Earth as yet so young?--

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion killed,

Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert tilled,

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles.

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by,

Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human soul;

Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the Whole.

Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.

Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.

Follow Light, and do the Right--for Man can half-control his doom--

Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb.

Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.

I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last.

Until next time,

Rob :)

“Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet how Gilgamesh went through every hardship. He walked through darkness and so glimpsed the light.”

-- The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia, 3rd Millennium BCE)