In December’s Sounds of Iona, Ruth Harvey is grateful for the small things.
In the overwhelm of global events, it can be hard to know what to do. Will my tiny action, small voice or concern penetrate the pain? As we approach Advent, how will we celebrate the birth of Christ when so many millions of children are homeless, hungry and fearful? How can we exchange gifts when swathes of the world’s population have had all they possess destroyed?
A letter to Philippa Perry in The Observer (24/11/24) put this despair succinctly: ‘I am finding it ever more difficult to be in this nasty world. Everything that I cherish is being destroyed and there is nowhere to go to find solace.’ The loss of birdsong and insect life; the seemingly limitless power and desire of humans to wreak havoc and violence on all creation; the selfishness that so often drives political decisions. ‘The list is endless.’
Perry’s response focused less on the vastness of the problem, and more on the agency of each of us to bring change. The hollow optimism of Pangloss’s ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ in the face of despair, offers, as it did to Candide, little comfort. Voltaire’s Candide in the end responds to despair in the only way he knows how: he cultivates his own garden.
In their magnificent hymn ‘The Greatness of the Small’, Graham Maule and John Bell remind us that the one who’s birth we anticipate over these next weeks was the very one who, in his life, honoured small, slight, seemingly insignificant acts and people and elevated them as markers of God’s Kin(g)dom:
‘He knew the beauty in the small.
Who saw the sparrow in the sky,
and crushed the corn which seemed to die
when left to fall:
He sensed a wonder in each seed which God decreed.’
Each time we offer love, compassion or a kindly word, we augment the love, compassion and kindness in the world. Each time we turn away, raise our voice, dismiss or deride, we augment the pain and suffering in the world. Our ‘tiny’ deeds are all we have. In fact, they are ‘the greatness in the small’ – they are the acts of God’s Kin(g)dom writ large in the world.
We here also choose community as our response. Whether that is gathered or scattered, we each choose to commit to, or associate ourselves with a Rule of Life that affirms the ‘greatness in the small.’ We gather our voices into one even while we celebrate and sometimes struggle with our glorious diversity. Our daily prayers of confession and forgiveness, our weekly prayers for healing and transformation, our monthly gatherings in local groups across the globe: each are faithful acts of trust in ‘the greatness of the small’, in the power of voices and hands joined together to transform the world. As the anthropologist Maragret Mead reminds us: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
So, as we light our flickering, vulnerable candles of hope, love, joy and peace this advent, let us pray for limitless small acts of strength, power and overwhelming kindness in the world to celebrate God’s Kin(g)dom: the ‘greatness in the small.’
Photo credit: Ken Scott
USA North East