The Wheels of the World

This is Philologus posting as Mari Howard because of a broken computer!

Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. Living in the world of 2018, fiction sometimes seems to me something I can now live without. Reality has taken its place. The public world all around us has sprouted the events and behaviours that, in the past, we believed were confined to make-believe. I was never one for news bulletins until the last two years—I let the world of politics go on without my interference. But now I am glued to my newsfeed, avid for information from Twitter, signing a petition on line every day.

The news is giving us the material of the most extreme fiction and giving it in spades. Were you an addict of the Dystopic? Look no further: the world this summer was practically on fire; the Arctic is melting, animal species are disappearing, women are being beheaded in Arabia, children tortured in Burma, refugees are enough to fill a whole country, churches are drowning in abuse scandals, the jungles are being cleared for mining and biofuel, even the English countryside is being ravaged for shale oil. And an English bookshop was trashed by fascists!

Perhaps you revelled in the antics of the bounders, braggarts, and bitches of Tom Sharpe, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury and co.? Now all you need to do is to witness the boasting, the false promises, the lying, the cheating, the abusiveness vomited up by our newspapers, celebrities, and, above all, our politicians.

Or perhaps you were addicted to Cold-War thrillers, with 007 and his ilk battling the wiles of Soviet spies and subversives? Back in the Cold War, this was total fantasy; nothing like it actually happened.  But now, every day, another tentacle of the Russian octopus is revealed to us, subverting electoral democracy in Britain and, of all things, the US Republican party, bribing, infiltrating, subverting, suborning, and even murdering with phials of nerve agent.

Or perhaps you used to enjoy dramas set in the Corridors of Power, and had to suspend your disbelief as the infighting, vituperation, and fornication unfolded in more and more labyrinthine ways? Well, now you have it in cold fact, in Washington and in Whitehall; the denizen of the Oval Office even instructing his counsel to break the law and cover up a sordid affair.

Every now and then I am jolted by the realization that this is happening in the same world that I live in and in the same time frame. This is not 1938, but 2018, and though history does not repeat itself, I fear that it does rhyme, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said but didn’t. As in that year of the Munich crisis, our country is teetering on the brink of the utterly unknown. This is not a scary book that I can shut and leave on the bedside table. I am a participant. But what can I do? It feels overwhelming.

There is something I can do to change things. I cannot change the story in a novel or a play; I cannot save the tragic hero from death. But I can change the story of this world in which I am a participant, by the power of prayer. With my feeble strength, I can help the hand of the Author turn things to good. We are exhorted to overcome evil with good. I believe that can be done by praying for those whom I see as enemies or as evil. My judgement may be wrong; they may be misguided or misunderstood; it doesn’t matter. I can call down blessing on those who seem bent on their own destruction; I can plead for them to be granted the true riches, the true power, the true pleasure; to be set free from the shackles of malice. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote: ‘Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world; small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’ The kingdom of God works in secret; but it is up to us to do its work.