Let Us Dream

Can anything good come out of the Vatican? (To paraphrase Nathanael.) If you were brought up, or have been taught, to have that point of view, think again. Pope Francis, assisted by Austen Ivereigh, has brought us a wonderfully inspiring message for the present crisis, Let Us Dream.

The basic rule of a crisis is that you don’t come out of it the same. If you get through it, you come out better or worse, but never the same. We are living in a time of trial. The Bible talks of passing through fire to describe such trials.

This is a taster from the Prologue. Again, he writes:

God asks us to dare to create something new. We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging, and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that impact their lives. We need to slow down, take stock, and design better ways of living together on this earth.

The rest of the book is in three parts: A Time to See, A Time to Choose, and A Time to Act. It lays out Pope Francis’s vision for how the world can respond to the crisis of our time. What is remarkable is how totally Christian his message is, and yet how no person of good will with or without a faith could really disagree with it.

The central crisis is, of course, the impending climate catastrophe. He writes:

If someone who loves you gives you a beautiful and valuable gift, how do you handle it? To treat it with contempt is to treat the giver with contempt.

Pope Francis says that his eyes were opened to this soon after 2007, when he began to become more aware of environmental news stories. But he emphasizes that for him it’s an awareness, not an ideology.

The point is that when Covid eventually shrinks to the scale of all the other nasty diseases on the planet, our problems will be nowhere near over. This other much larger crisis will still be hanging over us. And additionally, this country, like many other countries, will need to arise from the moral and spiritual darkness that is threatening to engulf us before we can respond to climate change adequately.

In his Epilogue, Pope Francis likens the present situation to being in a labyrinth.

In the Greek myth, Ariadne hands Theseus a ball of thread to track his way out. The ball of thread we have been given is our creativity to move beyond the logic of the labyrinth, to decenter and transcend. Ariadne’s gift is the Spirit calling us out of ourselves — the “twitch upon the thread” of which G. K. Chesterton spoke in his Father Brown stories. It is others who, like Ariadne, help us to find a way out, to give the best of ourselves.

This scarcely does justice to a book (and a short one, too!) which is not only creative and inspiring, but also a marvellous example of serious Christian writing. Tolle, lege!