Tuesday 27 January 2015

Patient and impatient waiting

Patience is a virtue. We wait for God's good time to give us wisdom. Many spiritual traditions are built around silent waiting - sitting in stillness with God and with others, being ready for his calling to speak and to act. I practised that discipline through Quaker worship for many years. It's a powerful discipline - hard work but at its best it can carry a deep experience of God's presence and his will.

This morning's reading in my daily prayer podcast, Pray as you go, which follows the Roman Catholic daily lectionary, comes from Psalm 40. It begins "I waited patiently", and goes on to talk of being called by God to speak in the 'great congregation' of the people.

But sometimes impatience is called for. Yesterday, the Church of England consecrated its first female bishop - something wonderful to see, but that should have happened many years ago. It was right for the campaigners for women priests and bishops in the Church of England to be impatient.

And today is Holocaust Memorial Day. 70 years ago, the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Russian soldiers. Nobody in that camp should have had to wait a single day more - the earlier it had been liberated, the more lives would have been saved. Impatience was right in that case too.

The scriptures are full of impatience when faced with injustice - "how long, O Lord?" (Psalm 13). It's a legitimate emotion, one that comes from the heart. But it's a generous emotion, not for one's own sake but for that of others.

Patience in our own case, waiting for inspiration or calling. Impatience in the face of injustice. That is surely the way to which we are called.

Thursday 15 January 2015

Changing countries, changing boundaries

I've been reading the excellent book 1913: The World before the Great War by Charles Emmerson. He lays out a compelling portrait of the world in the year before the First World War (through a picture of 20 different cities across the world). He observes that the world of 1913 is often viewed through the lens of the catastrophe and carnage of the Great War, but that the war was not inevitable and there was much else happening other than the run-up to war.

Reading the book made me very aware of countries and their boundaries. The world was carved up into several large empires which no longer exist or are much reduced (notably the British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires), while many of the countries we now take for granted as universal were part of one of those empires or another entity.

Europe in 1914 (Image: Diercke International Atlas)
If we look specifically at Europe (whose own boundaries are contested, but is often taken to go as far east as the Caucasus Mountains and the Ural River), there were 26 countries in Europe in 1914 (an easy year to get data for), while there are 46 today.

Europe in 1914 consisted of: Albania, Andorra, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Romania, Russian Empire, San Marino, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Europe today (image: Diercke International Atlas)

Europe in 2015 consists of: Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City.
For completeness, it's worth saying that there are four states which geographically are wholly (or almost wholly) in Asia, but which are often associated with European institutions, including the European Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Georgia. And there are six states which are not widely recognised internationally except by a few states: Abkhazia, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, South Ossetia. (And here's the part where I confess that my lists are extracted from Wikipedia, which is generally reliable for uncontested topics, but doesn't always handle controversies so well - so probably each state in this paragraph would be placed elsewhere by some people.)

Of the nineteen states which didn't exist in 1914: 8 were part of the Russian Empire; 5 were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; 2 were part of Britain and its empire (Ireland and Malta); 1 was part of Denmark; 1 was part of Serbia; 1 was part of Italy; and 1 (Poland) was split between Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany. Austria-Hungary, as well as losing its empire, formally split into two successor states, Austria and Hungary. Many of these changes happened in 1918 after the First World War, but others happened at a later time.

Enough already of lists and stats. Here's the moral: boundaries change. Nations in one time are not nations in another time. Sometimes boundaries change as a result of war, sometimes due to economic pressure, sometimes due to democratic will - or all of these together. But boundaries of nations change over time. 

This is important because we are in a time when European boundaries are under question again. Scotland and Catalonia had independence referendums (of different kinds) in 2014, Ukraine's boundaries became threatened by Russia. The Balkans are quieter than they were, but not entirely settled. And there are independence movements, with more or less support, in various regions of current European states. 

Future boundary changes are hard to predict, but one thing is almost certain: the political map of 2115 will not be the same as that of 2015. And it might look just as different from 2015 as the modern map looks from that of 1914. Countries are not static entities.

Gaps in translation: Babel, information and colonialism

Recently I've been reading the novel Babel by Rebecca Kuang, and found it both highly enjoyable and thought-provoking. Very much an aca...