A great Christmas present.
Not long into these reflections on the lessons of a traumatic year, Pope Francis offers a line from his favourite poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Where the danger is, grows the saving power.” At moments of personal trial throughout his life, Francis writes, these words have helped him navigate the crisis. Though moments of reckoning will strip us bare, absolute vulnerability leaves us open to moments of grace and revelation.
Short enough to read in a single sitting, Let Us Dream is written in the spirit of that insight and throws down a spiritual gauntlet to the reader. The distillation of summer discussions with the English Catholic commentator and author Austen Ivereigh, the book is recognisably a product of that strange, surreal first phase of the coronavirus pandemic. As patients fought for breath in overwhelmed intensive care wards, our streets fell silent and lockdown brought the world to a shuddering halt. Calamities such as this, says Francis, can be a “threshold” experience, dividing one era from another. “This is a moment to dream big,” he writes, “to rethink our priorities – what we value, what we want, what we seek – and commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.”
The Covid crisis, argues the pope, has given the lie to a “myth of self-sufficiency” that sanctions rampant inequalities and frays the ties that bind societies together. Pitilessly, the virus has demonstrated our mutual dependency and common vulnerability. We have collectively relied on the state as never before. The doorstep applause for the nurses and doctors risking their lives, and the key workers who kept essential services going, was a collective lightbulb moment: “They are the saints next door, who have awoken something important in our hearts … the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves: not preserving ourselves, but losing ourselves in service. What a sign of contradiction to the individualism and self-obsession and lack of solidarity that so dominate our wealthier societies!”
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Us-Dream..., powerful prose, Pope,and the world at large.
Not long into these reflections on the lessons of a traumatic year, Pope Francis offers a line from his favourite poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Where the danger is, grows the saving power.” At moments of personal trial throughout his life, Francis writes, these words have helped him navigate the crisis. Though moments of reckoning will strip us bare, absolute vulnerability leaves us open to moments of grace and revelation.
Short enough to read in a single sitting, Let Us Dream is written in the spirit of that insight and throws down a spiritual gauntlet to the reader. The distillation of summer discussions with the English Catholic commentator and author Austen Ivereigh, the book is recognisably a product of that strange, surreal first phase of the coronavirus pandemic. As patients fought for breath in overwhelmed intensive care wards, our streets fell silent and lockdown brought the world to a shuddering halt. Calamities such as this, says Francis, can be a “threshold” experience, dividing one era from another. “This is a moment to dream big,” he writes, “to rethink our priorities – what we value, what we want, what we seek – and commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.”
The Covid crisis, argues the pope, has given the lie to a “myth of self-sufficiency” that sanctions rampant inequalities and frays the ties that bind societies together. Pitilessly, the virus has demonstrated our mutual dependency and common vulnerability. We have collectively relied on the state as never before. The doorstep applause for the nurses and doctors risking their lives, and the key workers who kept essential services going, was a collective lightbulb moment: “They are the saints next door, who have awoken something important in our hearts … the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves: not preserving ourselves, but losing ourselves in service. What a sign of contradiction to the individualism and self-obsession and lack of solidarity that so dominate our wealthier societies!”
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Us-Dream..., powerful prose, Pope,and the world at large.