This morning, I write to you from a familiar perch, my breakfast nook, where light filters gently through the window and the world begins anew with the steady clink of a teacup and the slow unfurling of birdsong. This place, with its quiet rituals and dependable comforts, has long served as a small sanctuary in an often bewildering world. Yet today, even here, there was a curious and imposing disturbance. Sometime during the night, a magnolia in my garden had been struck by lightning. It now lay sprawled, quite elegantly, between the tulip poplar and the garden shed, its great limbs felled in silence while I slept.
As I stood gazing at it I felt the faint stirring of metaphor. That tree, so long a fixture of spring’s pageantry, had become a sudden emblem of our age: the sense of being struck, undone, interrupted. It would seem we live in a season of many such fallings, institutions once thought unshakeable now cracked and splintered; truths once held in common now contested; the climate of the earth itself shifting beneath our feet.
Yet, into this brokenness comes an invitation—not to restore things to how they were (for the tree shall not be re-rooted), but to notice and imagine anew. We are called to become curators of hope, those who preserve the fragile, and quietly mend what can be mended.
Hope is the steady resolve to keep planting, pruning, and praising in spite of the damage and destruction we see all around us. This is the gardener’s work, the artist’s vocation and he quiet faith of those who, having seen the storm, still choose to light a candle.
This series of reflections is offered in that spirit.
Each will explore one of the great concerns of our emerging world—climate change, artificial intelligence, spiritual disconnection, and more, to uncover the threads of possibility running through the rubble. At the end of each reflection, you will find a modest invitation that you might be, in your own nook of the world, a bearer of that flame of hope.
For hope, is not a strategy, nor a mood. It is a practice. A lens. A sacred obligation.A choice we make daily. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, we must “be the change we want to see in the world”.
So come. Walk with me awhile. Bring your questions, your weariness, your reluctant faith. There is still good soil beneath our feet.
And we, dear friends, are not without seed.
