Planting seeds and sowing the Ultimate truth
The Spring Sunshine shone through the window of the stone shed as I opened up the packets decorated with colours of the sweet pea. Into the palm of my hand, I emptied out little orbs of seed that looked nothing akin to the flower that in the summer sunshine would evolve from this little hard shell to say nothing of the sweet smelling aroma that would fill the air in the balmy evenings of July. Such beauty yet to evolve from this seed held within my hand!
I planted each in their turn on this cold February day into the soft compost of the seed tray in the hope that they will germinate and sprout a delicate little root in the weeks that follow on the south-facing windowsill of the shed through which the Spring light poured on that last day of the mid-term break.
I took for granted in those moments that, God willing, I might be alive to see them flower, to transplant them into little pots and thereafter when the earth has warmed after the last of the frosts to plant them out into the ground. I took a lot of things for granted - the Spring sunshine, the freedom to walk through the garden and watch as the first of the fresh green leaves appeared on the hawthorn bushes in the warming heat of the sun.
I listened to the radio in the background as I washed out another seed tray. Shockingly, it announced the death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian Opposition leader in a Penal Camp, far, far from here, somewhere within the Artic Circle.
I had followed his story for some years - his opposition to Putin, admiring from a distance his strength of character and courage to speak out against the Machine that is the Putin’s government, for the good of democracy, free speech and the ordinary man on the street; to be poisoned with Novichok, recovering in Germany' his seemingly naïve return to Russia, to be arrested, tried and imprisoned for 20 years and now, in these February days as elections loomed in Moscow and I enjoyed the Spring sunshine and looked to the summer, he lay in death alone in a Siberian prison, all his work, seemingly, now in vain.
I felt a deep sadness as I clambered for my phone to read from the news websites, another flame quenched, another voice that spoke the truth silenced in a world that yearns for voices brave enough to speak for those who have no voice.
And no matter where it is we live and move and have our being, it is the case that people like Navalny are banished to the shadows, for the truth, if it doesn’t fit, is uncomfortable to hear. We can live in democracies, in so-called free societies and yet the truth that is proclaimed is often that which others want us to hear, a highly processed truth, filtered, sanitised, made palatable for public consumption. More and more I see that there is no ultimate truth, no ultimate right or wrong and no Ultimate Being that we refer to, so much so that your truth is equal to my truth no matter how nuanced either truth might be.
The truth we accept and adopt as our guide is often that which is most comfortable for us to live by, not that which is ultimately true. And, in making the truth comfortable for some, others suffer - usually the most vulnerable as a society without an Ultimate truth, disintegrates.
So in ways we all are Putins for we dim the voice that makes us feel uncomfortable. Democratic governments, such as our own, do it, through the legal system and various less obvious means.
The Media, the supposed voice of truth do it; large companies and organisations do it; why else do we need whistleblower legislation?
The Church did it and perhaps continues to do so as it casts to the shadows those who speak out and challenges the less than democratic voices who promulgate its dictates from Rome.
In these systems, the silencing of the truth may not be done as openly as in a Penal Colony of Siberian Russia but more subtly, by shunning voices that differ until over time those voices, unlike that of Navalny’s, wonder what’s the point of all the shouting? Might it be better to put your head down, mind your own business and plant seeds? For Regimes and systems change so slowly over time, and those who perpetuate them usually profit from the stagnancy of their existence.
For it seems to me that it is those who challenge and speak out who suffer most as the cowardly, though seemingly supportive, run to the shadows when your voice is at its loudest, in a time when we are desperately in need of people who will speak for the Ultimate truth, for that which is eternally right and condemn, again and again, that which is indissolubly wrong and not continue as we are promulgating that which makes us comfortable in the quagmire of untruths.
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