When we look at the world around us, we can’t believe that much can be done by us to change things for the better – to find food for the hungry, places to live for refugees, safety for those abused, peace and respect between people of various faiths, the ending of wars, and so on.
But what if the feeding of the 5,000 wasn’t literally a miracle but rather that people simply followed the example of Jesus and shared the food they had with those around them? In a sense, it was indeed a miracle because, sadly, we often do not share our resources with people that are not in our immediate circle. We also can’t believe that if we do one small act of compassion it will stop there. We think that, once we start, we may be continually called upon for assistance and so we don’t extend a helping hand at all.
Possibly that is largely true, but if we live from that meanness of spirit and lack of hope very little will change for the better. When we initiated the beginnings of this paper, 17 years ago, we did so because we felt that the mainstream media only ever published bad news out of Redfern and little else which would inspire people to begin changes for the good or think more deeply about where justice is needed.
It is hard to estimate how successful we have been in fostering greater hope in our readers as they look out at the world and the community around them. The fact that so many people offer us ideas about what stories we should be covering, volunteer to write for us, or to deliver the copies of our paper, certainly lifts our hearts and inspires us to keep going.
In a way, that is what faith is about – doing something which might change things for the good, even if we can’t see how that might happen. It is rather like the story of Jesus walking on water. When we do that, we might sink, but sometimes an unexpected arm of another is extended to us and it lifts us to safety and new possibilities.
That arm of care may belong to a person of another faith, or none, but it adds to the life of the world. One of the reasons that this paper is now an interfaith paper is because we can see good things coming from people not necessarily just like us and we don’t always recognise that because we are so self-focused. We judge others just because they appear to be different from us and assume that we know the nature of their faith by just observing the most conservative exponents of the particular creed that they follow.
We often miss initiatives which would inspire us to have deeper hope in the way that we live – hope that invites us to “feed those around us”, believing that others may be sharing in that activity and that together we can change the world.
When I read the book written by the leading Muslim woman, Susan Carland, I saw Islam in an entirely different way and my commitment to keep working for the equality of women and men was lifted to a new height.
