A Request

I'm not sure I should really call this blog "A Request", it is perhaps more of a "A Suggestion".  I was talking to an internet friend in the States, who was asking me what it was I found sad about the Olympics.

When I told her, she suggested I should blog my answer. So here it is, in part.

In the first part of Janet Frame's wonderful three part autobiography, in "To the Is-land", when speaking of her earliest memories, she says this:  "I remember a grey day when I stood by the gate and listened to the wind in the telegraph wires. I had my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness, or it seemed to come from outside, from the sound of the wind moaning in the wires. I looked up and down the white dusty road and saw no one.  The wind was blowing from place to place past us, and I was there, in between, listening. I felt a burden of sadness and loneliness as if something had happened or begun and I knew about it. I don't think I had yet thought of myself as a person looking out at the world; until then I felt I was the world.  In listening to the wind and its sad song, I knew I was listening to a sadness that had no relation to me, which belonged to the world."

The sadness that belongs to the world.  Isn't it the sadness of being cut off from our Creator, our Source of life?

And watching the Olympics, which I did enjoy, the level of excitement, almost of hysteria, made me feel as if I was watching a frenzied attempt to stop us feeling this sadness, stop us realising it; to make us feel that there is real meaning in what is, at the moment, essentially futile.

I also noticed how the Closing Ceremony featured the atheists hymn "Imagine".

Audrey and I managed an hour on the doors yesterday which included a long chat with a lady I have been calling on some time.  I don't know if Dorothy o' South Island reads my blog, but if so Dorothy, hello, and she is the lady whose relatives you traced. Thanks again. 

I am now suffering for that hour on the doors though.  Only an hour and I feel more debilitated that people who have climbed Everest...