You are the lens in the beam….

Dag Hammarskjold is one of my spiritual heroes. Diplomat, statesman, ambassador, politician, arbiter, peacemaker – and a man of granite integrity. His book Markings I’ve bought three times. The first volume, a Faber paperback, eventually split into a pile of pamphlets as the glue dried out. The second I gave to an older friend who loved the oblique wisdom of someone who looked steadily into mystery without jumping to easy conclusions. The third I’ve lost, and don’t know where – and I will buy a fourth copy! Hammarskjold famously identified the radical differences that modern life imposed on our understanding of Christian sanctity and goodness: "In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action".

But it is one of his more astringent comments on a life of self-disciplined service that I have often gone back to as an ideal of ministry – though I’d want to live this goal with a sufficient and divine grace presupposed.

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.