As heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is silenced. Isaiah 25.5
Every generation has its symbols of courage, hope and freedom. For over 20 years Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken truth to power, and power has sung its ruthless song, seeking to drown out the melodies of hope, the anthems of freedom and the hymns of truth.
But these too have their songs and their singers. In her first words to the gathered crowd greeting her release she said, "There is a time for silence and a time to speak." In a symbolic act potent with its own meaning, wearing the trditional lilac dress, she placed a flower in her hair. Flowers, are fragile sources of seed, each seed itself latent with life and replete with new possibility. The great visions of freedom and hope that illumine Isaiah and Micah, look forward to days when human beings live without oppression, fear and confiscated speech – desert places burst into bloom and the wilderness is carpeted with flowers. This woman embodies that humane hopefulness, that yearning for liberation of mind and soul, that humanising hunger for freedom to speak the words that change the world. On a day when we remember the cost of freedom, and the sacrifices of those who died to preserve it, we require to give integrity to our rhetoric; our prayers of intercession should include people like Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi (Iran) and Liu Xiaobo (China):
Lord silence the voice of the ruthless,
and give voice to the words of the oppressed.
And as Advent draws near, and we reflect on the people who walk in darkness, and languish in prisons of other people's making, it is central to the church's mission to articulate hope, to sing the song of the merciful, to speak truth to power and pray for those silenced by the songs ruthless. This God-loved world is a dangerous place, and there are deserts waiting to blossom, and other songs waiting to be sung.
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