Yes, I’m old enough to remember Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ first time round! I’ve always loved bridges – their architecture, their usefulness, the way they help us on our journey.
One of my favourites is ‘the clatterin’ brig’ at the foot of Cairn o’ Mount. Last year I took a photo of the bridge, while standing on stones in the middle of the burn. It’s framed in gorse, and looking upstream through the arch it’s easy to imagine the importance of the bridge, and to be grateful for all bridge-builders.
Our world now urgently needs bridge-builders, those carefully constructive people Jesus called peacemakers. There are priority vacancies for bridge-builders between communities who work at healing divisions, for recruits who are willing to be conduits of goodwill, for imaginative creators and curators of trust, skilled craftsmen in the work of bringing people together in friendship.
A bridge is made of walls, but walls of friendship which enable each other to journey, to go from one side to another, passing or waiting for each other to pass, a long-term gift to each traveller, a place where multiple paths intersect.
A bridge is a monument to goodwill, a deposit paid towards journeys others will make. Bridges are reasons to be grateful to those who build such sturdy walls which carry the road we travel, and which carry us, from here to there, and back again.
Some of the most important words in the thesaurus of human relations are shown by experience to be the most durable stones for building bridges – listening, understanding, empathy, forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion, co-operation, generosity, laughter and yes, humanity.
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