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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.

In conversation with Stuart (word at the barricades) on my current rehumanising campaign, we picked up on a number of what are called human interest stories on the news yesterday. TV News is usually dominated by the macro concerns of the 21st Century human community. ICT and economic transactions are globalised, products and cultures increasingly standardised, the language of diplomacy and policy militarised, and the economic, social, ecological and political consequences analysed!

So it becomes important to rehumanise the News, to tell and consider those stories that focus on the struggles and achievements, the joy and courage, the sadness and the dignity of ordinary people and their all too human, and therefore significant, stories.

The other morning a man spoke about early diagnosis of his Alzheimers condition and the drugs he is now taking. He tells of the joy of retaining his sense of self, the daily awareness of his grandchildren, the softening of his underlying  anxiety about losing his hold on the deepest relationships in his life. But many of these drugs are expensive -and so not universally available – so what price on enabling a person to retain their identity, to maintain their friendships, and to be a giver as well as a receiver of love?

Altogether different, the story of an 8 year old boy whose weight of 14 stone is now of serious concern for those who have a duty of care. The papers were interested in the possibility of social work taking him into care – but the local hospital suggested a close tie-in with their eating disorder clinic. Whatever the rights and wrongs of how an 8 year old becomes three times the expected weight for a child of his age, there is no denying there are now huge ethical questions around food as a substance we increasingly abuse. Just what is it we are feeding, and how do we name, those hungers that come disguised as inner emptiness? How do we avoid uncritical acceptance of a culture where human beings eat themselves to death? In Elizabethan plain English, the words of another era are scarily and culturally precise – ‘whose God is the belly, whose end is destruction’. Both a warning and a description of a society where ‘enough’ is never enough, and more is always better.

And Josie Grove, the brave young woman who decided not to live at all costs, and who wanted whatever of life was left not to be diminished in its quality by chemotherapy. She didn’t blame her illness, leukaemia, for her distress; it was the treatment and its effects that she couldn’t suffer any longer. Surrounded by her family she gradually relinquished her hold on life – and again I’d never presume to say what anyone else should or shouldn’t have done. I simply admire the dignity and spirit of a young woman whose humanity was radiant with a gentle defiance of all that would diminish the human value of the time she had left.

Three human stories. And from my book of Poems for Refugees:

All you who sleep tonight

Far from the ones you love

No hand to left or right

And emptiness above-

…

Know that you aren’t alone

The whole world shares your fears,

Some for two nights or one,

And some for all their years.

Vikram Seth (1952-)

Incidentally, Vikram Seth’s Equal Music is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever read (and I’ve read it three times). He understands the full range of emotions that provide the scales and structures, the points and counterpoints, of that music which is the human song. Music too is a rehumanising activity.