Hopes and Fears

 Although I left the Church of England many years ago, the words of her most popular hymns and carols still come back to me. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was the work of Phillips Brooks, an American churchman but as an Episcopalian, part of the Anglicah family. Written after a visit to the Holy Land, the hymn links Christ with the ancient Jewish belief in a Messiah who will come to rule benignly over the whole world. The lines:

The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

clearly spring from that belief. Brooks lived through troubled times in the United States and must have hoped that the victory of Lincoln, whom he supported, in the Civil War would lead to better things. In the present century, there is hope that the US will again take the moral high ground when the reigh of a charlatan president comes to an end in January. 

The big stories here, bundling up both fears and hopes, are of course Brexit and SARS/CoV2. But two other news stories from recent days struck me.

Fears for continuing religious and tribal conflict were fuellled by news from Ethiopia, an early stronghold of Christianity. Hundreds of people have been killed or dispossessed in Tigray province.

The hopeful sign is the renaissance of Iraqi literature, helped along by a new generation of young female booksellers. This was noted by euronews last year and confirmed by an al-Jazeera film report yesterday. If the arts are reviving, and young people are participating, then Iraq is clearly emerging from the anarchy that followed dictatorship.