‘Don’t you lose your faith?’ I was asked yesterday. What kind of faith wasn’t specified in the question, faith in people, faith in God, faith in life itself, that the buds on the oak trees will open and the blossom emerge on the grey apple twigs?

I can’t explain why my final answer is ‘no’. It isn’t even something willed or deliberate, but more of an intuition, a trust and a hope.

Yet it’s not been a good week. Yesterday the appalling slaughter at the Bardo Museum in Tunisia penetrated all the news. The attack was shocking, despicable and closer to home than it may sound. ‘We went there; it’s a wonderful museum’, said a friend. Our thoughts are with the families of those killed, with the wounded and with everyone who will suffer as a result of this abomination.

Nearer to home, I attended the dinner of the Community Security Trust and listened to the powerful speech by the Prime Minister in which he condemned without reservation all forms of violent extremism, racism and anti-Semitism in the name of the central democratic, liberal and pluralist values which characterise this country. But what made the deepest impact on me was the CST’s film documenting incidences of attacks here in the UK against school children, synagogues, Jews who happened to be passing by, even the gravestones of the dead. Why does hate seem to spring eternal in the human breast?

Regarding Israel, only one person accosted me enthusiastically so far, hoping to share his delight with the results of the election. They point to the centrality of questions of fear and security, understandably so. But they don’t open the shutters onto a vista of hope.

So why not lose heart?

Perhaps it is because of the overwhelming and irresistible force of life itself. The last days of winter still offer their growing buds to the first warmth of spring. The daffodils and cyclamen are no less beautiful. The blue tits are picking up the dry stalks from the grass and making their nests. These things make the spirit sing.

It’s also because of people. It’s the love, courage, striving and hope which I witness every day, even when that hope is frustrated and the love sometimes turns to pain. I was sitting with a man going through old family photographs, a ritual of solace and solidarity. ‘Look at that!’ he said, placing next to me a picture of a child in a garden and smiling for the first time that hour. Life isn’t in the end about power, honours or even accomplishments. It’s the about the impacts of companionship and love; that’s what tells our deepest story in the end.

Tonight brings the new moon of Nisan, the month of redemption, bringing Passover and the memory of the Exodus of Egypt. Once again we will wind our own lives and their meanings around that ancient narrative as it carries us from slavery to freedom, from degradation to dignity and from hopelessness to hope. Once again we will ask how we can travel further on the road to redemption, how God’s light can guide us, and how we can liberate others and be liberated by them.

We shall never give up hope.

In a week which has brought the first bright sunlight of approaching spring, making the daffodils glow golden, two short meditations have somehow stuck in my mind.
 
I saw one of them on a poster outside Friends House opposite Euston Station yesterday: ‘Live simply. Find God in every person’. I’m not sure if the two sentences were part of the same idea or if each was sufficient to itself; but it was the second which caught my immediate attention. It was on a Quaker poster, yet the idea was familiar from the very first chapters of the Torah in which we are told that God makes every human being in the divine image and breathes into them the sacred breath of life.
 
‘Find God in every person’: it’s not so easy. What about when they annoy one? Or when one simply hasn’t got the time? Or when they are so familiar that one takes them for granted? In fact, how often does one ever consider with respect to another person: how do I find God in you today? What would it even mean?
 
Thinking about it, how often does one ask oneself, ‘Where’s God in me today?’ I wonder what it would entail to experience the world like that. How might it make a mere few minutes feel different? I can’t imagine God would not want to notice something beautiful, like the purple crocuses, or those daffodils, or the hazel catkins. I can’t think God would want me to rush past another person without pondering who they are, what might be glowing in their imagination, what could be weighing on their heart.
 
Opposite the poster outside Friends House sat a woman with a pile of The Big Issue on her lap. I guess she may have been from Bosnia. She’d brought her own low plastic chair on which she’d placed a cushion to make her vigil less uncomfortable. In the ten minutes I stood waiting for the person I was due to meet I don’t think anybody stopped to say a single word to her. Where was God in her today? In her loneliness, I imagine. Or perhaps in the questions she herself may have been asking about the legs rushing past her line of vision: where are you carrying your hearts and minds? Do I, or others like me, exist at all to you?
 
I can’t imagine God in us being anything other than our deepest, most comprehensive, most generous and least selfish sensitivities.
 
The second meditation is from Rachel Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom. It’s simply a short prayer her surgeon asked if she might share with her before her operation. She took her hand and said: ‘May we be helped here to do whatever is most right’. Rachel was, she admitted, ‘startled’ for a moment, but then she felt all her fears subside.
 
The two thoughts go well together. To do what is most right we need to try to sense where God may be within ourselves and in each other. It’s a very different direction of thought from working for the most convenient, least troublesome or most profitable outcome. It opens into a wider world, of sensitivities so often missed or unexplored, of wonder and awareness:
       i thank You God for most this amazing / day…
       this is the birth / day of life and love and wings…
       (now the ears of my ears awake and
       now the eyes of my eyes are opened)   E E Cummings
 

I want to recount some of the acts of loving kindness, gemilut hasadim, which I have witnessed over the past few weeks. They may seem nothing much compared to the great actions in the world. They can’t put the heads back on the shoulders of the poor people whose last lonely moments fill the front pages. They usually can’t even prevent heartache, though I regularly find myself wishing they could. But acts of kindness, small as they may seem, may be the only reliable materials we have for creating places of sanctuary in the world, as our ancestors once did symbolically with cedar planks and goatskins, spaces where God is somehow more deeply felt and the spirit finds comfort and inspiration.

‘Would you like some time alone with her?’ says the nurse to the two young women who sit in the hospital bay with their grandmother. The doctor has been and they’ve agreed that it’s time to end the life support; it is only prolonging the dying. The nurse slips quietly out through the curtains surrounding the bed. She returns and puts a hand on the shoulder of each of the granddaughters, saying nothing. She goes to the bed and touches the grandmother’s head, strokes her grey hair, as if it were in blessing. Only then does she turn to the machines.

Outside, the man at the fruit and vegetable stall takes another brown paper bag. ‘How are you today?’ he says with an easy cheer. ‘It’s the apples you’re after again, isn’t it. The coxes are pretty good, and there’s a real flavour to those russets. I’d go for them if I were you. How many d’you like?’ A moment ago it felt like a cold winter day; all of a sudden it feels like a bright winter day.

The vet has come to put the man’s dog to sleep. The gentleman himself must be every bit of eighty-five; the dog’s fifteen. She lays the animal on his favourite rug. ‘You give him a biscuit and hold his head’, she says. Tears land on the dog’s nose. ‘I’m so sorry’, the old man says; after all, men don’t cry, especially old men. The injection goes into the vein and the animal’s legs fold gently; now he lies still on the blanket. ‘This little fellow kept me going when my wife died’; more tears run down his face and drop into his dog’s open eyes. ‘You hold his head for a little longer’, says the vet, ‘Then we’ll carry him together.’ At that moment the cleaner walks in. For a second she just observes, then she crosses the room and takes the old man’s hand.

How often I’ve wished there were some means, of word or deed or silence or prayer, to enter the places which hurt in people’s hearts and take away the pain. But only God can do that, and life, God’s gift of life.

In the street I notice a woman, evidently a carer, helping a frail and very elderly lady on her daily walk. They stop by a camellia in a hedge. ‘Look’, she says, ‘Aren’t they beautiful!’ They stand together for a long time, just looking.

Of the ten sephirot or centres of spiritual energy of which the Kabballah speaks, two are located just beneath the heart: hesed, loving kindness, on the right, and gevurah, strength, on the left. The art of living is to deepen and then balance these two faculties. Without loving kindness there would only be the remorseless battle to survive. Without fortitude we would not have the capacity to bear sorrow and hurts with forgiveness, or to dare to love and care. Where they meet is called tiferet, the place of beauty and truth, where appreciation of life’s beauty, and awareness of life’s depths and sorrows merge, in humility and wonder.