Beacons of fire, beacons of hope...

The colours flapped in the fresh breeze, the beacon-fire threw tongues of flame skyward, and the sea beyond whispered to us like a fretful mother. We prepared to bed down for the night, and to keep a vigil over the commemorative fire. Tomorrow would be a new day, a new dawn, a new beginning, with fresh hopes and aspirations, the spiritual door to the rest of our lives and the birth of a new era.

The beacon of fire could be seen for miles around

We slept in turns and somewhat fitfully, our sleep accompanied by the crackle of the nearby raging beacon-fire, one of thousands lit throughout the land to mark our Queen's long and glorious reign, to celebrate her stalwart occupancy of the throne of this hard-bitten northern land whose proud people had faced countless trials over the centuries and come through every ordeal made stronger and more resolute.

This beacon and thousands of others lit on this chill-laden night, the most primitive and most ancient symbol of life, renewal and raw energy, proudly announced the rebirth of this scarred land and a belief in a strong and dynamic future. It would burn throughout the night and into the morrow before it gave up its last gasps.


I half-closed my eyes and half-looked towards the leaping fire ahead and the darkening sky above and I was not afraid anymore... it would be alright, there was hope and there would be a tomorrow springing phoenix-like from the flames of the present....

Son of Man, Son of God

And so that final gasp in dead of night

that brought the curtain down on hope;

that grinding fear of a cruel tomorrow

and the rising despair that death brings;

but this was no ordinary death of a man,

this was no passing of a common mortal;

though a man born of woman thou wast,

yet more than that wast thou, much more.


Thy time had been short and thy path
strewn with the sharp thorns cast
 by the cruel hands of cruel minds
impelled by even crueller hearts,
whose fear made sure thine end.

Thy life had been mapped since birth
and thy certain demise early foretold;
circumscribed by destiny's demands, 
by a heavenly mission forged for Earth,
by a purpose that marked out thy days,
by a Fate that held thee tight in her claw,
the march of days bore thee to thine end.


Son of God made God by the Father,
the Word made flesh by the Divine,
the instrument of Salvation and Rebirth
and the Grace of Redemption and Hope;
such a burden on such frail shoulders
and the Light of the World in one Man.


And so we mark thy coming and thy life
and the dark shadow of thy passing
and thy story is told and retold
stirring belief and stiffening faith
in the Son of Man, the Son of God!


Jesus was thy name, Christ thy title,
and the Messiah thy sacred calling.
Thou camest from God, wast born of woman
didst die and return to Heaven,
there to reign at God's side.

The Sower

The statue above, located in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, is evidently a man sowing what must be seeds of one kind or another. We do not know what the crop is and there’s no practical way of showing the seed grains flying out from his hand, but nonetheless it’s clear what his activity is. Now if we go on to focus on the wall behind the statue, there appears to be an array of stars drawn on it, which fan out as they get closer to the ground. As things stand, it’s not clear what this is all about. At first sight, one might take it to be some form of graffiti defacing the wall, the handiwork of a disrespectful and inconsiderate youth who wants to leave his mark on the urban environment, an all too common feature of our undisciplined modern society. But is it really graffiti? Is it just the unrestrained daubing of a mischievous individual? The second photo below reveals all.

This is the same statue, the same sower of seeds, in the selfsame place, but now we see the scene at night, and all is suddenly revealed to our astonished gaze. What seemed to be mindless graffiti on the wall behind the statue is now seen for what it is, and we cannot help but marvel at the ingenuity of it all. Thanks to a clever positioning of the lighting, a shadow of the sower is projected onto the backdrop of the wall and we now see what is being sown - not crop seed at all, but a constellation of stars that sprays out from the right hand of the sower as it is scattered on the ground. The sower of seeds is in reality a sower of... stars! And by analogy perhaps a sower of dreams. And how apt that this should be seen at night, for it is then that dreams populate our sleep and transport us to a world of mystery and magic.

This transformation may also be regarded as an allegory: that things are not always what they seem and that seen in a different light or from a different perspective their true nature reveals itself. For those of us who are all too ready to jump to conclusions, it is a salutary reminder of the risk we run in prejudging what at first appears to be obvious.