Read this today (here)…

The late Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano once expressed his deepest concern that “we are all suffering from amnesia … [that makes us] blind to small things and small people”. Who, I asked him, was responsible for this forgetfulness. “It’s not a person,” he explained. “It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered, and who deserves to be forgotten.”

If you are in any doubt about how our own society, dominated by the twisted logic of ‘Austerity’, views small people, then you really need to watch this film.

Expect to be devastated. Not by the hard story it tells, as much as by the moments of kindness perpetrated by ordinary people. Small people

It is hard to escape the logic emerging from the Bible narrative- where we see systematic waves of Empire rising up and promoting the accumulation of power and wealth over the worth of small people.

The Jesus-logic of the Beatitudes turns this upside down and inside out.

Blessed are those who are poor in spirit…

Blessed are they in failure
Blessed are they in defeat
And blessed are they in
Every empty success
Blessed are they when plans, laid out-
Are stolen

And dreams are drained by

Middle age

Blessed are the wage slaves
And the mortgage makers
Blessed are those who keep on treading

This treadmill

Blessed are they who have no hope
And for whom life is
Grey and formless

Blessed are the B-list
And the has-been’s

Blessed are they at the end
Of all their coping

For here I am

And here I am building

My Kingdom