We know that oceanic tides rise and fall because of the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth. We may even treat a new calendar year a bit like a new tide especially when we say. “Out with the old and In with the new”.
Similarly to ocean tides, social tides are brought about by forces but in this case the forces are those of expectation and frustration. Expectation plus hope can energise us to the point where we have enough energy to cause a rising tidal flow, however frustration and disenchantment will sap energy so that a tide loses its momentum and becomes ‘slack water’. It is at that moment that the tide turns and I wonder if the calendar year of 2016 was such a point of tidal change in British social history.
The tide had changed in the nineteen sixties but even that was not the first. Periodic social change has been around for a long time. Even earlier Shakespeare (in Julius Caesar) has Brutus saying: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures”.
Better minds than mine have written books about why the human being amongst all the animal kingdom is unique in having expectations and hopes. Throughout the ages, writers have noticed that, in addition to the usual physical animal drives, humans also appear to have a unique singular spiritual awareness of great antiquity. It is this awareness that causes me to be hopeful that the leaders of the Western World will avoid a tidal tsunami and, like King Canute, respond wisely during this slack water period. A failure in their courage to respond positively to the incoming tide could result in the good things cast up by the last tide being thrown out along with the things now deemed unacceptable by the electorate.
The courage required to accept change can, of course, be also applied to our own minds and this was summed up rather well in a prayer by the American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. (1892-1971)
God, give me grace to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.
The very same idea is also echoed in the Prayer Book of 1662 where the General Confession encourages us to let go of the past by acknowledging our previous errors, and then being renewed to try, with courage and confidence, to do better in the days ahead.
Having always been a fairly confident person I am therefore, never quite sure when my own confidence turns to arrogance. However my wife is pretty good at letting me know. She does so by reminding me of the scripture in which a man did so well that he planned to build bigger barns and then to, ‘take his ease’. However he had not realised that there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and so the parable challenged the assumptions behind his plans for the future. It did so by showing that however clever he thought he was the assumptions lying behind his plan were not complete: He simply didn’t know enough, and so the parable ends with the words, “Thou fool, this day shall thy soul be required of thee.”
A more recent reminder of the dangers of being overly confident about the future came from a gentleman I met in The Feathers; Originally from Brockhampton, where his father had been head-gardener at the court, he now lives near Abergavenny. He told me that in 1823 one of his family (a good swimmer) had diddled a cousin out of an inheritance and, having turned his ill-gotten gains into gold; stitched the cache into a body belt and announced plans to sail for Canada. It was thus with mixed feelings that the entire family gathered in Bristol docks to wave goodbye. However, on mounting the gang-plank he slipped and fell between the quay and the ship where the weight of his belt caused him to plunge from view.
Consternation at the loss of both the cousin and the gold swept the family group until the aggrieved relative announced, “Listen everybody; don’t panic, give him ten minutes and if he’s not up by then, I’ll dive down and take the weight off.
View from the Pew 