Rev Marie-Elsa Bragg

This week, while teaching a class on mysticism, I showed my students a picture of the mythical King Oedipus. It showed him raging for answers as to why nature was suffering and his people ill or dying. On the palace walls behind him were paintings of past generations caught in an inherited web of tragedy alongside trees, animals and crops – all crying out in pain. Determined to be a good king, Oedipus had ruled well and justly, until the onset of plagues which he could not work out how to stop. What did he do? He called for the old blind prophet Tiresius who showed him the cause of suffering and helped him to see that the only way forward was to completely change the culture. The story of King Oedipus sets out the two steps needed to lift our sights to the bigger picture of what must be changed. The first is to fully see the cause of our suffering. Any denial of the nature and scale of the problem stops us from tackling it. Oedipus did this stage well - he felt the full pain. Then, once we’ve embraced the painful truth, the second stage is accepting that we must reach for a completely new world. Sadly, when Tiresius showed King Oedipus how generations had been stuck in subterfuge and delusion, sacrificing the lives of the innocent to further their power, it was more than he could bear. In his despair, he blinded and exiled himself to the desert. As king, his job was to set humanity on a completely different path. Tragically he failed. We must do better. With one week to go until the COP climate conference, there’s no shortage of modern day prophets ready, like Tiresius, to show us the causes of our planet’s suffering and the need for systemic change. COP 26 president Alok Sharma acknowledged recently that the rich G20 countries are responsible for 80% of carbon emissions. A leaked COP26 report shows negotiations to play down the use of fossil fuel – exactly the kind of denial the Prophets Isaiah warns against when he says: ‘he who flees the report of disaster will fall into the pit … and the earth will be shaken violently, it will fall never to rise again.’ But perhaps, if we are to avoid the despair of King Oedipus, we also need something to inspire a sense of service to the greater good. The mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote that everything in heaven and on earth is filled with connectedness and relationship. King Oedipus could not find that to inspire a completely new era but we can. This our crossroads, this is our chance.