Sic Transit

‘Sic transit’ was the title of a brilliant talk given by Tom Shakespeare on Radio 4’s Point of View programme last Sunday.  It’s part of the longer Latin phrase, ‘sic transit Gloria mundi’, meaning: Thus passes the glory of the world.

Point of View occupies the one time slot of my all-time favourite radio programme, Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America and is really a well-argued and consistently interesting ‘secular’ sermon, and Tom Shakespeare’s offering last week was no exception.

He reflected on the word ‘nostalgia’ with its Latin roots of ‘nostos’ meaning return and ‘algos’ meaning suffering – so the word implies that any attempt to return to the past inevitably brings us suffering or disappointment.

Tom Shakespeare told us listeners that the ‘bad times don’t last but neither do the good ones either’!  Well I suppose that’s true in that most things we go through, whether they are highs or lows, are time limited.  Apparently, the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, put it rather more eloquently when he said: You can’t stand in the same river twice.  In other words, change really does govern the universe and it’s simply impossible to return to yesterday, so it's much better to accept today is the nostalgia we’ll be talking about tomorrow!

I suppose I’m reflecting on that a bit because although I left theological college and was ordained thirty years ago this June I still meet up (as I have done twice this month) with good friends from three decades ago.  And in a sense, I love standing in the same river twice!  OK, so it’s not the same water flowing by, yet these encounters do, in a way, put me in touch with my former self and I find it tremendously reaffirming and reassuring that the friendships and ideas that inspired and challenged the young me still have a certain potency over the middle age version which is the current me!

Yet, it also has to be acknowledged that neither I, nor my friends, are the same people we were when studying together in South London all those years ago.  We have been moulded and fashioned by all that water which has flowed along our rivers of life.

Ecclesiastes, in the Jewish Scriptures, says: There is a time for everything under heaven and we need to live in the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ conscious that the God who thrilled and inspired us in our ‘salad days’ is still able to do a ‘new thing’ among us and through us in 2017.