Â鶹Éç

Good morning. Sadly, I don’t see myself getting to Blantyre on the banks of the Clyde any time soon, but I was fascinated to read about a revamped museum featuring Dr David Livingstone the African explorer due to open there next month. What is so different is that it brings out the key role of his wife Mary. He wasn’t the solitary trekker of myth. He had a close companion who was essential to his work, for Mary was a talented linguist who spoke a number of local languages.

Livingstone was a 19th century celebrity whose story is still well known. On his most famous expedition he lost contact with the outside world for 6 years, until a reporter from the New York Herald, Henry Stanley was sent out in 1869 to find him which he did two years later on the shores of Lake Tanganyika allegedly greeting him with the legendry words ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’ Sadly, Mary had died by then, so he could not reply ‘And may introduce Mrs Livingstone?’ Shortly before she died Livingstone had said to her ‘We old bodies ought now to be more sober, and not play so much.’ To which she replied ‘Oh, no you must always be as playful as you have always been. I would not like you to be as grave as some folks.’

One of the great features of our own time is an unearthing of the experience and contribution of women in history, so long overlooked in a male dominated culture. Mary’s story brought to mind Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poetry entitled The world’s wife with poems such as ‘Pilate’s wife’ ‘Mrs Lazarus and Mrs Darwin’. History is not fixed and final but an interaction of the past and present, a continuing reinterpretation of the past in the light of fresh perspectives. So it is that we are also uncovering the experience and contribution of other overlooked or minority groups.

When will it all end? This continuing re-interpretation of the past in the light of the present? When will be the defining perspective, the true selection and arrangement and prioritising of the facts? Never is one answer. The other is provided by the Hebrew scriptures, which are based on the conviction that there is an end in the light of which the true meaning of the whole will be revealed. One day, in or out of time, it will be luminous in the light of truth and justice. And Jesus built on that conviction in a particularly startling and challenging way. He said the last will be first, those who quietly do good- the forgotten, the innocent, those on the underside of history, the overlooked, will be given their proper significance in a blaze of glory.

Show less