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Good Morning, At first, I thought the floating thing in my eye was a fly. But then it broke into a thousand particles, and everything went dark. Two days later, I lay on an operating table and watched the surgeon clean my eye - the reflected light was suddenly visible as a miraculous blue. I simply had to marvel at what a piece of kit the eye is, the millions of years and several iterations it had taken it to evolve - and thank God for the skill of the surgeon. As part of my recovery, I was told to lie still on my side for 14 days. This is more challenging than it may sound. Initially I filled my days watching the news. I got caught up the eye candy of catastrophe: mass shootings, huge casualties in Russia and Ukraine, powers (that assume they are absolute) oppressing their own people. The world looked no better sideways. Someone reminded me that the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel had to lay on his side, so I re-read his story. It is eye-popping. He actually lay on his side for 390 days, ate food cooked over excrement, and had some of the wildest visions ever recorded. All in protest at his people’s embrace of nationalist ideologies and their general indifference to the suffering of others. His book is like reading the news delivered by a brilliant if unhinged street artist. Wheels within wheels, with eyes on the rims, pornographic descriptions of people’s infidelity to their God. Bodies resurrected from bones. The veil between religious mania and spiritual insight seemed thin with this one. But as I read on, Ezekiel’s peculiar actions looked more and more relevant. As he indicted leaders who corrupt and pollute and abuse, or exposed the phony absolutes of nation and race, he could have been speaking to the sideways world I was watching. A world in which nations tell themselves they need more guns to prevent further gun deaths; or will only dispense justice ‘for people who are like us.’ Ezekiel’s crazed approach made perfect sense. Sometimes, only creative action and scandalously particular words are going to get our attention. The prophetic way of speaking is not all critique, subversion and doom. The theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote that ‘the prophetic word of God is the resilient minority insistence that power cannot drive out human hurt or human hope.’ Prophets sometimes see it all - the good, the bad and the cosmic – and they propose an alternative world by envisaging new possibilities. The source of their vision is a Just, Merciful, Restorative God. Ultimately this is who I think they are trying to get us to see. They are like skilled surgeons, removing obstructions from the eyes so that the reflected light becomes visible once more.