Dag Hammarskjold's Markings is another of those books I've had on my shelves all the years of my ministry. I first bought it in 1972. It cost me £2.25 and is a Faber paperback. I bought it because it was quoted in an article in the Expository Times and that single quotation has sometimes kept me afloat when not much else was giving buoyancy.
For all that is past Thank You;
For all that is to come, Yes.
We've become used to Journalling now. But in the 1950's and 60's there is something remarkable about this narrative told without plot but with purpose, a slow accumulation of received wisdom, distilled at times to sentences of Zen precision, with poetic rhythms reminsicent of Haiku, and occasional self revealing paragraphs of a mind and spirit refracted through profound moral awareness of the world around and the world within. If you don't know this book, then you are missing an encounter with one of the most fascinating and enigmatic minds of the 20th Century in which political conscience, personal faith and social vision combine so that you could equally say political faith, personal vision and social conscience.
Markings is the published version of those occasional jottings, found in a black note-book discovered after his still unexplained death in an aircrash. As the then Secretary General of the United Nations he had been on a peace making trip to the Congo. Since then his personal thoughts have given comfort, clarity, insight and encouragement to the readers of Markings. I have a 90+ friend whose yellowing copy is still to hand. Had Hammarskjold lived he would have been about ages with her.
Here he is on what it means to live a human life:
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
What does that mean? Wrong question. It isn't an argument - it's a confession of faith in the worth of human life, and the conviction of Ecclesiastes the Preacher, 'that to be human is to be b orn with eternity in our hearts'.
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